Tag: “Mount Vernon Trail”

Anacostia Bikeabout

The weather here is so perfect that I could not pass up a nice easy ride. Well, it ended up being 65 miles. It was so worth it.

After taking in some smallish hills near home Deets and I picked up the Mount Vernon Trail near Belle Haven Park. In a few minutes we were on our way across the Potomac River on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge trail. Once in Maryland we started the long slog up Oxon Hill. The new casino is nearly finished. It still reminds me of a galactic cruiser in Star Wars.

At the top of Oxon Hill we turned east to head into the Anacostia neighborhood of DC. We needed to use the sidewalk because MDOT no longer allows left hand turns into Oxon Farm Park. The sidewalk was closed as part of the casino project. So we just rode behind the traffic cones against traffic. Just wait until a bunch of up-all-night frustrated gambler start driving around this monstrosity.

The ride down the big bumpy hill through the farm was fun. I did it one handed because I was trying to take interesting pictures. I did not succeed. But I didn’t crash so there’s that.

Once through the flat section of the park we rode up Blue Plains Drive, a road that gets steeper as you go. Not fun.

At the top of the hill we took a left on MLK Jr. Boulevard and rode it through the eastern edge of Anacostia. This is the lowest income area of DC. It also has the most violent crime. On Sunday mornings it is also the church going-est neighborhood.

At Good Hope Road we turned into Anacostia Park where we headed up the Anacostia River. This river was long regarded as little more than a sewer but nowadays it’s a gem. More and more people are coming to the Anacostia for its quiet beauty. After riding about a mile we came to the new (as in not yet officially open) extension of the Anacostia River Trail north of Benning Road.

It was clear from the get go that this new section of trail was really well designed. It is not meant as high speed trail. Rather than cut a straight path, it winds through the parkland on the east side of the Anacostia River. Some of the bridges have concrete decking instead of the slippery wooden decking used on the MVT. There are traffic calming design elements to keep Lance Mamilot and his friends from riding aggressively.

One section of the trail is on a sidestreet. I was shocked at all the new housing in this little Northeast DC enclave. The street riding soon gives way to a cycletrack! Woot!DSCN5627.JPG

Wayfaring signs make it easy to navigate the trail. Except for when the stop where the trial ends as it intersects the old Anacostia Trail system in Bladensburg MD.

We rode the Northeast Branch Trail up to Lake Artemesia. Just before I turned to get to the lake, I stopped for a deer. It just stood there only a few feet away. I think I could have petted it. Then it decided that I was a danger and turned and ran.

Deets and I ended up riding the old trail all the way until I saw an Ikea sign. This is somewhere at the northern edge of College Park. I checked my Google maps for a way to ride to Silver Spring but it seemed hopeless. We were going to go to Meridian Hill Park to see the disarmed Joan of Arc statue. (Somebody cut off her sword at the hilt.) Not seeing an obvious route, we turned around and rode back to DC. On the way back, I switched over to the western side of the river and rode the trail all the way to Nats Park. After cheating death on Maine Avenue I worked my way to the 14th Street Bridge over the Potomac and rode the MVT home.

Despite not actually being officially open yet, the Anacostia Trail had some serious traffic on it. Not much less than the MVT. When word gets out, it’s going to get a ton of use.

It’s only shortcomings are a distinct lack of water fountains and no obvious places to eat. All in good time I suppose.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking over on my Flickr page.

It’s Clinchmas!

