Monday, August 23, 2010

Big Bike Ride

For the past three years New York City's Summer Streets Program has made 7 miles a streets a pedestrian paradise for 3 Saturdays in August.  I only missed it once.  I have either run it (once back and forth) or biked it 8 times.

This year on August 8th, I used it to run to the start of the NYRR Team Championship Race.  On the 15th I met my teammates from the Prospect Part Track Club and had a great group run.  I actually had a lot of fun giving some out of town visitors a "running tour".  On August 21st, I took the kids for a "Big Bike Ride"

I did not bother taking photos of Summer Streets because there a like a billion here. On the Brooklyn Bridge we saw a dude running in a diaper. (That photo is stuck in my camera, when I can get it out I will post it.)

Just past City Hall we saw a medical office for pens.  I doubt there is another like it in the world.


Then we had a great time ride uptown.  Of course, we stopped to pee at the Waldorf Astoria.  That was after drinking all the free water that was being given out by the City of New York.  Yes, free water coming right out of the pipes.  No plastic bottles necessary.

We made it all the way to Central Park and had a great lunch at the Boat House Cafe.  I am gonna be there on October for a Wedding.  I guess I gotta buy a pair of long pants.

The we rode North in the Park so we could cross it on the 102nd Street Transverse.  To me this was so familiar.  I have raced this route about a hundred times.  Up Cat Hill and then that long strait rolling rout to the finish line in the Transverse.   It is a nice way to finish a race.

My plan was to leave Central Park and head west to Riverside and see how far we could get.   But we got sidetracked by a great playground.  The Tarr Family Playground.  It really had a nice vibe,  kinda like the Park slope of Manhattan.  The Upper West Side is A LOT different then the Upper East Side.


Crossing town, I saw something I thought was extinct.  A phone booth on the street.  I thought it might have been a prop for a movie, but it was real.

Heading downtown, we had our fist injury.  My son told me to take a picture for the blog.  Of course.  Then I cleaned it up and gave it a kiss.  (Yes, as director of Daddy Day Camp, I have a little fist aid kit in my back back.)

Then we made it down to the Battery,  Time for ice cream and sprinklers.  That is Ellis Island in the foreground.


Then the big mistake.  I asked the kids if they wanted to ride back over the Brooklyn Bridge (and then up the slope of Park Slope) to get home or if they wanted to take the subway.  Whata think.  It was doable till we had to get off the crowded train.  Sorry world.  Next time we ride home from where ever we ride to.




The map is a little wrong. It automatacally made it a round trip, and added about 2.5 miles in a strait line to get us home. Not so much.

5 comments:

  1. Even if the map added 2.5 miles...20 miles is a whole lot for kids in a city that large. That's awesome. Are you sad that DDC is almost over?

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  2. nothing like running or biking in Central Park. It is sooo energizing and I love the Boat House, expensive place and hard to get a table outside in the summer but well worth it

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  3. I did the Big Bike Ride this Saturday for the first time. I biked up from Sheepshead Bay, over the Brooklyn bridge, did the whole stretch, a lap around Central Park and then back down over the Manhattan Bridge. 35 miles total, I believe. I'm still freakin' tired.

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  4. I think they still have phone booths in LA. Haven't been there for so long though. You sure have an eye for the unusual photo. I loved the Fountain Pen Hospital -- Since 1946. Fountain pens reminded me of so much from when I was a kid and learned to write with ink. Yes, I'm so old, we actually dipped them in an inkwell in school.--Inger

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  5. Every single time I run to work, I see that Fountain Pen Hospital and giggle to myself, thinking about all these pens being carried in on old-fashioned white stretchers by women in old-fashioned nurses' caps. Hah!

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