My morning ride 2016 02 02 #mybikestory

Second post in the week-long "BIKE COMMUTE STORY WEEK", Tuesday, February 02.

#mybikestory

A gray overcast sky replaced the fog of yesterday. With the temperature in the 70s and humidity at or near 100% my apartment was warm and damp. Everything not cloth was a bit slick. I don’t particularly like it when my sweat drips into my oatmeal but it was that kind of morning.

The weather report spoke of rain, tornadoes, and gusting winds. The humidity made the streets a bit slick, the concrete cool enough to be below the dew point.

Fortunately, I head south through town and almost all the motor traffic is heading west. The streets I cross are crowded with state workers swarming off the Interstate toward the parking garages lined up along North Street and points upriver behind the Capitol.

My route takes me past a number of historical buildings and through the old neighborhoods of downtown that were spared the wrecking ball and bulldozers of the recent past. Those neighborhoods bracket the middle passage in what is now called the Central Business District with its many surface parking lots and a notable lack of businesses.

I can see the undulating surface of Beauregard Town, the houses’ foundations built up to create a level floor. Had they been built a little later the ground would have been leveled completely changing the face of the earth on which they were built. I am happy to ride up and down these remaining undulations, these traces of the past.

Passing through the Expressway Park it occurs to me that it looks like a park with its grassy lawns, playground equipment, and basketball courts but it does not feel like a park. It can’t, really, as it lies under a massive Interstate interchange where Interstate 10 and 110 intermesh.

The noise level is astonishing. The scale of the roadway supports dwarfs everything in the park. It is a superhuman place, daunting to the human spirit and yet an outgrowth of that spirit. Best to pass quickly through.

Fortunately, it is only a few blocks to the Museum of Public Art with its very human scale. What a pleasure to see this place even on a drab day like today with the Interstate roar still very much in my ears.

Not much farther and I enter City Park. The view from Picnic Hill is radically different from Expressway Park. Here I can see the “hills” of the park across Dalrymple Drive but the trees block my view of the Lakes. The grass is oddly brown given the amount of rain we’ve had lately.

At this time of the day, the cypress trees in the Lakes, at a spot I call Roosting Cove, are almost empty of the cormorants, egrets, and ibis that come here in the evening in their hundreds. I do see a few cormorants and one lone little blue heron perched on a cypress knee near the shore. The white pelicans are no longer here or, at least, not on this part of the Lakes.

Motor traffic becomes denser as I approach campus. Unlike a friend of mine, who passed me on his bike as I was taking a picture, I stay on the bike path along the lake shore rather than riding in traffic. I will be in traffic soon enough. No sense looking for trouble.

I work late, 8 PM late, and the weather has yet to arrive. When I leave work it is well past sunset. The temperature remains in the mid-70s, the south wind blasting in from the Gulf keeping things warm and damp.

Rather than risk being caught out when the weather arrives I opt for the Levee route home. As soon as I top the Levee the south wind pushes me home. How nice to have a stiff wind behind me making my much-faster-than-normal 20 mile per hour pace effortless.

Riding that fast with the wind behind me I find myself in a quiet bubble, no sound of wind in my ears as I pace the wind itself. As I near the bridge I can hear things being blown against one another in the construction site to my right, down and across the empty River Road. Plastic snaps, metallic things ping like lanyards on masts, something rolls and stops.

The new grocery store downtown is on my way home. I stop in for something to eat, a short chat with the checkout clerk, an internal debate on beer or no beer. No beer wins and I ride home wondering when the rain will come.