  • Tonight, if the Mets lose and the Nats win, the Nationals win their division and qualify for the playoffs. YAY! This has been a foregone conclusion for a couple of weeks but longtime Red Sox sufferers like me know that nothing in baseball is to be taken for granted. You could look it up. Of google “Bucky Fucking Dent” or “Bill Buckner and Mookie Wilson.”
  • Baseball quiz: who scored the winning run on the Buckner/Wilson play? Answer: Ray Knight, the Nats announcer.
  • Summer is officially over. In the last week, I’ve seen two bicyclists fall on the Mount Vernon Trail. That’s why I prefer the word “autumn” to “fall”
  • Felkerino once told me it is bad luck to refer to terrain as “flat” during a bike ride. It’s a four-letter f-word. Use “level” instead.
  • I am nearly recovered from riding the Backroads Century on Sunday. It had a lot of hills. My body was not happy this week. First, my back gave me a spasm on Tuesday morning. It lasted only a second and I managed to avoid turning into Quasimodo for a week. My legs have been dead for a few days. This morning they sprang to life. I hit 18 mph on the MVT. Must have been a tailwind.
  • The last two days I woke up at 5 am. I waited for daybreak (around 7) yesterday before heading to work. Today I left in the dark, with lights on my helmet and wearing a reflective vest. I am experimenting with strapping my battery to my helmet. I wouldn’t want to do this for hours at a time but it seems to be better than having a battery shoved down the back of my shorts. Note to Light and Motion, make me a Stella lamp with a shorter cord please.
  • It wasn’t until I was practically at work that I thought of going to Friday Coffee Club. I would have had to backtrack four miles. Not gonna happen.
  • One thing that never ceases to amuse me is how I know dozens of bike commuters but rarely see anybody I know. The person I see the most often, Chris M., is somebody I seem pathologically unable to recognize. Weird. Every once in a while somebody says hello as they go by. I typically respond “Blerfg.” I’m either half asleep or in a trance.
  • I signed up for another autumn ride: the Great Pumpkin Ride. I’ll probably be doing it with Ultrarunnergirl.
  • A friend of a friend runs several web-enabled freelance businesses. I can’t quite sort them all out but she is obviously a fan of yoga/mindfulness. When she lapses into yoga lingo on her business videos she says, “Sorry, went a little ‘woo woo’ there.” I have been looking for a word to describe this jargon and now I have it. People who are into yoga and mindfulness will henceforth be the Woowoos on this blog.
  • It’s suppposed to be a perfect weekend. All I want to do is let my body recover. So my plan is:
    • Mow the lawn
    • Swab the deck
    • Do a very gentle and short bit of cycling
    • Read my book about genetics. It is cleverly entitled The Gene.
    • Watch the Nationals clinch on TV!

Random Thoughts on a Down Day

Taking the rest of the day off

  • It’s hot as blazes outside. And I have ridden 188 miles in the last four days. So I decided to skip my usual night baseball game this week. And I am working from home today as well. I haven’t had a day completely off the bike in two weeks. It’s no wonder that I slept like a log last night. I am still a bit drowsy today, but I will be back at it for tomorrow’s 50 States Ride.

Blog power?

  • The car that was parked illegally for over a week in the bike lane at 420 North Union Street in Old Town was gone yesterday morning. Did somebody read my post? Or is it coincidence?  Either way, good riddence to the scofflaw parker.

Coffee in a tree

  • The forecast calls for horrific heat and humidity. Thank god the last rest stop is at a coffee shop around mile 55. Nothing says relief on a hot summer day like a big hot cup of joe. My friend Ursula will be running the rest stop. The thought of heat and hills and hot coffee gave me a weird dream the other night. (I rarely dream so it has stuck in my head.) I am climbing a tree. And there, sitting on a branch, is Ursula. Drinking hot coffee. She is cheerful. Then she spills the coffee and we mourn the loss.

Keeping my rubber side up

  • A shout out to the bike rider who nearly crashed on the Dyke Marsh bridge on the Mount Vernon Trail yesterday morning. He was passing a runner when he saw me coming toward him. He hit the brakes and his bike went skidding every which way. I was surprised he didn’t go down. His misfortune was a warning to me to take it easy on the wooden bridges which get really slippery when wet. Good thing. There was a pile up on the Trollheim, the boardwalk under the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge, yesterday morning. I wasn’t involved but rode through the crash site about 40 minutes after.

Road rage in North Old Town

  • I was on the receiving end of an act of road rage last night. I was coming to the place in North Old Town where the trail crosses the railroad tracks at an angle on First Street. A driver was approaching from the left. I was braking for the stop sign. About 50 feet before reaching the stop sign, the driver passed in front of me. He honked his horn and started yelling and pointing at me from behind his rolled up windows. He must have been having a bad day. It was weird.

Greetings while you sweat

  • A woman gave me the peace sign after I rode through the Memorial Bridge underpass last night. Then a passing male cyclist said hello. (Odds are it was Chris M. who I never recognize.) Just before the road rage incident two other unknown cyclists said hello. Considering the brutally oppressive heat and humidity, I’d say the people of the Mount Vernon Trail were having and exceptionally cheery day.

Flogini’s healing bike commute

  • My friend Flogini, erstwhile spiritual adviser to the Rootchopper Institute, wrote a cryptic note on her Facebook page yesterday. It was about bike commuting home in the rain and having the rain wash away her heartbreak. She broke up with her boyfriend that morning, on her birthday. I have been in a down mood the last few weeks. Her note was eloquent (not a surprise), and it somehow made me feel better. Whatta ya know about that, Burt? I reached out to her for the first time in months last night.

Impermanent friendship

  • Flogini and I have known each other for over nine years but we don’t hang out together anymore. A couple of years ago she just stopped saying yes when I asked her to get together. After several nos I stopped asking. Then she stopped reading my blog and following me on Facebook. So I unfollowed her. If she read this, she’d almost certainly say “Nonsense. We are still friends,” but her inaction speaks louder than her words. Sometimes life goes “CLANK.”

