Travel
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The bicycle bug has bitten my brother. Years after his wife bought him a bicycle for a birthday present, he started to ride the bike in earnest over this past summer, including regularly pedaling ten miles, each way, to work.
This Saturday, he and I rode twenty-two miles together in Costa Mesa, California, to benefit the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. The ride was a milestone for both of us. It was his first organized ride, and his first single ride longer than ten miles. And it was the first organized ride where I didn’t ride for pie or beer.
Riding for Family at Two Wheels, One Planet
As skeptical as I am of these charity rides, I rode for family. Not only did my brother and I ride together, our mother has had breast cancer twice, most recently in 2011, and she benefitted both times in no small part due to early detection. Last year, when the Susan G. Komen Foundation withheld funding from Planned Parenthood, as a way of punishing the organization for its family planning efforts, I was furious. A significant number of poor and uninsured women get breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood, and shortening the lives of adult women to protect the unborn seems counter to what I regard as “Christian values.” I swore I wouldn’t give a penny to that organization, and it soured me on similar breast cancer events. But I got over that since my brother was really excited about the ride, decking himself out in pink, and both my mom and dad, sister-in-law, and nephew came to meet us at the finish line. Also, this ride benefitted a different organization anyway.
The ride itself was very pleasant. We started from the Two Wheels, One Planet bike shop in Costa Mesa, and rode on two very nice multiuse trails, one around the Newport Bay and the other along the San Diego Creek.
Pedaling in Pink
Shipping one of my bikes seemed impractical so I rented one from Bicycle John’s, just a few miles from the Burbank airport. It was a neat little road bike: a steel Serotta frame with a mix of lightweight Ultegra and DuraAce components. Beautiful!
Why ship when you can rent?
Because my suitcase was getting full, I left my pedals and bike shoes at home and opted to ride with a set of track pedals and Converse high-tops. It kept me from breaking away since I couldn’t get good sprint going, but that meant I could escort my brother throughout the entire route. And he could keep up.
We finished about 100 minutes after we started. As I mentioned, the ride was a bit slow, averaging just under 13 miles per hour, but we made good time because we were on bicycle paths without stop signs and traffic signals. Flat rides, as this one was, can be both easy and difficult. Sure, it’s nice not to climb hills all day, but for every uphill, there’s usually a downhill, and that’s always nice. Also, climbing helps raise my heart rate, helping to sprint on flat terrain. If I maintain an even effort throughout a ride, my body won’t bother expend more than that effort.
My brother and my nephew at the finish line outside of Two Wheels, One Planet.
At the finish, our family was there waiting for us. Not having my same “experience level” with organized rides, my brother didn’t attack the pizza, beer, and snack table as I did. We both did spend an hour browsing the wares inside the bike shop and watching people win prizes as our raffle-ticket numbers were never called. But what can you do? It’s family.
This past weekend was the tenth-annual Gonerfest in Memphis, Tennessee. It was a whirlwind festival of about thirty rock ‘n’ roll bands, over a sixty-hour period, from near (Memphis and New Orleans) and far (Australia and France). We first went to Gonerfest in 2011 but missed last year’s because I was visiting family in California.
Guitar Wolf hangs at Goner Records just before Gonerfest X.
Memphis really stood up to a second visit, especially since we stayed in Midtown instead of the downtown riverfront area. It’s much more residential area and compact. Although we rented a car, none of our trips were more than two miles long, which is perfect for a bike share system, if you ask me.
As with any trip outside of New York City, there is a degree of culture shock. On this trip, all of that shock revolved around smoke. First, there was plenty of smoking in the bars. For almost my entire adult life, smoking in bars has been illegal where I lived. The statewide ban passed in California in 1998, and five years later, New York City followed suit. For me, second-hand smoke is something they do in movies. Second, if you can find an outdoor spot without smoking, there often is a smoker nearby because everyone in Memphis is mad about BBQ. By the end of the weekend, my clothes and suitcase smelled like an unholy combination of tobacco and hickory, which, if you think about it, really encapsulate a lot of Southern culture. There was a third form of smoke. While seeing a few bands at the festival’s night club. There were a few bands who used smoke machines. I know those things don’t actually use smoke, but since I don’t see too many live shows anymore, the effect was novel nonetheless.
Also on this visit, Memphis reminded me a lot of Portland, Oregon. Although it seems like deprecatory opinions about Portland are widespread today, my initial impression of Portland has been overall positive. Portlanders take a few things very seriously—music, coffee, beer, and nightlife—and it seemed like Memphis treasured a lot of those same things.
Anything worth eating is worth overeating.
In my mind, I was in a Southern version of Portland because of the prevalence music scene and its nightlife. Granted, I was visiting for a music festival with people from all over the place, but it seemed like Gonerfest was more for visitors like us. The locals, however, were still playing plenty of shows during the Gonerfest shows, and they would even complement the festival by continuing to play before and after those shows. For example, immediately after the Saturday afternoon show, a pickup truck pulled up to the venue’s parking lot and inside the truck bed was a four-piece band playing a set. After about ten minutes, they drove off as they continued to play. A moment later, another band began playing in the parking lot of the strip mall across the street. And if that isn’t enough music for you, there were plenty of after-hours shows that would start after the Gonerfest shows and end before daybreak. One flyer announced such an after-hours show with doors opening at 2:00 AM. At my age, shows like that just seem impossible.
