With another cycling season upon us, it was time for another ride to Montauk. This is the seventh time, either through the 5BBC’s Montauk Century or on Glen’s Ride to Montauk, that I’ve pedaled to Montauk. And, as I’ve done since 2013, I rode from home.
Greenpoint to Montauk
This year was a bit different in a few ways:
The ride was earlier than usual. The 5BBC used to run their ride on the weekend before Memorial Day weekend, but Glen’s ride was always later in the summer. Word on the street is that he did so to take advantage of the longer day and to avoid the rainy climate and cold temperatures that linger over the east end of Long Island well after Memorial Day weekend. But with all the battles he’s faced with the East End towns of Southampton and East Hampton, he has undoubtedly had to make all kinds of concessions, such as capping the ride at 1,500 participants and scheduling it outside of the summer shitshow season.
For obvious reasons, I didn’t start from Long Island City as I did in 2013 and 2014. This year, I started on the other side of the Newtown Creek, in Greenpoint, which put me about 0.6 miles closer to Montauk than starting from my former home on Vernon Boulevard.
I had a riding partner for almost the entire ride. I rode the century course a couple of times with Sarah, and in 2012, I rode with Colin, a fellow cycling and softball enthusiast. But this year, I rode with Andre for the 150-mile course. Over the years, Andre has accompanied me on some rides and has also helped me mark the first forty miles of the course. This year, he and I rode together from Greenpoint all the way to Amagansett, after which he turned on the after burners and got to Montauk about ten minutes ahead of me.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s common for it to rain on Long Island throughout May. The first year I rode the Montauk Century, it was like the first time you do a hard drug. It was perfect! It was one of those rare May days when the temperature is about 80°, and a gentle southwest wind was at our backs all the way to Montauk.
But, like doing any hard drug, on the subsequent times you do it, it’s never as good as the first time. Each year after that, there was always something wrong. For example, in 2009, Sarah, her friend Mindy, and I rode the 100-mile route from Babylon, but it rained the entire day. And it wasn’t just an isolated shower, it was a menacing drizzle with very cold temperatures. I remember getting to the rest stop in Westhampton Beach, about half way through the ride, unable to feel my feet.
This year’s ride, scheduled before Memorial Day weekend on May 16, saw a sizable storm hit us as we rode through Islip. The rain was heavy enough to impair visibility. Andre and I waited it out under a highway overpass for a few minutes and then, as the rain increased, we took shelter inside a gas station with three other cyclists. We waited out the rain for about an hour an a half, which jeopardized our finishing the ride before 6:00 PM.
Once the rain subsided, Andre and I hustled through the rest of the course. We also shaved off about ten miles of riding by skipping “Glen’s flourishes” in Oakdale, Southampton, and Wainscott. Instead, we stayed on the Montauk Highway through those towns to make up for lost time. We did, however, stop to get a lobster roll at Tully’s in Hampton Bays, as I did last year, but we sat inside because it was too cold for outdoor dining.
We stayed together, pedaling between 17-19 MPH, until we got Amagansett. It was there at the final rest stop, Andre gulped down three slices of pie, whereas I only had one slice of blueberry crisp, enabling him to power through the last fifteen miles of the course about ten minutes ahead of me. Another reason I fell behind was that I followed the prescribed detour around the town of Montauk. Our ride happened on the same weekend as the annual music festival in town, and we were told to take a slight detour to avoid the attendant congestion. I think I might have been one of a few riders who actually took the detour, which was great because it was less congested than the main road, and also had some hard pack at the end before the road ended at the Montauk Highway. (Like with rolling hills, I have become a fan of hard pack.)
Two crazy guys biked from Greenpoint to Montauk.
We arrived, at a lakeside restaurant northeast of town, at about 5:30 PM. The shortcuts saved us about 11 miles—because we had only pedaled 139 miles instead of the more impressive sounding 150—but insured we arrived at the finish in time for a shower and hot food.
I have to admit that I felt a bit cheap afterwards that I skipped some of the more scenic parts of the ride in order to finish the ride by 6:00 PM. But for the first time since I’ve ridden the NYC-Montauk route, I didn’t feel like I needed to sleep for days.
