![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.johndaltonwalks.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/Mike-on-Bridge.jpg\" "\\"Mike")
<\/a>a Friday afternoon. We then stopped at my daughter Jennifer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s house to load up our gear, and then rode through the heart of Brooklyn and Queens between 4 and 6 pm that same Friday afternoon. The only way I can describe what we did is with a football analogy. On a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153broken play\u00e2\u20ac\u009d circumstances prevent the preplanned offensive maneuver, and predictably everyone is scrambling unscripted, all over the field. The guy with the ball is totally on his own, and is doing a lot of\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153open field\u00e2\u20ac\u009d running. Back and forth, sideways, whatever it takes to evade the enemy. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how we left the city.<\/p>\n
Metropolitan Ave in Brooklyn is not a big street. It is sometimes one lane each way with a row of parked cars, and sometimes two lanes each way with a row of parked cars, but regardless the configuration, always narrow. And replete with two lovable New York traits: double parkers, sometimes several per block, and aggressive bus drivers. What all that meant to Mike and I was that we were sometimes on the side of the road, sometimes on the sidewalks (even where no sidewalks existed), sometimes in the middle of the road going around double parkers, and sometimes in between busses lined up at a bus stop. It was a Friday rush hour after all, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m glad it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s over.<\/p>\n
Once we exited New York city, it became anti-climatic. We were on the wide highways of Long Island, and although the traffic moved much faster, there was plenty of room for everybody. But then, and only then, did we realize that we encountering a third New York icon: summer heat and humidity. The forecasters had predicted near 90 degrees, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure it was every bit of that. And a sky of LPF\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s (little puffy \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fellows\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) in my vernacular, which of course means lots of moisture in the air. We were sweating buckets, but somehow during our focus of staying out of harms way in the city, we never realized it.<\/p>\n
To be continued.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well I did it again. In my desire to get in just one more ride at home in California, I shipped my bike a day late, which of course meant it arrived over a day late in New York. Sounds kind of minor, but it meant that instead of leaving New York City late on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johndaltonwalks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johndaltonwalks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johndaltonwalks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndaltonwalks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndaltonwalks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndaltonwalks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":449,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndaltonwalks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions\/449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johndaltonwalks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndaltonwalks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndaltonwalks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}