Happy Halloween!

Cat-o-lantern, 2011

Take Me Away

I know this is a bike blog that has been saying very little about biking lately, especially considering Barbara and I recently triumphed over the New York Century Bike Tour, and I do still have posting to do on that subject.
Instead Barbara and I have been preoccupied with revolutionizing our perceptions about food. She with some book called “Eat to Live” that she talks about 24-7 while trying to convince me that no one ever told her it was bad to eat marshmallows and cake 3 meals a day plus snack. As for me, I have “gone vegan”. What this has entailed so far is waking up most nights, many times, because I feel so sick. That is why I posted this pic. I truly want Social Services to take me away from myself. And feed me cheese.

Chore-icane

While Irene caused a lot of damage to some of the neighboring communities, boroughs and states, I am happy to report everything is well in Prospect Park South. No power outage, a few  broken trees, but nothing major.

Things will be a bit quite on this front as I am heading to New Orleans for the rest of the week on Tuesday. Hopefully I’ll be able to sneak in at least one bicycle adventure, and the park will be safe enough to ride through tomorrow so Penny and I can ride to meet our friends for yoga. But with my long list of to do’s before we leave I’m not sure I’ll have time for a post. So I’ll leave you all with a few old snapshots that have me really excited to get away from all responsibilities.

A sleepy friend in El Salvador, 2009. Maybe it’s the current weather outside but this dog looks blissful. Also I love any photograph in which my finger makes a surprise appearance.

A ride in the Rockaways late 2009.

One of the most amazing places I’ve ever been to in El Salvador, I don’t even remember the name, but I want to go to there, everyday.

 

<3,

B & P.

 

 

Can’t Hug Every Cat

While Penny and I have been consistently enjoying romantic weekends, including one very exciting ride to Fort Tilden a few weekends ago, we have been very quiet on the blog front. We are sorry. But in a curious case of turning lemons into lemonade by bank account is currently hosting .67 cents (yes I already rolled all the coins in my piggy bank and cashed them) which means I can no longer afford the $2.25 metro ticket each way to work and Penny is my only form of transportation, so here we are!

After a shamefully long time of not riding into work it was absolutely refreshing this morning to see so many commuters on my route, I was part of a gang of anywhere from 4-10 people the entire way, and felt SO cool. Penny and I were feeling so good we actually  felt the need to race all the other commuters until we led the pack, only to then be at the tail end of another pack we felt the need to prove our skills to.

But Penny and I fell in love with the streets of New York again, the surprise pot holes, the public bus who thinks they will get to their location faster if they kill you, and the very best part, randomly running into Elizabeth & Wayne en route! So I am excited to have this week of bicycle or bust ahead of me, and now that we are recommitted to having the best bicycle blog ever, there are some things from our epic trip I want to back track to.

1.  If you run into some wandering goats in Layton NJ, please review the descriptions of Jill, Jack, Elvis & Elmo and phone Darlene accordingly.

2. While making our way to this bridge from our campsite in Dingman Falls, Elizabeth and I went down a hill that helped me achieve my all time top speed 43 mph. It was fast.

3. I then proceeded to force Elizabeth to take this very dorky picture of Wayne, Penny and I in the middle of this very narrow working bridge, cars were not amused. But I had just gone 43 mph, I was on top of the world!

4. On our last day I decided to surprise Elizabeth by building the tent all by myself.

Depending on your level of tent building this may or may not be obvious to you, to me this was a master piece, to Elizabeth it was obvious all the poles were in backwards which is why I can’t hook the top part.. not because it’s broken like I thought.

5. Once back in NY, my boyfriend and I enjoyed NYC bicycle parking logic

6. Decided our bikes prefer to sunbathe

7. And were tricked into buying this thinking it would be like Arizona Iced Tea, and because I love you all I want to make sure you never buy this thinking it will even be mildly tasty. It is an alcohol (rubbing I imagine) and ice tea mix… and they need a divorce.

Phew, Catching up feels good!