Yes, I am aware that this site went all of April neglected like a dissertation chapter and a pile of ungraded, poorly written undergraduate. I didn’t get to update it much because I’ve been preoccupied with a few things:
Yes, I did get that MacBook Pro with Retina display. As you know, I decided the newly updated 13-inch model was the best computer for me…as long as we define “a computer” as a Mac portable. That turned out to be a curse because the computer and I have been inseparable since then. As is common at this time of the year, there’s a lot of work to do. A lot!
I made two, two, two trips to California in April for a couple of weddings. Despite being very sour on flying recently, I kind of enjoyed getting back in the air. If one can be in “mid-season” form going to an airport and boarding a plane, I was in it. Personally, I hate taking taxis to an airport, especially by myself, because of the disproportionate cost in traveling five miles to, say LaGuardia, compared to flying 2,500 miles to Los Angeles. And the chances of crashing are much higher in an Uber on the BQE than sitting in a Boeing six miles above the ground. Thus, I prefer to save some bucks and go multi-modal, using the subway and bus. That results in some just-in-time arrivals, which I don’t mind because it spares me from the gate lice. My friend Mark, a multimillion-miler on American Airlines, concurs with this approach.
Of course, the trips themselves were fun, too. I saw a lot of people, including lots of friends and family. I ate King Crab on a pier in Santa Barbara and fried scallops in the warehouse district southeast of DTLA. I even got to go on a bike ride.
And the weddings were great, too. I realized that, despite my earlier reservations, I like going to weddings. It helps that I don’t have to hear Sarah’s friends criticize every aspect of their own friend’s wedding, such as “can you believe this food?” and “this has to be the worst one yet!” Also, since there’s no immiment threat of staging my own wedding, I don’t feel that sense of failed dread I had when I was a teenager riding in my friends’ cars before I had even had my learner’s permit.
The weather is finally nice enough to enjoy cycling. Aside from crashing my bike on East Third Street in late March, I have really enjoyed being out on a bike. That crash, which happened on my way from Brooklyn to NYU, was bad enough that since then I’ve been unable to fully bend my knee. I can extend it just fine so I can ride a bike as far as ninety miles with almost no pain, but tying my shoes has been an entirely different matter. March was an especially miserable month for bicycling, and we had to two rides shortened because of icy road conditions. However, in the last few weeks, we’ve stepped things up and have been riding 80-90 miles on a single weekend day.
It’s softball season. Softball really is like the mob. No matter how hard I try to get out, I can’t not play. The only possible ways I can see “getting out” is to relocate to a far-off, remote place where no one knows I ever played softball… or to die. I wound up on four teams again, although I have missed a lot of games to that nagging cycling injury and because of my other commitments. However, it’s nice being out there again doing something I’m relatively good doing.
Now that I’m becoming accustomed to this new pace, to carrying around a heavy backpack and a light sweater, I’m genuinely excited about breathing and such. No, seriously. Not only has it been a hard eight months, but over the winter, it literally hurt to breathe that bitter, icy air. I’ll settle for the occasional allergy attack.
Earlier today, registration opened up for Glen’s Pedal the West bicyling tour. The tour looks pretty impressive. It lasts five days in late September, which everyone knows is the best time of year to travel, and goes from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon. It’s a fully supported ride, including lodging, most meals, and transportation for bike and rider. It sounds like an awesome excuse to take a late-summer vacation, but sadly, the price is a little high for me. It costs $3000, in addition to airfare and the inevitable other odds-and-ends.
But $3,000 is not that bad for a tour of this scale for 57 cyclists. Consider that this year’s Ride to Montauk registration costs $195, as of today, plus $65 for the optional, but really useful, bike-and-rider return transportation from Montauk. That’s $260 for a single-day event with 1,500 riders cycling past a bunch of angry malcontents in the Hamptons.
Anyway, I’m confident that Glen will get a bunch of riders to register for his Pedal the West tour. Cyclists are, after all, a spendy bunch. For example, the upcoming Grand Fondo New York costs about $289, plus registration fee for a single-day ride that consistently sells out, likely because you get a jersey and a bottle of wine. And if you want to upgrade to the GFNY Plus package, which includes access to a VIP tent in Fort Lee, New Jersey, you’ll need to spend $1,900 (registration fee waived). Shelling nearly $2,000 for a single-day bike ride makes spending $3,000 for a five-day tour seem like a downright bargain.
