So yesterday I finally got back on the road. \u00a0Sort of.<\/p>\n
For the first four years of this series, I was riding to a job in downtown Saint Paul. \u00a0It was about six miles each way; a brisk twenty minutes, mostly downhill, in the morning; a gruelling (initially) climb up Cathedral Hill followed by a relaxing blast up Summit Avenue at the end of the day.<\/p>\n
My new commute is something on the order of 20-odd miles. \u00a0Doable, certainly, but I’m not really in shape to make that kind of a jaunt and <\/em>make it to work and <\/em>do it on the way home at night just <\/em>yet. \u00a0So I compromised. \u00a0I threw the bike onto a bike rack and drove out to a park and ride in a nearby suburb, and I rode the last probably five or six miles in to the office.<\/p>\n Gotta say, I miss the relative calm of city biking.<\/p>\n The first half of the trip was mostly bike lanes and trails; it was a fun, if choppy, ride. \u00a0Hills are fine; new<\/em> hills that I haven’t done before suck.<\/p>\n The last half, though, was over a couple of busy suburban arterials with no shoulders and only notional speed limits. \u00a0I was keenly aware that I was only as safe as the least-engaged driver wanted me to be. \u00a0I grew eyes on the back of my head (or, to be fair, kept my head swiveling about like an owl on the hunt) for the last couple of miles in to the office.<\/p>\n The last three miles is, as it happens, the worst part of the whole trip. \u00a0 The rest of the commute – from my front door to somewhere in the western subs, on a hypothetical all-bike ride to work – is striped bike lanes (Minnehaha, Prior, Marshall) or dedicated bike paths (the Greenway, the River Bluffs trail), up to that last little gauntlet of death.<\/p>\n So my goal for my abbreviated biking season; get to the point where I can do the whole, Saint Paul-to-western-subs trip at least once a week.<\/p>\n You heard it here first…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So yesterday I finally got back on the road. \u00a0Sort of. For the first four years of this series, I was riding to a job in downtown Saint Paul. \u00a0It was about six miles each way; a brisk twenty minutes, mostly downhill, in the morning; a gruelling (initially) climb up Cathedral Hill followed by a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20777"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20779,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20777\/revisions\/20779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}