Bike Commute 40: Go Green Stamp, a photo by Rootchopper on Flickr.

Tomorrow is Earth Day. I don’t know who decides these things but it would be swift if they’d look at a calendar before holding Earth Day on Good Friday.

To avoid the conflict, we celebrated Earth Day today at my office. The festivities were tied to a new set of Go Green postage stamps, one of which says “Ride a Bike”. Some of my bike commuting co-workers and I gave out materials promoting cycling. The hottest item was the Washington DC Bicycle Maps. We ran out.

We gave away a one-year membership to Capital Bikeshare (CaBi) and many, many one-day trial coupons. Virtually everyone I talked to thought CaBi is an excellent idea. We’d have given away more CaBi materials but for the fact that so many of our co-workers live well beyond the CaBi network.

I was a little disappointed in the lukewarm response to the Bike to Work Day brochures (even after I told people that they’d get free food and coffee at the pit stops). I’ve done Bike to Work day 5 of the last 7 years and would have done all 7 if not for being out of town. I admit that I feel a little like W. C. Fields Charlie Sheen on New Years Eve when I ride to work on B2WD. (Come to think of it, I look a little like him too.)

We shared our display table with Kate, the “Take a Walk” person. I think I convinced her to try bike commuting from her home in Cleveland Park to our office at L’Enfant Plaza. It’s a piece of cake, Kate! (Pay no attention to that climb up to Calvert Street on the way home. It builds character – and thighs.)

In fact, the whole commute was going swimmingly until it got kind of literal.

That’s Little Nellie parked across the Mount Vernon Trail in the foreground. The Memorial Bridge is in the backgorund. In between is the Potomac River.  It is not supposed to be there.  Little Nellie is brave. Little Nellie is proud. Little Nellie is not stupid.  We took the high road (or grass) to the right.

Once we cleared the deluge we made our way into DC.  I cut under the 14th Street Bridge on Ohio Drive to avoid the car traffic on Independence Avenue.  Neither Little Nellie nor I are afraid, but we don’t like waiting at traffic lights and dealing with late-for-work policy wonks driving their commute mobiles.

As we came onto Ohio Drive we once again encountered the deluge, this time under the 14th Street Bridge. We knew not to ride through this one when we saw police cars driving up on the sidewalk to the left.  After this, it was clear sailing (sorry) all the way to work. The evening commute was uneventful as the waters had receded.  The commute turned out to be 14 1/2 miles, pretty much half my normal commuting distance, not including portages.

Planning a bike tour is sometimes as much fun as doing the tour itself.  I have long wanted to ride from my hometown of Albany NY to my house in Mount Vernon VA just south of DC.  I finally have a chance to pull this tour off with minimal hassle.

In mid-May, my son will be finishing his freshman year at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.  This just happens to be about 35 miles from Albany so I am going to drive a car up with my bike stuff, load his stuff in the car, and send him back to Virginia. I will ride back.

The planning for this trip is actually pretty simple.  New York State has a growing network of official bike routes with road signs much like regular highway routes.  NYS Bike Route 9 runs from New York City to the Canadian border along the east side of the Hudson River.  The Adventure Cycling Association produces bike touring maps.  The ACA Atlantic Coast route intersects NYS Bike Route 9 just south of Albany.  So my route planning couldn’t be easier.

I need to decide which bike to take. I could take Bike Nellie, my Tour Easy recumbent.  It is great on my back, but lately riding it causes sharp nerve pain in my left foot.  I could take Little Nellie, my Bike Friday folding bike, but riding it has been causing discomfort in my left knee.  Or I could take my Specialized Sequoia.  This bike is great for 20 mile rides but I fear that it would really mess up my surgically repaired back on longer rides.

I decided to try each bike at a long distance and see if I could resolve one of these issues.  Today, I rode the Sequoia 51-miles from my house to Bethesda and back.  The trip took me along the Mount Vernon Trail, into Georgetown, up the Capital Crescent Trail, and along the Georgetown Branch Trail, before returning via Rock Creek Park.

Other than some interesting debris along the Mount Vernon Trail, the ride to Bethesda was uneventful.  I felt fine the whole way to Bethesda.  As I started making my way back, however, my back gave me a twinge.  As is usually the case, this pain came without a warning,.  I also happened to be exactly half way into the ride.
I took some deep breaths and stopped and stretched a few times.  Long story short, I made it back with no more pain and in pretty good shape.  So this trial run was a mixed bag,

Even with the back incident this ride was a pleasure. It has been way too long since we had a nice day when I didn’t have a conflict with family, housework, or failure to rise from my slumber.

Tomorrow it’s back to bike commuting.  Little Nellie will get the call as I have to drop my car at the dealer in Arlington.  So, I’ll toss her into the trunk and bike commute from there. . Cheers.

Bike Commute 36: Lilacs!, a photo by Rootchopper on Flickr.