Bonerfest : Gonerfest :: Slamdance : Sundance
Memphis might not yet match Portland in terms of beer and coffee yet, although, there is a great coffee shop downtown that recently opened with terrific cold brew and an outstanding beer selection. But instead of fixating on coffee and beer, let’s substitute BBQ and soul food for that. BBQ used to be a rarity for New Yorkers, but that’s not the case anymore. However, for my friends from Santa Barbara, I can understand why they felt they needed to eat BBQ for every meal. I ate at one place and overate at another. I missed out on the spicy fried chicken and the biscuit sandwiches.
You might be asking, “if you had such a great time, where are the pictures?” Good question. Upon arriving at the airport and leaving all the magic Memphis had to offer, I realized that I had left my point-and-shoot camera in the rental car. Because our flight left at 6:00 AM on a Sunday, we were forced to use the after-hours drop system to return the car. I had locked the car doors and dropped the keys in the lock box before I realized that the camera was in the car. The rental office didn’t open until 6:00 AM. We’ve been calling the rental car office, but they said they couldn’t find it. In retrospect, I just should have missed or changed my flight and waited until they opened to get my camera. By now, it’s probably in a Memphis pawn shop or being fenced on eBay like this one clearly is.
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It’s probably not fair to call Memphis “The Portland of the South,” especially since Tennessee already has a Portland, thank you very much. That Portland is near Nashville, a city that constantly compares itself to other places. Consider some of Nashville’s nicknames: “Nash Vegas,” “A Country Boy’s Hollywood,” and most notably “the Athens of the South.” Tell that last one to Athens, Georgia, which was in the South the last time I checked. And a recent article made me think of it as a honky-tonk version of San Francisco. Enough already!
Guess where I ate today?
Earlier today, Larry Harnisch posted some clippings from the Los Angeles Times published sixty years ago today. As a transportation wonk, the headline “L.A. Welcomes Harbor Freeway Extension With Four-Block Traffic Jam” caught my eye as it succinctly summarizes the cycle of freeway expansion–congestion–more expansion—more congestion.
Accompanying that article, however, is a brief wire report of an assemblyman, Charles Chapel, questioning the wisdom of using money for freeway construction.
Chapel says, “Freeways, instead of solving our problem, are contributing to it.” He even advocates for mass transit options, “I don’t care what kind– elevated or surface or subway or what.” As cities, including Los Angeles, consider multimodal transportation solutions, his views seem prescient today.
On Friday, the Dodgers six-game winning streak came to an end. And it was a remarkable loss. As beat writer Ken Gurnick wrote:
this was a hideous loss of historic proportions, a 16–1 pulverization by the Phillies for the most lopsided home loss by a Dodgers team since 1947 in Brooklyn (19–2 to the Giants) and the largest margin of defeat since 2001 (20–1 to the Cubs).
An even more remarkable fact was that my brother and I were at the 2001 game versus the Cubs…in Chicago. It remains our only trip to Wrigley Field. As sons of an airline employee, we used to be able to fly for almost free. During the 2000 and 2001 baseball seasons, we flew to a few ballparks on overnight flights and often returning the same day on the last flight of the day to Southern California.
On May 4, 2001, we took a red-eye flight from LA to Chicago, arriving super early for a Dodgers-Cubs game. After breakfast and some brief window shopping, we headed to Wrigley field. Both teams, as I remember, were playing well and were probably in first place in their divisions. (They were.) But, as any serious baseball fan knows, your positions in the standings in early May means nothing because there’s still more than 130 games of baseball to play. We expected two overachieving teams to play a good game. We were wrong. Instead, we witnessed the Cubs pummell the Dodgers, 20–1. The Dodgers’ only run came off a Gary Sheffield double. Since we arrived at the ballpark early, we saw the Dodgers take batting practices, and he was hitting shots over the brick wall. No one else stood out in my mind, and that now seemed like a prescient analysis of what was to come.
Because we were dressed in Dodgers gear, we were heckled. Nonstop. A notable taunt was “Hey, Hollywood!” We deserved it. We were in enemy territory. Our team was getting killed. And because we had no sense of “springtime” in Chicago, we were underdressed, wearing shorts on a drizzly day that seemed much colder than the afternoon temperature of 57°.
My brother and I had a strict policy of not leaving a game early. However, we agreed that if the Cubs scored twenty runs, we’re outta here. But we came back only to see that the relief pitcher for the bottom of the eighth inning was utility infielder Chris Donnells, who threw three pitches to end an eighth-run eighth inning.
This morning, my brother reminded me of that game. It was bad. But it was also great and not only in how bad it was. Thanks, brother, for the reminder.
After spending over six hours at Louisville Airport, waiting to catch a flight to Newark, I get this tweet:
Granted my cancellation was due to a mechanical issue, not weather, but it would have been nice to have known about this waiver before waking up at 4:00 AM.
