The 2008 NYC Century is in 10 hours?

I don't know about this...

This is Broadway. I'm supposed to be riding down this at 6 am tomorrow morning, but hurricane Hanna seems to have something to say about that.

I'll see what it's like at 4am.
I know the Century goes rain or shine...
But I don't.

Why I Hate Bicycling in NYC

At least they said please.

I actually love bicycling in NYC. Just as long as I don't have to stop - anywhere, for any reason at all.

Don't go shopping, don't go to the bathroom, and god forbid, don't try to go to work.

They won't let you in.

No Crossing the Cross Bay Bridge

Don't try to cross the Cross Bay Bridge on a bike.

The pedestrian and bike path is closed for repairs until at least October, which is a bummer - I like doing the loop around Jamaica Bay.



Luckily, there is a shuttle bus that will take you and your bike across the bridge.
Luckier even if you happen to run into one of the local cyclists who has the driver's number on speed dial to make sure you don't have to wait forever.
I have no idea what the wait time is normally - due to my exalted company it was only about 15 minutes.




Still, it's a bit weird to end up crammed on a passenger van half way through a ride.
By the time I get that far down, I'm usually a pretty ripe and the poor guy sitting next to me and the nice clean couple on a date certainly wished that I had chosen a different route.

In the end, you can get across - I'd just recommend sticking to the Marine Parkway Bridge for now.

Henry Hudson D'Oh

New York is an amazing city. I've lived here all my life and I still discover something new every day. Bicycling has added tremendously to my knowledge of the city and the surrounding areas, but recently, I've had a run of frustrating bad luck.
One of the reasons why the city is so intriguing is that it is always changing. Stores, buildings, fads and causes come and go. Entire neighborhoods disappear. New ones spring up to take their place. Sometimes it feels like every night the city folds in upon itself and unscrambles into something new by morning.



I took this while crossing the Broadway Bridge at the top of Manhattan. The point in the distance is at Spuyten Duyvil - one of my favorite named locations in New York. According to Wikipedia, some of the origins of the name are Speight den Duyvil, Spike & Devil, Spitting Devil, Spilling Devil, Spiten Debill and Spouting Devil. Meanings include "Spinning Devil" or "Devil's Whirlpool" or "Spite the Devil."
I thought it would be nice to return via the Henry Hudson Bridge - the bridge at Spuyten Duyvil, but instead, I ran into this:



Closed, closed for repair, re-routed, non-existent. I've had some strange Karma going on that's drawn me to every fenced-off, under construction route in NYC, but this was a first - you can get on it - you just can't get off on the other side.
D'oh

As seen in...Canarsie

The Good - Spectacular view from the Belt Parkway Bike Path.














The Bad - Fence blocking the Belt Parkway Bike Path














The Ugly - Head-on collision right in front of me while trying to get around the construction and back to the Belt Parkway Bike Path in Canarsie.

Doored

...or why I hate riding on Manhattan's East Side.
I must be eligible for some sort of prize as of today. I think it would be called "most failed attempts at riding the periphery of Manhattan by one individual". I just can't make it work, and I don't know why.
Well, I sort of know why...
I feel like I know where I'm going when I'm in Manhattan, so if I miss a turn or two, I'm never that worried. "I'll just catch the next entrance", I say to myself. Only, I'm wrong.
Whenever I try to ride completely around Manhattan, I screw it up.
According to the Official NYC Bike Map, there is a (basically) unbroken line that goes around the island. This is a lie.
The West side of the island is quite lovely to ride on until you hit (Pet Peeve Alert), the parking lot of Fairway Supermarket at 125th street. After a little deadly intersection detour, it becomes one of my favorite stretches of bike path in the five boroughs. It passes through Riverbank State Park and then Ft. Washington Park (with a little detour to the Little Red Lighthouse), up along the Hudson into Inwood and the Cloisters.
It was a lovely day for a ride. Sunny, but cool, a little too windy for comfort - I almost got blown over a couple of times, but that's always the downside of riding near the water.
I got to portage my bike on the Henry Hudson Drive to get around some construction. I was impressed to see the workers set up on either end to help bicyclists heft themselves and their bikes over the barriers and across the highway - it was a happy bicycling high point of the day.
The low points followed in quick succession from there.
I followed the greenway signs across Dyckman to the Harlem River Drive Bike Path which quickly disintegrated into a broken glass covered on and off road excursion. Somewhere near Jumel Terrace, I picked up St. Nicholas Avenue and instead of turning left, I went straight.
This is not a disaster. Manhattan is very narrow, so when I figured it out, I turned. My best guess is that this is where I screwed up. Like little red riding hood, I strayed from the path.
My original plan was to go over the Triboro bridge into Queens and then ride down to Brooklyn, but somehow, at 125th street it all went wrong.
125th street is the bane of my bicycling existence. On the west side, it's where my happy, traffic - less riding ends. On the east side, it's where I ALWAYS get lost. Crossing on it is like attaching your mouth to the exhaust pipe of a bus.
The last time I tried it going north, I ended up in a sanitation storage yard where they store sand in enormous piles. And I don't mean that I left the bike path - the bike path ends in the giant pile of sand. The time before that, I ended up accidentally going over the Willis Avenue Bridge into the Bronx. This time, I was sure my plan would work.
I rode to the entrance of the pedestrian walkway of the Triboro and stopped short. It was gated shut with a sign that read, "Closed. Please use the walkway on the North Side." I crossed 125th street again (and the 6 lanes of on ramp, off ramp bridge traffic). The pedestrian walkway was gated shut with a sign that read, "Closed. Please use the walkway on the South side." Umm, WTF?
Is the Triboro closed to Bicycle traffic right now? Or is it my 125th street juju that makes it impossible for me to figure this out?
I sighed heavily and set off along the East Side of Manhattan.

Now some parts of the path are quite nice. And the sections in the North are fairly empty of pedestrian and bike traffic. But trust me, it may look like a path on the map, but it's not.
First of all, it's made of hexagonal concrete tiles, very bumpy on road tires. Second, though parts of it are quite beautiful, they end abruptly in flights of stairs that you have to carry your bike up or down. Third, when heading South, the section from 55th street through 34th street runs on 2nd Avenue. Not next to 2nd Avenue, not marked with a bike lane, just follow the NYC greenway signs straight to the bus lane.
So I was cranky and possibly not concentrating as hard as I should as I swung off onto Sutton Place and promptly got doored by the passenger side door of a car parked at the edge of the bike lane. I did a nice little slide on my elbow between the idling car and the moving traffic, leaving a bit of myself embedded in the road, but my bike seems ok and the rest of me is just slightly more bloody and banged up than normal.
I hate riding on the East Side of Manhattan.

Thanks for the door.
What do you do when you get doored?