When I was little, the best part of early May was the smell of lilac blossoms along the northern side of my grade school. For the next two weeks, I will be treated with that beautiful fragrance every time I go to or from my shed with my bike. Boy, does this beat the cold days of January!

I haven’t been riding my bike the last couple of days.  You see, yesterday was my wife’s birthday. Suffice it to say it was not one of the birthdays one normally gets upset about.  Just a run of the mill birthday divisible by 17 and 3.  To mark the occasion in a unique and heretofore unheard of way, my wife, known around these parts as as Mrs. Rootchopper, decided to celebrate with a bang.  During her midday pilates class she experienced what we later learned to be a thunderclap headache.

Much fun ensued as I rushed to her side and promptly stood around with a look of stern concern, feeling utterly helpless as she held two ice bags to her head and yelled through excruciating pain. Some EMTs showed up with a stretcher and whisked her off with me riding shotgun in the ambulance to GW University Hospital’s chaotic emergency room. (Digression: for those of you not from the Washington, DC area, the vehicle we rode in was pronounced am-BYOO-LANCE. I find this pronunciation almost as annoying as the word “irregardless.” Now was not the time to complain about the local dialect however. Now back to our tale.) For you history buffs, this is the same ER that saved Ronald Reagan’s life after he was shot.  It occurred to me that, as far as I knew, Mrs. Rootchopper’s thunderclap headache had not been caused by a bullet fired by an obsessed Jodie Foster fan so, I thought, perhaps we were in the wrong place.

Lucky for us, Rosie the nurse came to my wife’s aid with a nice IV with morphine and some other mysterious medications.  The ER was incredibly busy with the flotsam and jetsam of ailing city life, so we waited a couple of hours for a CAT scan.  This turned out negative, which is not to say that Mrs. Rootchopper was determined to have no brain.  Rather,.this meant that no tumors or fluids such as blood were evident in her head.  On the advice of the amazingly personable and calm Dr. Leila Zucker, Mrs. Rootchopper had a lumbar puncture to double check the presence of blood in her cerebro-spinal fluid. While the good doctor was setting this up, I fetched my car and picked up our 15 year-old-daughter, so that we all could make a hasty departure from the hospital.  Sadly the hospital  lab took a couple of hours to test the fluid samples so we sat around and played Brickbreaker and entertained Mrs. Rootchopper who was now experiencing a morphine hangover of sorts and a slight headache from the lumbar puncture. (We’re havin’ fun now!)

Very long story short, the fluid tested negative for bad stuff. Dr. Zucker told us that, basically, without beaucoup further tests, the cause of today’s medical excitement was a mystery. This I confirmed today on the Mayo Clinic’s website. The website also summarized virtually everything that Dr. Zucker had discussed with us in the ER.  So not only did she have a world-class bedside manner, she also knew exactly what she was doing which is very comforting indeed. Mrs. Rootchopper was told to go home and resume normal activities, and check in with her personal physician.

We arrived home at 10 pm exhausted and hungry, and proceeded to inhale chocolate truffle birthday cake and ice cream.

Hopefully, in a day or 2, I’ll be back in the saddle. Then again, my daughter’s birthday is Thursday. Who knows what adventures await..     

I ride a bike quite a bit by most people’s standards.  I’m pretty much a plodder. I have three bikes.  My conventional looking touring bike is a Specialized Sequoia from the early 1990s. It weighs a ton, but, then again, so do I; so we’re even. I call it The Sequoia, mostly because I lack imagination.

The Sequoia is my oldest bike and has well over 30,000 miles on it.  

Bike number two is my Tour Easy recumbent.  This baby goes by the name of Nellie. It was named when I was riding it down Big Savage Mountain in western Maryland.  When I hit 45 miles per hour, all I could think of was “Whoa, Nellie!!!”  And the name stuck. 

I bought a recumbent because I needed a touring bike and my surgically repaired back is very picky about my bike set up.  Nobody in town had a touring bike that I could test ride so I decided to try recumbents. On the third shopping visit I brought Nellie home from Bikes At Vienna .  Nellie has over 27,000 miles on her. Not too shabby.  She carried me on a few bike tours like this one.

My third bike is Little Nellie, my New World Tourist travel bike. It folds up into a suitcase. A few years back my son and I watched all the James Bond movies. One of my favorites is “You Only Live Twice” in which Bond (played by Sean Connery ) needs to do a recon mission of a mysterious compound in a volcano. He calls back to England and says, “Tell Q, send Little Nellie.”  Q’s Little Nellie is a kit helicopter.  After he assembles it, Connery takes to the air in a goofy looking helmet and gets into a dogfight.

 I don’t do dogfights. Little Nellie is a baby with only about 5,000 miles on her.

I often bike commute. Many people at work think it’s amazing that a 55-year old man can ride 14 or 15 miles per day to work.  I think it’s amazing (and a bit depressing) how many 45-year olds can’t.