Before you ask, no, I’m not riding the Grand Fondo New York. But if I were riding and were rich enough to afford the Plus-package, I would never spend $1,600 for an upgraded riding experience. Because, as spendy as my fellow cyclists are, I’m a comparative miser, and $1,600 in my mind can buy a pretty nice bike.
Disclosure: Although I have ridden the Ride to Montauk in past years for free, I’ve done so in exchange for route marking services. The opinions expressed here are my own and were triggered only by the public announcement of the Pedal the West tour. I don’t think Glen even knows who I am.
Remember how I seemed pretty cool to the whole Apple Watch thing? As certain as I was that this new piece of technology would be expertly designed, well-constructed, and very user-friendly, I could not figure out what function it would serve that my iPhone wasn’t already doing. After all, the wonderful thing about a smartphone is that it is the computer you always have with you. Reaching for it, I reasoned, will always be easy.
Or so I thought before going on a bike ride today.
Last Saturday, I had planned to ride to the Panera Bread in Northvale, New Jersey with the cycle club.1 But, bitterly cold temperatures, icy roads, and the closure of the George Washington Bridge pedestrian/bicycle path kept me off the bike for the entire weekend. Feeling restless, I rode to my various jobs this entire week, which I had not been able to do since mid-December, and, today, I scheduled a makeup ride to Northvale to eat that long-awaited soup–and–half-sandwich combo.
A “Bicycle for the Mind” for the Bicycle
It was on today’s ride through Bergen and Rockland counties that I recognized the utility of a smartwatch. I could care less about monitoring my heart rate, my speed/cadence, and elevation gain during a ride. At one time, that mattered to me, but in the last few years, I don’t consider it as important. No, as someone who likes to explore new routes and brewery tap rooms, it’s really important to not end up horribly lost. An Apple Watch would actually be really helpful as a navigation aid because, even on group rides, we often have to stop to find directions.
Decades ago, Steve Jobs called the computer a “bicycle for our minds” because he saw it as a tool that can elevate the human mind above its natural ability. Similarly, applications elevate the computer from a machine to a tool. What made iPhone different from all other smartphones and PDAs before it were all the apps developed for it. Although I never had a smartphone before getting an iPhone 3G in 2008, I did have a series of Palm PDAs. Those were useful personal organizers and decent notetakers. However, each one was really limited—not because it had a crummy screen or required a stylus to use, but because it simply didn’t do very much. Today, I have about 200 apps loaded on my iPhone, including task managers, an array of readers and writing apps, and apps for dozens of other functions. I may not regularly use all 200+ apps, but having them gives my iPhone purpose, especially compared to the PDAs and smartphones of yore.
For the past two cycling seasons, I’ve been using a Garmin Edge 200 on my long bike rides. I can track my speed, my distance pedaled, the time of day, and if I load my course before heading out on the road, which I almost always do, I can follow a route. I know I could use my iPhone with some app, such as Strava or Ride with GPS, to function like my Garmin, but there are a lot of drawbacks to this. On a warm day, the battery can power my Garmin for over 12 hours; the battery inside my iPhone might not. If I get caught in a rainstorm, my Garmin is water-resistant, whereas soaking my iPhone would be devastating. And, the plastic-and-rubber Garmin sits on my handlebars taking various shocks and shakes from our bumpy potholed roads: I’m not certain my glass-and-metal iPhone would fare as well.
The Garmin is only useful because of the various websites that communicate with the device. The stock Garmin Connect is fine for beginners, but the third-party apps are much, much better. For example, Strava is for those who obsess over every esoteric metric imaginable, and Ride with GPS is for those who love to plan routes, as I do. In due time, I can see the latter two making apps for the Apple Watch, just as they do for iPhone and other smartphones. Their smartwatch apps could communicate with an iPhone, securely stored in a Ziploc bag and safely tucked away in a jersey pockets. In fact, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that both of these companies have at least considered developing for the Apple Watch. Sorry, Garmin.