The Phonokinetoscope

As you may have read in the New York Times today, depending on which of Penny & Wayne’s 5 or so readers you are, there is an exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery right now that was curated by Thomas Demand. It includes about 50 too many Luigi Ghirri photographs and one very special film by Rodney Graham, which features, you guessed it, bicycling. To be more specific, dropping acid in the park + bicycling + amazing rock music. It is called The Phonokinetoscope, because the the projector is activated when the needle engages with the record, like Edison’s early cinematic invention of that name. However, this Phonokinetoscope does not sync music with video (yet oddly the music always seems appropriate for the image on the screen).

The artist writes, “The cinematographic portion of this work is a semi-documentary account of a bicycle ride and (actual) LSD trip I took in the Tiergarten last May. In front of the reconstruction of Rousseau’s tomb in Ermenonville, I ingested a blotter of ‘Mad Hatter.'” And there you have it.

Listen to the music from The Phonokinetoscope by Rodney Graham

The New York Times  review, “Out-Magritting Magritte, or at Least Coming Close” by Karen Rosenberg

Matthew Marks’ website for the exhibition

60 of these Ghirri pictures gets REALLY BORING

Rodney himself, thinking about drugs and bikes and how cool Berlin is

A playing card (the queen of diamonds?) is clothes-pinned to the wheel of this amazing bicycle.

Final question, would it be appropriate to give this post the tag “LSD”?

 

Just so no one gets confused, I do not do drugs

 

 

 

I’m calling Cathy

I talked to my mom on the phone today and did not ask her if her ears were burning all weekend. I should have. An unexpected consequence of deciding to have our bike weekend on one of the hottest, most humid weekends of the year and to have it in my parents’ state, New Jersey, meant that whenever the going got tough, Barbara and I declared that we would “call Cathy” (my mom) and try to convince/bribe/guilt her into coming to pick us up. Thank goodness that our strengths prevailed. Ultimately I think that shame alone prevented us from pressing the send button, but not from confessing all on the internet.

So to start at the beginning (or at least a few days ago), Barbara and I were really planning ahead when the day before we left we decided to review the details of our route to visit Kykuit, The Rockefeller Estate, as we had been planning since winter. We discovered some crucial information: Kykuit-The-Estate is not in Kykuit, New York; it is over 100 miles away. So the route we had been planning on for months no longer had any purpose. Going to Kykuit-The-Estate was not possible because it is close to the city and therefore there is no camping in the area. So late in the afternoon on Friday I proposed the Delaware Water Gap. Not because I know it so well- I had never been there even though it is only an hour or two away from where I grew up- but because I heard it was pretty, we could get there by train, and there was camping. Done. We arrived at Penn Station the next morning only to realize that the town we planned to take a train to did not have train service on Saturday. That pretty much set the tone for the whole unplanned, ridiculously hot, greatly spontaneous weekend.

We spent the first day (Saturday) biking from Dover, NJ to Dingmans Ferry, PA, where we camped. 5o miles. It would have been 40 but we actually managed to circle a lake by accident. Yes I am saying that we had the wonderful experience of showing up in the same place 10 miles later. It was definitely a low moment. Fortunately Barbie invented the amazing idea of buying a bag of ice and just drinking/playing with it for a while. That made us feel better. A little later we went to the best ice cream/hotdog stand ever, I think it was called Sprinkle.

Picture & commentary by Barbara: “Baby” the ice bag that helped us keep our sanity after realizing we had spent one hour climbing up hill only to enjoy a descent that put us exactly at the beginning of that uphill once again. Baby kept our water cool, provided some nice crunching for our teeth, soothed our injuries and got it’s lovely name when I decided that I was only willing to go uphill again if I could tuck my shirt into my bike shorts and carry Baby inside my shirt like a lumpy baby.

Picture & commentary by Barbara: Elizabeth doesn’t mind that we are the biggest dumbies ever now that we have made the finest $3 dollar investment ever made at Chaplin’s Finest Wines Beers & Liquors.

Picture & commentary by Barbara: The Sprinkle Shake Shack and a wonderful photo of Elizabeth Denny, at this point I had already dropped the ice cream from my cone onto the counter, picked it up and proceed to eat it while everyone stared at me in horror, thus why only Elizabeth has a commemorative photo.