Any day will do

  • There is no good day to break up a relationship. That is to say, when a relationship is not working out, any day will do. I sympathize with Flogini because I broke up with a girlfriend on her birthday back in my grad school days. It was the right thing to do but the timing was unintentionally unkind. 19 years later she sent me a letter apologizing for breaking up with me! I had to remind her that I was the dumper not the dumpee and that it happened on her birthday. Derp. Time heals all wounds. We are on good terms today.

Trees at the ballpark

  • I hate my birthday. It’s like New Year’s Eve. Expectations are rarely realized. And the next day, if you’re lucky, you wake up another day older. I don’t need to be reminded of the ticking of my life clock. My knees and back and neck and shoulder and bladder remind me of it every day. I just wanted to hide in a hole this year. After the day had passed, I went to a Nats game alone and hid in plain sight. The people in the stands around me were anonymous like the trees I rode by on my bike tour in July.

Charlie’s an angel

  • Finally, a shout out to Kelly, my co-worker who has forsaken bike commuting this summer for baby making. Last night, she gave birth to a healthy baby girl named Charlotte. Sometimes happiness comes in warm 7.3 pound packages. Congrats to all. (BTW, I lost the friendly, no-awards office pool by a little over 3 hours. Her due date was September 1. When I guessed the 9th, she wanted to burn my desk.)

Old Town Bike Lane Parking Lot

Today I took a picture of the car blocking the Union Street bike lane at 420 N. Union. This bike lane is part of the Mount Vernon Trail and it gets heavy bike traffic at rush hour and on weekends. This car has plenty of company. Often the entire lane is blocked. Sometimes the entire sidewalk is blocked. Sometimes both.

 It’s been there for more than a week. I spotted a parking enforcement officer parked nearby. So I asked him why he doesn’t ticket obvious parking violators such as this.

He told me that they had been routinely issuing $40 tickets to Old Town residents who park in their driveways in such a way as to block the sidewalk and/or the bike lane. According to the officer, residents complain that they are “parking in their driveways” and “have nowhere else to park.”

As you can see from the photo, driveways in this area of Old Town are little more than curb cuts. As such they are  too short to fit most cars. Every house has a garage, but the residents won’t park in them. Of course, there is nothing to prohibit them from parking parallel to the curb like anyone else. In short, their argument is bovine scatology.

But the ticket office at City Hall feels their pain. Their tickets are routinely dismissed. So the ticket officers have stopped ticketing. It was not clear whether the officers were told to stop ticketing or whether they gave up out of frustration. In any case, the officer said, “The city is trying to work something out.”  

What’s to work out? 

The League of American Bicyclists designated Alexandria as a “Bicycling Friendly City.” How many other BFCs allow parking in the bike lane for days at a time? Maybe the League needs to reconsider its award process. Maybe I need to reconsider my membership.

 

Deets Turns 2 and a Blast from the Past

I rode Deets, my Surly Cross Check, to the barbershop. I wore a baseball cap. I always get the same haircut. This time the barber must have mistaken me for a second grader. The short haircut became a buzz cut. Ugh. Good thing I had the baseball cap. I’ll be wearing it for about six weeks.

I rode to Old Town along the Mount Vernon Trail. The weather was breezy and just warm enough. Perfect. Just north of Belle Haven Park police cars were parked next to the trail with their lights flashing. A police officer was taking down yellow crime scene tape along the river side of the trail. I couldn’t see any desperados or axe murderers so I rode on.

I made it to the bank and did my business with the magic money machine. When I turned around there was Emilia. We did the 50 States Ride together in 2014, one of my very best days on a bike. It was also a very hard ride. She hasn’t talked to me since. (Just kidding.) What a great surprise.

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Emilia Shows Off Her Trophy

I dawdled a bit in north Old Town before heading home with a very pleasant tailwind. A police officer was still sitting in his car at the scene of the mystery but I decided to leave it to some other citizen crimestopper to find out what was going on.

On the way home, Deets decided to hit a milestone: 2,000 miles. He’s all ready to ride the Southern Maryland 100 on Monday and the 50 States next Saturday.

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Today’s News: Annoying, Depressing

Cement Truck Parking

The Mount Vernon Trail is one of the most heavily used trails on the East Coast. Ab28624928742_d40e68caa3_zout two miles from my house, the trail merges with Northdown Road. As
you can see from the picture, at this point, the trail and road are only one lane wide. It is in fact a trail not a road. That didn’t stop this cement truck driver from parking in the trail. I’d use the words “middle of the trail” but the truck obstructed the entire trail. Every last inch. Perhaps the driver thought “Hey, look at this trail. It’s the perfect width for parking my truck.”