Free to Escape
The great thing about going on a long bike ride is to escape life for a few hours, which is why I rode a lot during the latter half of 2014. Though I keep my phone stashed away in my pocket during a ride, I can still hear it dinging and feel it buzzing whenever I get a new message, phone call, or some other notification. Today, I heard a series of alerts as I pedaled through the relatively quiet suburban streets of Bergen County, New Jersey. I tried to put those distractions out of my mind, but as a product of the digital age, I simply could not. As soon as I encountered a red traffic signal, I hurriedly pulled out my phone to check who had been messaging and calling me. Fortunately, none of the callers had anything pressing to tell me, but right there, I recognized the value of having a smartwatch. Instead of kvetching about "who could be trying to reach me right now," I could have just glanced at my watch, saw that it was a doting relative, and continued on my way.
Part of me is bothered that I have cannot have a few hours on a bike without being interrupted, but I realized today that a smartwatch is a piece of technology that allows me to do what I want without being disconnected. Twenty years ago, when mobile phones started to become a thing, one of my mentors said that she would never carry a cell phone because she wanted to preserve the freedom from always being reachable. It was a sensible argument at the time. A few years later, after I got some Nokia candy-bar phone, I realized that the mobile phone didn’t tether me to work or other obligations, as I had feared. Instead, it allowed me to do whatever I wanted—and to go wherever I wanted. I didn’t have to sit by the phone waiting for someone to call me or, worse even, to keep calling my answering machine at home checking for any incoming messages.2 With a cell phone, I gained a new freedom from my landline telephone.
Maybe that’s what this new piece of technology—the Apple Watch with its plethora of apps and seamless connection to an iPhone—is supposed to do: ever-so-slightly liberate us from our older devices, even if one of those devices is only about eight years old.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
It’s something we did last year, and I thought it was funny that we were biking all that way just to eat at a ubiquitous bakery chain. ↩
Kids today—who probably never use voicemail—must presumably consider the practice of calling your home answering machine to retrieve messages a positively antediluvian ritual. ↩
A few days ago, the New York Cycle Club opened registration for its spring programs, including the SIG and the STS. The programs are the crown jewels of the club. The volunteer leaders run an instructional series, known as a SIG, for novice cyclists on how to improve their riding skills and a separate training series, known as an STS, to help more experienced types get in shape for the season. As a “B” rider, I did the B-SIG back in 2008, and have done the B-STS over the last two years…and again this year. If you find this interesting and want to signup, you’re probably too late. They fill up fast.
In addition to each SIG and STS at A, B, and C levels, the club president has added a new-for-2015 R-STS series for randonneurs. If you know me, you know I like to ride my bike for long distances and extended periods of time, but randonneurs are a whole different breed. It’s one thing to ride for twelve hours, from dawn to dusk, but it’s another to ride a 300K for twenty hours, mostly in the dark. That’s not for me, even if the final ride in May is only 200 km, because I know I’ll be beating myself for not having done a 600K in August.
But do you know what would be more to my liking? A Beer-SIG!
Although one club member led an “Autumn Leaves and Seasonal Hops” series, a Beer-SIG would probaby never happen as an official club series, but let’s make believe. It’s Friday the 13th; it’s a February day with a temperature of about 8° F outside; and tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. I say “bleh” to all these things. Instead, let’s imagine some places we would ride our bikes, in warm or even hot weather, with the intent to visit brewery tap rooms within our region.
Vault Brewing. This brewery is in the quaint town of Yardley, Pennsylvania in an old bank vault. It’s made for an excellent finishing point on the ride when I had a bad allergic reaction in October. It could also be a great lunch stop on the Cheesesteak Century because not only do they serve food, they serve a four-ounce pour for $2 to power you through the remaining thirty-five miles to Philadelphia.
Second Story Brewing. There’s a ton of places to choose in Philadelphia, but this one was great because it was big, they let us bring our bikes inside, and it was a short ride to SEPTA at Market East Jefferson Station.
Two Roads Brewing. We stopped here in November on club’s ride to New Haven, but it’s easy enough to make a ride that ends at this Statford, Connecticut–brewery. For one thing, the Metro North station is only about a mile away.
