Slow, Steady Train

Despite the number of different people I see riding the Wednesday Bike Train route, I'm not sure we'll ever have even 10 people riding together. On the other hand, our Sunday Morning group ride often carried much fewer than 10 for several years. Now we typically get at least a dozen and a couple dozen on good days. The encouraging news is there has only been one day out of the last 7 weeks that no one joined me on the ride.

This morning I was accompanied by Amy, a Ga Tech student studying Civil Engineering. She has a full appreciation of communities whose amenities are within easy walking and cycling distance. It is an idea whose time has come.

I haven't posted a panorama in a while. I had made a few recent attempts, but this is the only one that I've been pleased with.



The bridge in the lower right-hand corner reminds me of the winter of 1982. I was a student at Tech at the time and we were in the middle of Snow Jam. A sudden afternoon snow storm caught many people downtown and everybody joined in a big party across the city. All the roads were blocked with stranded cars so lots of people were walking everywhere.

Several of my best memories occurred during those few snowed-in days, but the "sledding" day is near the top. We took sheets of linoleum down to Candler Park (pictured here) and slid down the 1/4 mile hill that ended at the bridge you see in the panorama. We tried over and over to steer a sheet of slippery flatness across that bridge without falling into the water. The hill is out of view to the right of the bridge.

Most of the steering involved picking the initial fall line because the best you could do with your feet or hands was keep your head facing the trees you wanted to avoid. About half-way down the slope was a ridge you would disappear over. On Graham's turn, we watched him disappear over the ridge and then turned our eyes to watch if he would cross the bridge. We didn't see exactly what happened, but what we could see gave us a pretty good idea. One of the dogwood trees whose top was all we could see, had the snow shaken loose. This observation fit well with our next observation: an empty piece of linoleum sliding across the bridge.

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 17.8
Number of Cyclists seen: 37 - A very good number
In-bound Route: Wednesday Bike Train
Out-bound Route: Emory via Clifton
Weather: 57 in AM, 70s in afternoon. Mostly sunny.