As I mentioned last week, this Saturday was the final Summer Streets day, and I headed out at 10:30 to bike to the start of the route, then ride the whole thing down and back. It was sunny, breezy, and not too hot - a perfect day for a ride!
The route started at 72nd Street, and I got there by going through part of Central Park. It was even more crowded than the last time I went, so much so that even without cars I still had to deal with gridlock and bottlenecks. The soundtrack along the way was provided by a guy skateboarding back and forth with a boom box blasting "Barbara Ann," someone playing an accordion on a corner, a free Zumba class set up on a side street, a radio station doing a promo broadcast, several amateur a capella whistlers, and lots of snippets of conversation. I saw the same lemonade stands, product promotion tents, and free bike/roller blade repair spots as there were last week. The lines for bike rental places were consistently about 40 people deep.
This photo was taken from my bike! This was my first (and maybe last) foray into mounted photography.
Running into someone I recognize around the city is always a very startling experience. I have seen the same woman several times running around Central Park, whom I recognize because she has the weirdest stride I've ever seen, but other than that, I don't usually see perfect strangers multiple times. The odds are against it, given the sheer number of people pouring through every sidewalk, intersection, and coffee shop around the clock. I did, however, recognize the guy below from every New York race I've run:
He's rather hard to miss. Sorry about the poor picture quality - my camera seems to be protesting the last time I dropped it. If you can't tell, he is a very short, very thin Asian man with a flowing white beard and massive dreadlocks piled on top of his head in a sort of netting. He always wears the same sunglasses, jersey, and shorts and has the same tape around his knees, although this is the first time I've seen him holding jingle bells on route. It was tough to get a picture of him without his noticing. As I say, I've seen him in every Road Runners race, but this is the first time I've spotted him in a non-competitive event. It was rather exciting.
Urban tennis?
Another picture my camera chose not to capture vividly depicts the game of tennis I saw set up in an alley. The net was made of that orange webbing they put around construction sites and was held up by two of those standing wire baskets that allow you both pick up tennis balls and then access them easily by rotating the basket handles to the bottom. I thought it was pretty creative, and logical when you consider the cost/wait times required to use real courts in this city.
The route closed at 1:00, by which time I was safely back within the confines of the car-free Central Park. Altogether, the round trip was 15 miles, and was really a fun experience. No sign, I'm sorry to say, of the dumpster pools.
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