Crooked Ladder Brewery. Located in Riverhead, this was supposed to be the finishing point for the North Shore ride that I led in November. It’s easy enough to get home, if one doesn’t mind taking the 6:45 PM train home and getting back to NYC around 9:00 PM.
Greenport Harbor. One of my dream rides is a midseason Greenpoint-to-Greenport ride. It would be about 110 miles, and it would rule!
Blind Bat Brewery. This brewery is moving to Smithtown, Long Island from Centerport, and could be part of a short ride from Jamaica or a longer loop from Port Jefferson or something.
Captain Lawrence Brewing. Located in Elmsford, New York, it is sadly not near any train station, but it is about a mile or so away from junction of the North and South County Trails in Westchester County. From there, one can do a hilly five-mile ride to either Tarrytown or White Plains. Or one could head south on the trail and finish at the Bronx Brewery and take the 6 train home.
And these are just the ones that immediately come to mind.
Last night, we had our first significant snowfall of 2015. I had ridden my bike out and left it parked outside. This is what it looked like as I was preparing to head to bed.
My California adventure on two wheels continued unabated in the New Year because I have done something a bit foolish.
I got a used road bike off Craigslist.
Like the Green Monster I rode with the LA Wheelmen after Christmas, this bike is also from the late 1990s. Curiously, the late 1990s was about the time I started riding a bike more than a few miles at a time because gas prices spiked to the then elevated $2.00 per gallon, and I was unhappy paying more than $20 per week to fill up my tank.1
There’s a bit of lunacy in getting a bike that will sit in California while I live in New York, but I suspect that I will be coming out west a bit more frequently in the coming months. If that’s true, it might make sense to keep a bike to ride out there rather than renting one from time to time, as I’ve been doing. Also, my dad said he was thinking of riding it.
As soon as I got the bike, I made some minor though necessary repairs such as replacing a worn-out front tire, truing a rear wheel, and buying new bar tape. The chain could have used a thorough cleaning, but I was itching to get on the road the next morning and figured that the drivetrain might need more work than I was willing to do after getting it to my parent’s place. Instead, I said, “fuck it!” and rode to Oxnard on New Year’s Eve.
I rode the bike again on January 2. I had initially planned to ride a century from Orange County, where I was visiting my cousin for the day, to San Diego. But after talking with my family, I skipped that idea and decided to ride north towards Los Angeles.
My planned route seemed easy enough. I would start in Anaheim and head towards the San Gabriel River Bikeway, where I would proceed south towards Long Beach.
From there, I would ride along the beach and connect to the Los Angeles River Bikeway and head north towards Maywood and then onto surface streets to downtown LA.
If you’ve tried to ride this route, between the San Gabriel River and LA River Bikeways along Long Beach, you’ll find that it’s not very easy to connect from one bikeway to another. The bicycling layer on Google Maps suggests that it’s just a matter of keeping the beach on your left, but it’s not quite that easy.
When I finally found the bikeway on the beach, I found that the bikeway was closed due to construction, and there was no marked detour to continue. As I backtracked, I noticed another cyclist also riding to the closed section. As I looked back to see his course of action, figuring he might know something I didn’t, I ran into a curb and went over the handlebars. Ouch!
Fortunately, I was not seriously injured besides a sore shoulder and a bruised ego. After gathering myself for a few minutes, I got back on the bike and proceeded to Ocean Avenue in search of this elusive Los Angeles River Bikeway.
The other blow to my cycling adventure came the day after riding from Orange County to downtown Los Angeles: I caught a pretty bad cold. That and the residual soreness from the crash basically kept me off the bike for the rest of the trip. I skipped two rides that I had wanted to do before heading back east. Instead of coming with a hundred-plus miles ridden for the new year, I returned to New York, where there is snow on the ground and temperatures that will not reach above freezing this weekend. I will also be nursing a tender left shoulder and a crushing sinus headache.
As I’ve said before, riding a bike sometimes requires a bit of insanity. I’ll be needing some of that to ride again in the coming days.
