Category: Albuquerque

Route 66

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
Up in the air, Junior Birdman.

When it’s 66 degrees in February — 66! — you get the hell out of the house, chores be damned.

There was all manner of human-power transportation going on out there this afternoon. People cycling. People running. People walking. People walking dogs. Big people carrying little people.

You are cleared for landing on runway … well, actually, it’s a trail, but go ahead, put ‘er down.

And people flying. Not in airplanes, or like Superman, but still.

I noticed the hang gliders drifting around the Sandia foothills as I rolled away from El Rancho Pendejo, but soon got engrossed in my own little outing and forgot all about them until I was cresting a hill on the way home.

Zoom, there one was, right overhead, and if I’d had an actual camera with me instead of a phone, why, you’d be looking at a closeup of him right now.

Instead, you have to settle for this miserable phone shot of him preparing to land while his buddy continued to bank lazily overhead. I will never be smart.

But you knew that.

Bridge to nowhere

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
A would-be jumper snarled traffic for a dozen hours yesterday, and a few Burqueños were irked at not being able to motor along I-40 at 25 mph above the limit as per usual.

Now and then I wonder whether we ever should have come down out of the trees.

Of course, if we were still up there, a certain subset of the species would probably still be inclined to shout, “Jump! Jump! Jump!” at anyone who was having a rough day.

That’s what was going on at Interstate 40 and Louisiana yesterday, according to the Duke City cops.

A would-be jumper had law enforcement and traffic tied up for the better part of quite some time on Super Bowl Sunday, and apparently not enough of the spectators had been to church yet because their prayers seemed wildly off base.

APD spokesman Simon Drobik told the Albuquerque Journal that efforts to talk the man off the overpass were hindered by drivers shouting “Jump!” and “Kill yourself!” as they motored happily along.

“Any ground that we can take, it just gets taken back immediately when somebody does that,” Drobik said. “It’s very disheartening.”

Well, at least they weren’t shooting at him. Keep hope alive.

Making tracks

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Yesterday kind of got away from me somehow. It never really did warm up as advertised. But I finally got out for a short spin, and for laughs I took a Shimano CM-1000 along for the ride.

These trails start two blocks (!) from El Rancho Pendejo, as part of the Casa Grande Linear Park, and you can take them south to within eyeshot of I-40.

They tend to crowd up pretty thick on weekends, but I must have hit the sweet spot, because there weren’t all that many other folks out and about.

The recording of the Orchestrion, a mechanical street organ at The Hague (not the album/concept by Pat Metheny), is by RTB45 at www.freesound.org.