Bike to Work Week

Well it’s bike to work week and due to the fact that it is also ridiculously nice here – I mean upper 70’s which is almost hot – I thought it would be a good time to start biking the six miles between my apartment and work.  My goal is to do this every single day for the remainder of warm weather, even during late summer monsoons.  Rain be damned.  Today was day one.  So far so good….

The route I take has a couple traffic snags, and then winds through what has suddenly become a very empty campus, before plunging across a busy intersection – this is about three miles – and then out of the city altogether onto a forest trail which gets me just about the rest of the way – about another three miles.  Nothing beats riding to work through the forest in the morning except riding through the forest on your way home in the afternoon.  Seriously, not a damn thing.  Especially if you have delicious frothy cold beverages waiting in your fridge for you.

Beer and bicycling.  Now that’s sublime.

I used to work at a pizza place and one summer and I was taking a full 12 credits and working full time, and helping my stressed out wife plan our wedding.  Biking to work was the only thing that got me through, though beer played its own not insignificant part. I’d bike to class each morning and I’d be on campus until six in the evening Monday through Thursday and then go straight to work where I’d be until around one or two in the morning.  But still, gliding home in the silent dark had this extraordinarily calming effect after a night of pizza tossing and a day of lectures.  The moon and a cool breeze.  A train howling its mad midnight jeremiad at the stars.

And, yes, I still always wear a helmet.