It’s funny how gas prices, not adjusting for inflation, are about that price again at the beginning of 2015. ↩
Until I was in high school, all I knew of Santa Barbara was that Michael Jackson and Ronald Reagan both lived near there and that it was the setting for a long-running soap opera. But one day, in my junior year of high school, a friend and I drove from the Antelope Valley to Santa Barbara for a day trip out of the high desert. Once we arrived, I was struck by remarkable differences in topography—desert versus beach, 2000-foot elevation versus sea level—but also by the drive. It was a much longer drive than I had done to that point: my parents didn’t really drive very far so most of our car trips were about an hour long and almost all contained within Los Angeles county. Driving over 100 miles, through two different counties, seemed to me then as extraordinary as biking 100 miles across state lines seems to me today.
A good portion of the drive from the desert to the sea is on CA-126, between Santa Clarita and Ventura. That road has undergone a lot changes since the mid-1990s. The thirty-two mile stretch between Santa Clarita and Santa Paula was more or less a one-lane country road, but today, it is a nice two-lane byway with a wide shoulder. Over the years, I noticed cyclists riding on this road, and at the time, it seemed crazy that someone would ride a bike that far, but as you know, I’m that crazy now.
On New Year’s Day, I hitched a ride with my mom to Santa Clarita and then biked fifty-odd miles to Oxnard for a friend’s New Year’s Eve dinner.
It’s been atypically cold here in Southern California and on New Year’s Eve, it was downright chilly and windy. Fortunately, that wind was at my back for almost the entire ride and, to make matters even better, the ride is almost entirely downhill.
My first stop was in Fillmore: a town that I kind of hated driving through because it forced me to slow to a pokey 40 MPH and even stop when I would inevitably come across a red traffic light. But on a bike, Fillmore was an oasis.
There are a bunch of places to stop and eat there, although I am convinced I picked the one that was the most expensive serving the most forgettable food. After eating a BLT, I headed back out on the country roads of eastern Ventura country, surrounded by citrus groves in full bloom. For whatever reason, as I rode through those roads, I kept thinking of two quintessential movies about the roots of modern Southern California: Chinatown and There Will Be Blood.
The next town on the route was Santa Paula, where the CA-126 turns into a freeway. At that point, I did something I had never done before: I rode through the town of Santa Paula, where I found another decommissioned gas station. This one however was not abandoned by adapted into an auto repair shop.
The rest of the ride was along Telegraph Road all the way to Ventura. The road runs parallel to the old railroad that ran through the Santa Clara River Valley, suggesting the strong historical connection between railroads and telegraph lines.
I arrived in Oxnard for a dinner with a few friends, and then to cap off the night, took a train to Santa Barbara for a New Year’s Eve party with some very old friends to, as they say, ring in the new year.
http://instagram.com/p/xT460BEJ2z/
Santa Barbara obviously means a lot more to me today—both good and bad—than it did twenty years ago, when I associated it with two 1980s American icons and a soap opera.
Happy New Year!
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
Aside from some basic commuting-by-bicycle, I have been off my road bike for three weeks since I rode to Philadelphia with the New York Cycle Club, and as I’m still visiting family in Southern California for another week, I felt the urgent need to get on a bike. On Sunday, I rode with the LA Wheelmen from Alhambra Park east to the city of Upland for a seventy-mile loop to burn off some of my “holiday excess.”
The name of the LA Wheelmen club was a bit of a misnomer: we didn’t ride at all within the LA city limits, and there was more than one woman who rode with us. (Please note that I’m being sarcastic here.) The ride, called Santa Anita Canyon, was also misnamed as I don’t remember us stopping to admire a canyon. We did however stop at a Carl’s Jr for lunch, halfway through the ride, although it did seem like a long way to ride for an All-Natural Burger.
Normally, I hate eating a heavy lunch on a ride because we usually have hills to climb shortly afterward. But this club did things right. After lunch, we rode more or less downhill for the entire second half of the ride.
In order to ride out here, I rented a green, 1990s-era Cannondale touring bike with finger tip shifters from Spinlister that I’ve dubbed the “Green Monster.” This bike is considerably heavier than my road bike, but it rides well, as you would expect from a touring bike. As I’m accustomed to riding a road bike, I had a some trouble adjusting to the 48t chainring. While it happens to be the same sized chainring as my single-speed bike, I didn’t really appreciate the difference a 53t chainring makes when I want to go fast.