The second day (Sunday) we had to climb 3 miles out of the river valley just to get breakfast and coffee (and therefore wanted to call Cathy), had mediocre breakfast, got sleepy. The decent woke us up for sure. We spent the rest of the morning riding along Old Mine Road along the Delaware back on the NJ side. It was beautiful. After climbing out of the river valley on the NJ side, we reached a bizarre period village called Millbrook. A cyclist did us the favor of stopping to tell us that the rest of our road out was infamous amongst cyclists for the grade (it is one of the top 100 climbs in Cyclist Magazine I guess). So we spent some time wanting to call Cathy and calculating how much time it would take to get to the next town if we had to walk the whole thing. Fortunately that did not happen. Barbie had a little help from a motor vehicle and somehow I made it. At the top was a lovely surprise- a trail into the woods marked with white blazes can only mean one thing: the Appalachian Trail! I waited for a while at the top with my bag of apples and granola bars out but no thru-hikers came before Barbie reached me and we moved along. Blairstown was our next spot. I was able to buy a beer for the campground but otherwise it was a pretty horrible town food-wise, at least on Sunday when stores were closed. Getting to Jenny Jump State Forest, where we were camping, required yet another huge climb but it was very beautiful and the campground manager was very nice. We had the place to ourselves, a nice shower, and were asleep by 9:30.

Picture & commentary by Barbara: In case you think we are liars, here is a photo of the Appalachian Trail sign, Elizabeth did wait around here for an extended period of time and I did not mind, even though at this point I had partially hitch hiked up the mountain Penny and I had hiked enough of it to be happy calling Cathy at that point and being laugh out of society. Also I could see how in the future I may say I hiked the Appalachian Trail.. I mean we totally did right..?

This morning (Monday), we got up early to make an 8:23 am train 10 miles from the campground and made it back to New York without too much trouble!

Overall, the trip was a great success for natural beauty, accessibility from the city, and how much fun we had. We could have done a little better on food, heat, and preparation. It might be a good idea to not go in New Jersey next time so that I won’t have such an urge to call my mom.

Sorry about the lack of photos. Barbie was the team photographer. Hopefully she will insert some illustrations into my post later.

Inspector Ellington

After 104 miles on the road together, your bike can get very dirty. Thankfully Duke Ellington was available to help me give Penny a shower when we got home this morning. While a humorous experience for all involved (Duke Ellington) I’m going to include this on my seemingly never ending list of reasons why I was not meant to live with out a yard.

Small Victories

I bet you thought I was just kidding about there being a part two to Shark Valley, but you were wrong. Even though I left Shark Valley with skin in varying tones and enough blood loss to disqualify me from making any donations for the rest of the year, there was a second visit.

In an attempt to make the ride bearable there was a nice combo of sunscreen and bug off that had me choking on fumes, and it was great. How great? This great :

Walking up to the observation tower! We made it! The mosquitos can’t see us! It is the best day ever! The views, Oh my! The VIEWS!

Nope. Just some bushes and more flat lands, Florida sure is flat. In fear that our invisibility would run out and feeling mildly accomplished we got back on our bikes to finish the trail and head home. The crows did not manage to steal our bikes while we were sight-seeing.

But this guy stole my heart :

What’s that? You can’t see anything? Well that is just photographic evidence of me sticking to my 400 feet rule from all gators rule. Maria Moreira is proud.

After riding for a few more feet I saw what I think must be the largest snail house ever. Honestly I didn’t even know they could get this big… the shell seemed to be empty and I  was tempted to take it, but I was too scared of the possibility of a giant snail emerging later on and killing my family while we slept.

Has anyone ever seen a snail this big? Are they common? Am I insane? It was about 2 – 3 inches in circumference. If you visit Florida, and it is under 100 degrees and you want to sweat a lot and see a lot of grass for a long time, I totally recommend Shark Valley.

Kris wouldn’t properly slow down for me to photograph this Coke Zero monument that we saw on our way out and I think Elizabeth will qualify for it next week when she consumes her 1,000th can.

I think that was a good transition into the random parts of the trip, and I will continue.