Trail users had to dismount and make their way through the mud on the side of the trail. It was barely wide enough to get by.

I may be making a big deal out of nothing but this is the kind of disrespect that bicyclists and bicycle infrastructure routinely get, especially in places like Fairfax County. All this truck driver had to do was park where I was standing when I took this picture and trail users would have had free passage.

Death by Parking

Earlier today, a 92 year old driver was parking his SUV in an alley a block from the Mount Vernon Trail in Old Town, Alexandria. He hit a parking attendant, then he hit another man, killing him. How the hell you can kill someone in an alley that is about as wide as the trail in the picture above is beyond me. Why in the world does Virginia allow 92 year olds to drive?  Will somebody from the DMV show up at the funeral to explain this to the loved ones of the deceased?

I’m Walking Here

Meanwhile in the 400 block of North Union Street an SUV was parked perpendicular to a house. It’s front end completely obstructed the sidewalk. Sticking in the ground next to the front bumper was a sign that said “No Not Block Driveway.” There is no end to the entitlement mentality of the landed gentry of Old Town Alexandria.

$2.5 Billion for Nothing

On Friday evening at rush hour my family and I drove to Tyson’s Corner. (This is the first time I have driven to Tyson’s in a year. It will be the last, but that’s another story.) On the way we got on the Beltway at US 1, just west of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. Traffic heading to the bridge from Virginia was backed up for miles. In all six lanes. The bridge is only a few years old. The project to rebuild the bridge and the adjacent roadway and exits cost about $2.5 billion. The rationale was that this would relieve congestion. Trying to relieve congestion by adding more capacity is like trying to achieve happiness by buying more stuff. If only I had one more lane! If only I had one more HDTV!

The bridge was designed with the capacity to carry a Metro rail line. This has yet to be implemented. Already people are calling for the rail line space to be converted to car lanes.

 

Great Falls > New Tires

The plan was to put two new tires on The Mule. Then I walked outside. It was MUGGY. Then I looked at the old tires on The Mule. They looked acceptable. Sort of.

Then I jumped on my neglected Cross Check and headed to Great Falls Park in Maryland.

The first 13 miles was essentially my commute route, the Mount Vernon Trail and the 14th Street Bridge, to DC. Ohio Drive and some sidewalks masquerading as bike trails took me to K Street in Georgetown. I survived the half mile traffic gauntlet and made it to the Capital Crescent Trail.

I was making pretty decent time. This is attributable to three factors: a light tailwind, fresh legs, and, well, I’m a badass.

I switched over to the C&O Canal towpath at mile 18. The Cross Check loves the towpath. After a couple of miles, I had some solitude and it was bliss. Sweaty bliss but bliss nonetheless.

I rode past Widewater, a section of the canal just downriver from Great Falls. There were about 8 women sitting on stand up paddle boards in the canal. They were finishing, I am not making this up, a yoga class. Floating yoga? Really?

I stopped to check out the rapids at Great Falls. It rained heavily yesterday and the rapids were muddy and raging. If you’ve never been to DC, make sure you put Great Falls on your to do list. (I prefer the Maryland side because it has the towpath, a trail out through the rapids, and several really good hiking trails.)

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After watching the water show, I headed out of the park on the access road. It’s a long up hill that leads to what is normally a fun, curving downhill. Unfortunately, the road surface is choppy and, even on the Cross Check, not a road I want to ride over 30 miles per hour on.

I survived the descent.

The ride back was a familiar one along MacArthur Boulevard to Resevoir Road, back to the canal. From there I retraced my ride out with the exception of using a new bike path through the park on the Georgetown waterfront. The path is nice enough, but on an oppressively hot day the pedestrians and tourists on bikes were annoying. They’d just stop and chat in the middle of the path.

I had the following conversation a half dozen times:

“PASSING!”

“Oh. Sorry.”

I have the patience of a Swede.

The ride home was uneventful. There were no Lance Mamilots to irritate me. Despite encountering plenty of families with little ones riding tentatively on the trail, I remained civil.

How unlike me.

When I arrived home, my odometer read

60

So I went inside and had this:

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Making the Landscape Move through You

One day when I was in college, I drove my older brother around in a car. He was (and is still, for all I know) a skilled photographer. As he took pictures, I remarked again and again, “Why are you wasting film on that?” His answer was that what seems mundane to me may be fascinating to a photographer. “A photographer views his world differently,” he said. I didn’t really understand him.