Veda Shook, president of the International Flight Attendant union, at a House aviation subcommittee hearing last Thursday, debating the fate of the Transportation Security Administration:
We believe that any return to a bottom-line-driven system that puts security second to profits would be a reckless and unjustified regression from T.S.A.’s mission to protect our skies.
After September 11, 2001, I always wondered how long it would take before the US would tolerate farming out airport security to private contractors. After hearing about http://www.wewontfly.com, which has all the makings of an AstroTurf lobbying group, I imagine that with a coordinated public relations campaign, it will be soon, just over ten years after that monumental breach in airport security.
I’ll admit that the TSA isn’t the most well-run and customer friendly operation in the country. Yes, their agents have stolen some property. Yes, they miss some contraband. Yes, they have installed invasive and expensive body scanners. And yes, they might even grope people. Call me a little paranoid, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this was part of a public relations smear campaign to put airport security into the grubby paws of private contractors.
But will the private sector do a better job? I doubt it. For one thing, it’s not like the agents at Argenbright were handing out smiles and candy at the security checkpoints when they were screening people at airports during my frequent flying days in the 1990s. Also, in these days of airline staff cut down to the bone and working for paltry wages, it’s not like you’re getting much love from the airline, and the last time I checked, that’s still a private sector industry. No, private contractors are just going to hire the cheapest staff they can find, give their staff minutes of training, and secure contracts so they aren’t held accountable in a “competitive” industry."
Nationalizing airport security in 2001 was done as an emergency measure. It needed to be done to remove the incompetent contractors that allowed the coordinated hijackings. It needed to be done to restore a semblance of security to save American aviation. It needed to be done to ensure it was done with some centralized oversight. It’s possible that those concerns aren’t valid anymore, but I wonder how many of these security contractors were the same ones telling us to “Never Forget” about that horrible day, and likely capitalizing on newly minted security contracts. Now, it looks we are supposed to forget how airport security failed us when it was in the hands of the lowest bidder.
Recently, Sarah received a free companion certificate on Amtrak, The certificate is good for either a one-way or a roundtrip journey, in coach, on just about everywhere Amtrak goes in the United States. There are some blackout dates, however, usually around the major holidays, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day.
We wanted to use the certificate on an upcoming trip. We would travel from New York to Chicago and then return from Washington, DC to New York, with a bunch of other travel in between. One could travel this way by buying two separate one-way tickets. But since we had the certificate, it would make sense to try to redeem it as an open-jaw.
Open jaws are one-way trips combined on a single ticket with a common point of travel. We have taken advantage of the open-jaw rule as recently as last Christmas. I had a free roundtrip ticket on United or Continental Airlines for two passengers within the contiguous forty-eight states. Our holiday plans were to leave New York for Paducah, Kentucky and then onto Los Angeles before returning to New York. The rules for the certificate did not allow for stopovers but did allow for an open-jaw. The open-jaw allowed us to travel from A-B and then C-A, specifically New York (A) to Paducah (B), and Los Angeles (C) to New York (A). We just needed to find our own way from Kentucky to Los Angeles.
For the upcoming Amtrak trip, we were only going to use the companion certificate for the longest and most expensive segment of our travel: Chicago to New York. Then I remembered that for most airlines an open-jaw often counts as a roundtrip. Would Amtrak’s rules allow it? After making a reservation over the phone, we were able to book the open-jaw as a roundtrip from New York (A) to Chicago (B) and then from Washington (C) to New York (A).
The usual conditions apply with this certificate, including needing to visit an Amtrak ticket office to pay for the tickets and redeem the certificate. However, if you’re planning on taking a somewhat complex journey and have one of these certificates, don’t settle for a one-way trip and see if an open jaw can benefit you.
At last there will be a toll road in Los Angeles. But it’s not like the freeways will stop being free.
In today’s New York Times, an article implies that Los Angelenos will have to give up their freeways. But that’s not the case at all. People who don’t want to pay for driving on a public road can still drive toll-free. The new toll lanes actually benefit solo drivers, at the expense of those who car pool.
The new toll only applies to drivers using the Express lanes. These lanes were previously only for high-occupancy vehicles (a.k.a. carpools), which solo drivers could never use without a pretty hefty fine. The new Fastrack lanes will now allow solo drivers to use these less-congested lanes, but they will have to pay for the privilege. High occupancy vehicles, such as carpools and busses, still get to use the lanes for free. Except now, single-occupancy vehicles can buy their way into these lanes. If such drivers don’t want to use them, they will have to use the general-use lanes or find their way into high-occupancy vehichle.
The only mandatory charge is for the FasTrak transponder. No matter how many people are in the car, all drivers using the Express lane must have a FasTrak transponder, which costs $40, and a billing account. It impacts car pool drivers more than solo drivers in general because they must now opt-in to the FasTrak program, where they did not before. Solo drivers can still opt-out by using the general-use lanes.
The new Express lanes do in fact take the free out of the freeway, but not for the single-occupancy vehicles that are the biggest cause of urban congestion. Those cars are still free to clog up the roads or, if they wish, buy their way on to roads reserved for vehicles that actually move people more efficiently and deserve refuge from the solo driver.
