Where the skies are not cloudy all day (lately, anyway).
On Thursday the lads at Reincarnation had a look at Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster and told me she required no heroic lifesaving measures at this time. It’s a red-letter day when a geezer on a fixed income with an equally ancient rice grinder can escape a mechanic’s clutches for under a hundy.
Plus I managed 30 cycling miles — 15 after dropping the old gal off downtown and then cycling back home, and another 15 picking her back up. Though the mileage is identical in both directions, the first leg feels the longest, with 1,150 feet of vertical gain. There’s less than 200 feet of vertical on the return trip, most of it in the first mile.
There are still a few hurdles to clear, though. The people whose “home” is the weedy industrial area alongside the North Diversion Channel Trail huddle together in what shade they can find come the heat of the afternoon, usually on the west side of the bicycle path’s underpasses, south of I-25/Pan American.
Like, wow. Like, bow wow, man.
Many wear dark clothing and are hard to spot in the shade, if you’re new around here and don’t expect to roll up on a small crowd sprawled in a blind corner. Here’s a guy who looks like the Feral Kid from “Road Warrior,” with a dog instead of a boomerang. There’s a pensive young woman who seems to be revisiting her life choices as the temperature creeps into the mid-90s.
We were all on the same path, but not really. I was riding a bicycle that’s worth more than the car I was going to pick up. I was wearing sunscreen and about half a G’s worth of cycling kit, with an iPhone in one jersey pocket, wallet full of cash, credit cards, and health insurance in another. I knew where I was going to sleep that night, even if the Subie didn’t start (I was riding a bicycle, remember). The place has food, drink, beds, toilets, showers, doors and windows that lock, climate control, and a lid on all of it.
Cycling past the street people I always feel like a tourist gawping at the wildlife in some squalid national park. Possibly because I am one, and always have been, never more so than when I was pretending to be a hippie, hitchhiking, panhandling, and taking all those gosh-darned drugs that were so much fun.
Maybe the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showed me around one dark night, way back when. Or maybe I just wised up to all that unearned middle-class-white-boy privilege I was wearing like a Superman costume under my hippie garb. Because I never had the balls or the bad luck to take anything that might leave me sprawled under a bridge on a searing August afternoon, as some bastard on a bicycle breezes by.
The turnaround point, just south of Interstate 40 along the Paseo del Bosque trail.
It was a bit premature, but I rode my age yesterday and then some.
The final tally was 44.6 miles, or 71.8 kilometers; I only needed 43.5 miles to make 70km, but I figure the additional mile and change constituted a punishment tax for being a wuss and riding my age in kilometers instead of miles.
My 70th birthday isn’t until Wednesday, but the forecast was not promising and yesterday’s weather looked (and was) superb, so I took a cue from Janis Joplin and got it while I could.
I’ve been in something of a rut lately, literally as well as figuratively. The drill has been to break out a cyclocross bike and ride a mix of roads and trails, the latter slashed into tire-grabbing ribbons by fatheads who shred (or stir) the gnar-gnar after a wet spell. The ruts they leave behind don’t pose a problem for anyone piloting a double-squishy with plenty of travel and 3-inch tires, but can be a tad jarring on a rigid drop-bar bike with 33mm rubber.
Still, it beats working, especially if I pick a day and hour when the usual suspects are likely to be hoeing a row in the cube farm. I managed 24 miles of that sort of thing on Thursday. But doubling up on that, on a Friday, sounded like a punishment tour, not a birthday celebration. Also, too much of the same-ol’, same-ol’.
What to do; what to do. …
Temps looked to be headed for the 60s, with wind from the west. Coasting down to the bosque would force me to commit to some proper distance while giving me plenty of options in case advancing age or some other wrinkled catastrophe reared its ill-considered comb-over in midride. Off I went.
It’s mostly off-street bike path (Arroyo del Oso) and downhill from the intersection of Tramway and Manitoba to the bike-ped bridge over I-25, barring a short, unpleasant stretch of Osuna between the western end of the Arroyo del Oso golf course and Brentwood.
But once I’m on the bridge it’s all bike path, all the time, depending upon how I choose to head home.
I’m prone to overdo and bad at math, so after following the North Diversion Channel Trail and the Paseo del Norte Trail to the Paseo del Bosque, I refused to be lulled into complacency by the early greenery, stifled various miles-enhancing impulses — Hang a right at I-40 and climb to 98th? Hang a left at Mountain and cruise past Old Town back to the NDCT? Continue south to Rio Bravo? — and pulled a U at Mountain, heading back to the NDCT the way I’d come.
I thought I’d get more vertical than this, but that bosque trail is flatter than a Republican’s head.
The wind was mostly with me, so it felt like the right call, not least because it was all uphill back to El Rancho Pendejo. The question was: Which way back?
Arroyo del Oso is kind of a slog if ridden up from NDCT, with lots of stop and go plus a couple-three evil multiple-lane, median-divided, high-speed baby-highway crossings to negotiate with pale, failing, nearly-70-year-old legs. And my limited math skills seemed to indicate the mileage — kilometerage? — wouldn’t make the nut.
So I hung a left where the Paseo trail met the NDCT and headed northeast through Balloon Fiesta Park, where a few didoes through an underused office/light industrial ghetto connect to the Pan American Freeway, which in turn leads to the climb up Tramway — if you don’t mind riding a short stretch of shoulder alongside Pan American against high-speed, one-way traffic, which I kind of do. There’s been talk for years about extending the NDCT north to Roy, which would spare cyclists this game of chicken, but no action as of yet.
A quick digression: As I was rolling through the balloon park en route to doing battle with Pan American I saw a dude on what looked to be a gravel bike who’d left the official trail to drop down into La Cueva channel, a drainage like NDCT only without a bike path along the edge.