But this is December, and who cares if I can’t pedal a bike faster than 17 MPH. It was a treat to ride seventy miles on a balmy (for me) and chilly (for them) Sunday along the San Gabriel Mountains with temperatures in the lower 50s. There were some nice climbs and decent views but, sadly, no beer stops.
Another funny difference with this group was how obsessed this group was with riding centuries. Like one a week…even in December. (They save the double and triple centuries for the warmer months.) They were a nice pleasant group and invited me to ride their Kick Off Century on New Years Day, which I was tempted to ride but ultimately decided to skip.
Of course, as is my custom, after finishing my ride, I was in search of a burger and a beer. As I browsed Twitter, I saw that Grill Em All, a celebrated food truck serving heavy metal–themed burgers, was doing a chicken wing special.
But I learned that they no longer get around on four wheels. They have a permanent store in…of all places…Alhambra. That was a mile and a half from where the Wheelmen finished their ride. My brother and nephew, who picked me up in Alhambra, met me at Grill Em All for a post-ride meal.
Getting back to my parents’ house the next day was via a familiar way: commuter train.
Metrolink offers a pretty nice bike storage setup, allowing you to not only roll your bikes on board without a reservation but also to secure your bike with Velcro straps.
Riding out here with the group was a great way to test out bike riding in Southern California, and I look forward to doing more and more rides throughout my stay here.
A few years ago, when Instagram was becoming a thing and people started taking photos of the elegantly plated meals they had at restaurants, I remember reading a screed somewhere that criticized the practice. The author took issue with people using their smartphone cameras to snap blurry, heavily filtered, square photos of “blobs of food.” His rationale was that the image of the food alone didn’t communicate the excitement of the experience.
That spoke to me.
During a visit to Cooperstown in 2012, we stumbled into the dining room of the Council Rock Brewing. It was early October, and the brewery was commemorating Oktoberfest like any good beer supplier would do. Overwhelmed by the choices of beers available, I resorted to ordering a flight. At first, I was tempted to snap a photo of my flight which looked like an artist’s easel covered with several tawny pigments. But I resisted because that photo would not have captured the excited anticipation of sampling each brew. Instead, I posed for a snapshot.
Since then, it’s become somewhat of a theme for each time I get a flight at a brewery tap room. (What can I say? I like structure.)
Last year, I ordered a flight after a very hot, sixty-mile ride on Bastille Day from Poughkeepsie to Beacon via New Paltz. Although I look a little bit exhausted in the blurry photo, I was really excited to cap off a great ride with some delicious beer and kick off a great day in Beacon.
This year, I started to make a conscious effort to make these kinds of photos, as part of a series, especially when I buy a flight at the end of a bike ride.
For example, in October, I posed for a photo with a flight I got at The Vault Brewing in Yardley, Pennsylvania. If I don’t look like my usual content and composed self, it’s because I was suffering from an allergic reaction and was drowsy from a double-dose of Benadryl.
I was in slightly higher spirits carrying these beers in Patchogue at the Blue Point Brewery after riding there from Jamaica over Labor Day weekend.
And the following week, I posed with one glass from my flight at Greenport Harbor Brewing after riding to Orient on one of the greatest days of the year.
Last month, I had a fellow rider shoot a photo of me posing with a flight at Two Roads Brewing in Stratford, Connecticut, as part of our ride to New Haven.
Another fellow rider more or less recreated the October 2012 photo with this shot of me at the Green Growler in Croton-on-Hudson.
Even on occasions where I didn’t ride a bike to a brewery, I still posed with the flight. I did so at last week’s holiday party at Rockaway Brewing.
Speaking of the holidays, I am now in California for almost three weeks and this first week, I am spending it with my parents. We ventured to do some grocery shopping, and almost immediately, as if I were a computer programmed to do so, I found the tap room for Bravery Brewing, in Lancaster, California.
Twenty years ago, it seemed unthinkable to have a pretty solid brewery in the Antelope Valley. But I think, like an Irish pub and Chinese restaurant, any town worth a damn will also have a local brewery tap room.
And, of course, I’ll be there to order flight and get a photo of me excitedly waiting to try it.