I love Mangroves, this is a terrible picture, but the only one I got. My camera did not deal well with the constant change from cool to blazing hot and the intense humidity.

My mom feeds our neighborhood ducks Cheerios, they like it.

This may be one of my top cat pictures ever.

On Saturday Elizabeth and I will begin our adventure to Hudson Valley, we are excited to start this journey after so much planning. Wish us luck!

Queso

Part of visiting my folks means no internet, my mom knows the internet is run by the devil and wont allow it in her house. Also we are JUST starting to master cell phone voicemail.. baby steps.

I did manage to introduce my mother to banana bread, at first she was hesitant “If we don’t eat these bananas today they are going to go bad- EAT!!” but I’ll let this photo have the last word.

Bam! Banana bread, hanging out in our backyard, looking delicious!

With that, onto business, Shark Valley. It all started innocently enough.. Here is one cricket giving another cricket a piggy back ride

Something must have the crickets very depressed because it seemed that they LOVED to hang out in the middle of this bike path, even though there was literally hundreds of their dead friends serving as clear Memento mori. Later on I decided that the bottom crickets were actually ambulances sent to escort the suicidal crickets off the bike path, or perhaps a double suicide… hmm.

The first day we did not make it to the watch tower, because while I was contemplating the complicated lives of crickets, every other insect in the Everglades was feasting on my nice sweaty burned skin. We should have known things were going to go sour at this point when we saw this sign.

I appreciate their providing photographic evidence of these serious criminals in action. Here is my rental bike, I named her Sharon. Sharon has seen better times, and she was upset that I was leaving her to fend for her self with the crows.

But Sharon got real lucky because as we started walking up the observation tower we quickly realized there was no way we were going to make it with out bug spray and literally ran back down screaming “AHHHHHHHHHHHHH” slapping our faces and getting mosquito blood everywhere, jumped on our bikes and biked the second half of the trail in 1/3 of the time the first half took us.

At least it was very scenic

Just kidding! Flat empty lands for 8 miles.

The true saving grace was that somehow all that mosquito blood gave me the super bike control to be able to finally ride hands free!

Weee!!!! I think we did a full mile handless and it was beautiful, on Sunday when I got back I tried to show Tony and already I had lost my powers. Must find more mosquito blood.

I shared my Shark Valley adventure with my friend Kris, Here is a picture of his cat in his room that I’d like to summit as my description of Kris. Is Kris a squatter? I’ll let you decide.

Next time on Penny and Wayne we’ll cover Shark Valley : Take Two.

Lemons

To think that this time next week I will be eating Mangos from my backyard, drinking the finest oranges in this country and biking Shark Valley!  Shark Valley is a sort of pocket of trails lying in the heart of  Everglades National Park and I have never done the bike trail before. Although this trip will not be an athletically challenging one, I found this image of the trail on Google that exemplifies it’s lovely flat paved ways I am told it’s a good trail for sight-seeing.

A quick Flickr search lead to hundreds of photos of people mere feet from alligators, and let me assure you friends I will produce no such things, I like to keep my distance from gators in 300-400 pace range.

But of course I say this now… when just last week I had zero concern for tempting my very real enemies, bees. While enjoying a very lovely walk on the Highline on Friday I came across this strange purple flower plant that seems to be bee mecca, and as anyone with a bee allergy should I felt compelled to take photos, even though the only camera I had was the one on my phone, and my phone is as old as dust. But don’t let my low quality photo fool you, this was the queen of all bees ever, just look at it in comparison to a flower petal.. HUGE!

The Highline is quite literally around the corner from where Elizabeth and I work, but somehow I had managed to not visit since it first opened two years ago, at which time the train tracks were very clearly visible and I was amazed at how much growth has happen since then (but typing this is making me realize it HAS been two years.. I don’t know what I was expecting it to look like..)

There are train tracks under these!

This man was walking down the Highline with his friend trying to identify all the plants, I should have offered him my insights on purple flower bee mecca plant…

And as an unrelated bonus a favorite photo from this weekend, a prop ruler and myself.

My parents would have never had another day of peace in their lives if I had seen this as a child, even now I am pretty sad it’s not sitting in our living room..