It made me wonder if, rather than risking the short against-traffic dash to Tramway from Balloon Fiesta Parkway, a savvy cyclist might be able to ride La Cueva channel underneath Pan American and I-25 all the way to Louisiana, then climb out somehow and head north to Elena, a less harrowing alternative to the 50-mph traffic of Tramway. Never saw the other dude again, so, maybe? To be continued. …
I took my chances on the Pan American shoulder, cautiously skirting two parked vehicles that may have had some unfortunate interaction — one car, one 18-wheeler — and started the half-hour ascent of Tramway to The County Line Bar-B-Q.
This is where the age thing manifested itself. A couple skinny young pups on them plastic-fantastic whirligigs with the disco brakes and what have you passed me so fast I had to stop to check my pulse, see if I still had one.
Nevertheless, I persisted, and upon hitting the stop sign at the barbecue joint it was clear that if I headed straight home I was going to wind up a couple klicks short of the full megillah. Thus I had to add a couple curlicues, flourishes, and do-si-dos to my little dance party before I could leave the floor and collapse into a medium-heavy lunch.
The official high was 69°, four degrees above normal. If that’s my birthday present, I’ll take it.
• Postscript: Lest anyone consider this even marginally impressive, my man the M-Dogg out in California reports having covered 9,000 feet of vertical and 166 miles in four days, none of which was his birthday.
The Kona Sutra at Albuquerque’s Balloon Fiesta Park, which sits right on the North Diversion Channel trail (from Feb. 2014).
It seems the best way to get to the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta is … by balloon.
Or is it?
Motorists and park-and-riders have suffered mightily this year, getting stuck in traffic and/or at bus stops, reports The Albuquerque Journal. With a record 21,000 park-and-ride tickets sold, the problem was “sheer volume,” according to Dennis Christiansen, Fiesta coordinator of traffic and P&R.
Added Fiesta executive director Paul Smith: “We have a limited number of access points to and from the park. We are kind of landlocked here. We have a reservation (Sandia) to the north, a neighborhood to the west, and AMAFCA (flood control) channels on two sides.”
Neither the Journal nor the Fiesta mentions this transportation option, though I was riding that trail to that park before I even lived here. I tell ya, we don’t get no respect. …
The Paseo del Bosque hasn’t leafed out yet, but it’s still a nice change, snotlocker-wise, from the juniper-heavy foothills.
Spring? Meh. Don’t talk to me about spring. We got summer down here, dude.
Yesterday I did a nice little two-and-a-half-hour ride that took in a number of the local bike trails — Paseo de las Montañas, Paseo del Bosque, Paseo del Norte, North Diversion Channel — and finished with the Tramway climb.
This is a really good ride for letting the mind wander alongside the body. The first hour is mostly downhill with a few tense moments — a couple dicey multilane-thoroughfare crossings, too much time on Indian School Road, and a narrow, stop-and-go, pain-in-the-ass stretch of Mountain skirting the north edge of downtown — but after that it’s smoove like butta, yo.
The bosque trail is flat as flat can be. The Paseo del Norte rises a bit to North Diversion. And Tramway is a pleasant steady-state, half-hour climb. There’s a little suffering at the bottom, near Interstate 25, and a little more at about the six-mile mark, but mostly it’s a matter of picking a gear you like and turning it over.
Mid-50s at the start, mid-60s at the finish, what’s not to like? When I got home I ate everything worth eating and then set about making some more — tacos, pico de gallo, spuds and turnips roasted in olive oil, salt and pepper. There were leftovers so I can eat it all over again today.
Then this morning I arise to learn that Il Douche and Uncle Joe are barking from a safe distance about throwing hands. Jesus H., etc. Can someone give these noisy old farts a couple of bikes, turn ’em loose in the desert sun for a couple of hours?
The only thing they’ll want to pound on afterward is a taco platter. But I ain’t cookin’ for ’em.
The bike paths in these parts are better than the roads in some of the towns I’ve lived in.
Yesterday I decreed it would be Ride Your Own Damn Bike Day, and so I dug out the Nobilette, which has been neglected lately, aired it up, and took it out for two and a half hours of delightful sunny goodness.
The sprinkler system is A-OK.
No biggie — easy pace, just 32.5 miles on rolling terrain — but still, it’s refreshing to ride one of my own damn bikes* for a change, and for more than 90 minutes at a stretch, too.
There was only a little bit of old snow and ice hiding in the shady bits, mostly toward the end of the ride on the Paseo de las Montañas trail.
I’m guessing that’s where I picked up whatever flattened the front tire, probably a goathead thorn, though the culprit could have been some errant glass from earlier in the ride. Swear to God, it looked like someone chucked an entire case of Heineken out the car window on Tramway between Manitoba and Spain. There was so much green glass scattered around I wondered whether Ted Cruz had been practicing his carpet-bombing techniques in the Duke City.
It’s a beautiful morning.
Today the weatherpersons are predicting a high of 62 (!) so I decided to power up the sprinkler system for the first time in quite a spell. Nothing exploded. This is what we sprinkler-system owner-operators call “a good thing.” Because nothing makes so much sense as a nice green lawn in the Southwestern desert.
Indeed, the forecast proved so enticing that Herself declared herself ready for her first bike ride of 2016. And just in time, too. There’s rain and gloom predicted for Monday and Tuesday.
* Incidentally, in case you’re wondering, it’s still possible to ride a steel bike with cantilever brakes and come to a stop without Flintstoning or caroming off cars, trees and light stanchions. I know, it’s against the conventional wisdom, but you can rely upon me. I’m in the media.
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