Right on, ride on

I haven’t been logging my activities much lately, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been much to write about. Here’s an account of my doings for this summer so far.

There was the Bikes Not Bombs ride in June, delayed to its rain date. I struggled a bit on this 65+ miler, not having trained enough and starting too aggressively, but I rallied and pulled off a clean finish.

I have been making trips out to Concord on my fixed gear bike, usually stopping by the overlook at Hanscom on the return trip. I spotted some wild turkeys on the Minuteman one of the times I went out.

More recently I attended the unveiling of the new bike sharing program in Boston, the Hubway. I got a little sunburned on the inaugural ride where I joined other volunteers in populating the stations with the first fleet of bikes, and later that day used the system to get from my office in Allston to Government Center where I had left my bike, managing the trip in roughly half an hour, obeying traffic rules (it was slow going as the bikes aren’t built for speed).

I am currently on vacation visiting my folks in northern NY, and my sister is here as well on break from her job teaching English in South Korea. No bike means no rides, and that’s a shame because the area has a lot to offer for scenery.

There’s still tons to do, summer isn’t over yet!

Yesterday was Halloween, so I donned my pirate socks and joined in the annual Tour de Grave (sponsored by MassBike.)

It was a pretty long ride, hitting ten destinations around the Boston and Cambridge areas in total. There were over 30 riders of varying skill levels, and the going was paced to be able to keep everyone more or less grouped together. There were some challenging hills in Brookline which caused a little trouble for some, but for the most part the ride was interesting and educational. Somewhere between 20 and 30 miles was covered over the course of about five hours (!!!) with a good deal of that time spent actually in burying ground perimeters learning about each of the sites.

The places we hit were (in order) the Old Burying Ground (Cambridge,) King’s Chapel Burying Ground (Boston,) Granary Burying Ground (Boston,) Central Burying Ground (Boston,) South End Burying Ground (South End,) Eliot Burying Ground (Roxbury,) Evergreen Cemetery (Brighton,) Market Street Burying Ground (Brighton,) Cambridge Cemetery (Cambridge,) and finally the Mt. Auburn Cemetery (Cambridge.) The tour guide took a little time at each stop to explain some details about famous people buried in each place, what the practices for burial and treatment of the dead were at the time, some religious and political history to tie things together, and as we continued from one location to the next he presented a progression of the changes in the treatment of the deceased changed the entire style of human burials.

The tour was quite informative and was too much to keep all in my head, so fortunately a handout was available which provides the “readers digest” version of everything.

I experimented with using my phone to take pictures this ride, in part because it looks decent enough (as long as the lens is clean and I hold steady when I take a shot) and also because the pictures are automatically tagged with the location (which I had to fix in a few cases.) Without further ado, here are my (not so very spooky) pictures of the Tour de Grave:

There’s an article today on Boston.com introducing a bike sharing proposal. (There’s also a sweet video with Nicole Freedman performing a small track stand in rainy conditions while waiting in traffic.)

From the article:

Over the next few weeks, officials expect to name the company with which they would negotiate a contract on how to run the system. They hope the program will lead to tens of thousands of people saddling up in Boston daily.
…
Bike sharing is the next step. The city envisions making available between 1,000 and 3,000 bikes at stations 300 or 400 yards apart, located at subway and bus stops, main squares, tourist sites, and across city neighborhoods.

This makes me wonder, would I ride my bike around as much if there were publicly accessible ones available? I guess we’ll have to wait and see, either way I’ll be very happy that a program like this will be made available.

It may come as soon as 2010… up right now on Boston.com is the article “Boston takes first step on bike sharing program”

In my opinion there’s still plenty to do before this can become a viable reality.