Fast forward to about ten years ago. My eyesight was terrible. I had had two surgeries to repair a detached retina in my left eye. The result was that the vision from my left eye was blurry and far more nearsighted than my right. Given that my vision in my right eye was something like 20/400 this was a significant problem. To make matters worse, my post-surgery vision while passable was also severely deficient in depth perception. (Before the retina detachment, while wearing my glasses, I could see well enough to hit medium speed pitches at the local batting cages. After, I couldn’t put the bat on the ball if my life depended on it. Was I low, high, early, late? I just could not tell.)

Then I got lucky. I got cataracts.

Before the surgery my lenses were cloudy. This made it very hard to see at night and put a yellowish tinge on everything I saw. The surgery (which takes ten minutes per eye under light sedation) involves removing your lens (one eye at a time) and replacing it with a man-made lens. Since your lens is being replaced, you can replace it with a lens of a different power. So a more powerful corrective lens went in my bad, left eye than the lens lens that went into my right eye. The result was literally awesome.

(Digression: my father was an ophthalmologist. Often when walking in a shopping mall or other public place, someone would walk up to him and thank him profusely. I thought these people were bonkers, but now I had a first hand understanding of where they were coming from.)

The replacement lenses got me to 20/100 or so in both eyes so I still wear glasses, but my fully corrected vision is, well, eye opening.

One day, after getting my new glasses, I was standing in the opening to my shed facing the yard. A passing shower was dropping rain on my back yard but half the sky was clear allowing the evening sun to strike the raindrops at an angle. My new eyes saw these raindrops as shining silver droplets; they seemed like tinsel falling through the air. I had never seen anything like it.

Normally, when we move through a landscape we focus broadly. We see everything as a whole. We correctly perceive ourselves passing through the landscape as things we see leave our focus and move behind us.

Lately while riding my bike I’ve started playing with how my eyes focus on the world I am passing through. I pick out an object like an tree limb overhanging the trail and focus my attention on it. This causes the limb to take on a separate place in the visual field, not unlike the 3-D effect of a Viewmaster. The rest of my visual field is slightly out of focus. I notice that when I do this eye trick as I ride, it seems like the landscape is moving and I am staying still. As if, the landscape is moving through me.

My commute is really beautiful, but I have ridden the Mount Vernon Trail to and from DC several thousand times. I can practically ride it with my eyes closed. Now, however, my little perception experiment is opening my eyes to an entirely different perspective.

I can’t help but wonder if I would have been able to pull off this visual stunt with normal, healthy eyes.

 

 

 

Sticky, Wet, and Grumpy

This morning was a rude re-introduction to biking to work in DC. It was incredibly muggy. I was sweating before I pedaled once. Ick.

I rode Big Nellie to ease my way back into reality. It was a smooth fast ride to work. A fellow bike commuter passed me without warning with inches to spare near Porto Vecchio just south of Old Town. I yelled at him to give a warning. He passed a man walking a dog again without warning. I rang my bell and passed the man who proceeded to yell at me for not giving a warning. I said I gave a warning and rang my bell again. “You have to do it louder!”

I can’t win.

I miss the peaceful riding with logging trucks going past at 60 miles per hour.

At the north end of Old Town, a resident had parked his car completely obstructing the sidewalk. Did you know that Alexandria’s city motto is “Where pedestrians come last.”?

I managed to avoid any more unpleasantness until the evening commute.27782018774_13c91636c0_m

My co-workers started warning me about a very nasty storm approaching from the west at about 3:30. (I had the radar on my screen already.) I timed it too tightly and managed to find myself a mile from work or shelter in a downpour. The tailwind was nice but the visibility was almost nonexistent so I pulled over beneath the 14th Street bridge to wait it out.

After 15 minutes the rain abated and I headed out. Within a mile the rain began anew so I pulled over under the National Airport access bridge near Crystal City. I had some company including a dad and his toddler son in a Bakfiets. The boy was upset, not because of the rain but because he had lost his bottle.

The r27782018834_bec4af58b7_mains abated again, this time for good so I headed home. Of course, old difficulties came in Old Town. Three cars pulled u-turns in front of me (two were in intersections) without signaling. A car was parked across the bike lane on North Union Street. Rather than take a picture and report it, I gave the house the finger as I rolled by. Going in the opposite direction was an Alexandria police cruiser. They didn’t bother to stop and ticket the car. They never do. It is days like today that I really believe that the League of American Bicyclists should rescind Alexandria’s bicycle friendly city status.

South of the Beltway the Mount Vernon Trail was strewn with branches and other tree debris. I managed to get through without a problem.

Tomorrow I get to do this again. The day after I may have my head examined.