Posts tagged #Bike adventure

In The Rearview Mirror 2020 pt. 2

Flashback Friday

This too Shall Pass

Second Quarter of 2020 started off with a low. Calls for healthcare workers and refrigerator trucks piling up. Big city life is a bit hard when everyone are struggling around you. Life is put on hold. We were lucky enough to stay healthy, and be able to work remotely and still get paid. Many others in our neighborhood were probably not as lucky. The second quarter was the time when we started donating to various organizations. Mostly black owned but also to the public radio. If there was ever a time when public radio was important, 2020 was the year. 2020 when a virus, a pandemic entered the world, something that had been predicted to happen sooner rather than later. The most frustrating part is that the Obama administration had practiced for this, monthly, during several years. They handed over the pandemic response playbook (the Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents) to the Trump administration when the transition happened. No one knows what happened to it, but we all sure as hell know it wasn’t opened, EVER.

April

April came with a slap in the face. The emergency call for health care workers because too many people came to the hospitals at once. There wasn’t enough capacity, not enough capacity of healthcare workers, space, and space for the dead. The realization of that horrible thought came when we took a walk to Randall’s Island and saw all the refrigerator trucks on stand by to be sent to various hospitals around the city. A morgue on wheels, how bizarre that we in this day and age can face such a travesty from a tiny little virus. We continued to stay inside and did the best of the situation. We ordered nice beers, and food and I started (like many others) my own little sourdough adventure. We took weekly walks to various parks, mostly Central Park and Riverside Park. It was a bit eerie to meet the spring in this way. The parks were mostly empty, now that so few tourist are around. Most people did their best to keep 6 feet apart, and in reality it was mostly around the reservoir in Central Park that this became hard. We also got to spend some time on our friends/neighbors roof terrace. But even with all this I think the end of April and early May was a low point for both of us.

May

    End of April early May, the lowest point of this pandemic for us. It was the empty city, the troubled neighborhood, the sadness of all lives lost, the graduation celebration that never happened for so many students. The death numbers we were fed with day in and day out, the radio had started to play a relaxation/meditation minute every day around noon by now. It was needed, for everyone, to take a deep breath. But May was also the month it started to get hot, hot enough to enjoy long bike rides through a mostly empty NYC. We biked to the cloisters, and past the little red lighthouse that I’ve wanted to see for so long. And all that time at home meant more baking, and cleaning and a lot of good quality beers from local breweries that delivered for free.

June

   George Floyd was murdered on May 25th, and this was like the final straw to get people riled up. I don’t know if it would have gotten as much attention had the pandemic not been a fact, but the pandemic was real and this was just another brick in the wall of black lives being taken from this earth by us white people. We, like many other New Yorker’s debated weather or not to participate in the protests, and eventually decided that we should, with masks of course. We were not seeing anyone else anyway, and hardly left our apartment as it was. It felt good, good to be participating in something so large. In the midst of all this we got access to a garden plot, and that was one of our best moments during June. Red Rooster is owned by Marcus Samuelsson who grew up in Sweden, and so we ordered a midsummer basket on Juneteenth and celebrated both holidays in Central Park. There were more protest all around the US, and the world, for Black Lives. We went for another bike ride, this time a very long one that took us south on Manhattan to the very point where life in NYC as we see it today started. Then we headed over to Brooklyn and finally came home 25 miles later. June was an intense month, and it was also the month we finalized our move to Millbrook. A move that would happen already in August. We definitely took advantage of that excitement all of June and July, before the move was a reality.

When We biked to Millbrook

Around here, where we now live, there are many smaller roads. Roads that will take you past farms and horses. A month or so ago we took our bikes and went to Millbrook. It’s about 6 miles, one way to get there.

We biked past bunnies, turtles, goats, cows and horses. We really live on the countryside now. 190 people live in the nearest hamlet, and in Millbrook about 1500 people reside.

It still feels pretty weird that this is our home now, and that we are able to do all of this directly from our house. Life changes, and isn’t that great. This general area will be our permanent home now. We’ve been moving every second year the past 4 years so it will be nice to finally settle down.

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Millbrook is just like any other little village around the countryside in the US, although the villages here on the east coast are older than elsewhere. This general area houses many rich people, and you can clearly see that while biking or driving around. There are large mansions that you can buy for 13 million dollars here, if you can afford it. Many of these places you can’t necessarily see from the road, but the stone walls and fancy entrances to the driveways are telling those stories. But just like any other place there are houses that barely stands around here too.

Once we got to Millbrook we didn’t really spend too much time there. We bought a coffee and something to eat and went to the park. After maybe an hour we got on our bikes and biked home again. You could clearly tell that we were going slightly downhill now, which probably explains why I felt like I was dying biking there.

When we Biked to Battery Park and Across the Brooklyn Bridge - Life in NYC

June 28, 2020

You couldn’t stay indoors all the time of course, at least not now in June when the number of virus cases had dropped so much. So we went on another bike ride. This time we headed towards Battery Park and the most southern tip of Manhattan. We started off by biking across Manhattan towards Riverside Park (from the east side to the west side). There we had a breakfast bagel, from one of the famous bagel shops I don’t remember the name of before we headed south. The bagels were no sensation, but they tasted good. The whitefish topping was definitely the go to at this place, quite suprisingly since I always love the lox option. It was the end of June, and just like any other day it was hot. Very hot.

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Up north on Manhattan we didn’t really have any bike traffic, but as with everything it started to pick up as we made our way south. Or that could maybe also be explained by the fact that the bike trail narrows here and there down there.

Eventually we arrived to an empty Battery Park. It wasn’t until then we actually felt how hot it was. We both felt very exhausted and went to some of the park benches in the shadow to relax a bit. To my surprise it seemed as if the boats that take you to Ellis Island had started to take customers again.

We started to move towards the east side of the southern tip, and started the long way home.

As we approached Brooklyn Bridge I don’t know what flew into me, but I yelled to W, - Don’t you think we should bike across the Brooklyn Bridge now when there are so few people in the city? I had been so tired, and I was still pretty tired, but the thought of finally biking across the Brooklyn Bridge energized me. Of course this was also in the midst of all the protest going on, and rightfully so. The case of defunding the police is very complicated but somethings got to change, seriously. If you haven’t already check the play by play of Breanna Taylors murder. It’s actually kind of disturbing and makes me so angry, but that is a totally different story, and what is even more disturbing is that there are countless of other stories like this one.

I guess that after the trip over to Brooklyn we really started the long way home. Not only did we do Brooklyn Bridge, but we also decided to take on Williamsburg Bridge while we were at it. I know, don’t ask me what we were thinking. It was a bit complicated to follow the bike route to the famous pink Williamsburg bridge but we finally arrived and got back to Manhattan.

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At this point we were all out of water and the heat, talk about the heat. I was not in a good mood and needed some energy. Luckily we found a vending machine that carried Gatorade and the day was saved.

About 25 miles later, and several hours from the start in Riverside park we finally got to our street in East Harlem. I could hardly carry my bike up the stairs. But as I was laying on the floor in our cold apartment I silently promised myself to never ever do that again.