Escort

I rode Corinna partway out of town. Well, all the way, I guess, we were in unincorporated territory when I u-turned.

The headwinds going south on Gardner Road were spectacular. They were out of the southwest, stronger in the south than the west, though once we turned east it was a definite tailwind.



Definite, but nothing like the return trip heading north. Once I got on Moonlight, I found myself cruising casually up a gentle grade at 22 mph. At 22 to 28 mph I felt no wind, as if becalmed, which is to say I was matched with the air speeds.

¡Hacía mucho viento! My Spanglish is still embryonic, so if that's wrong, feel free to correct me in the Peanut Gallery.



My girl had a tailwind basically all the way to Warrensburg, though if she could have been headed northeasterly, she probably could have made Des Moines in the same time.

Three O'Clock Ride

I've meant to do this ride again, it's the ride I wandered into right after I ate that grate in the River Market.



You see the most interesting bikes in this group. Improbably shaped compact commuter bikes right next to downhill mountain bikes that are little more than handlebars and a saddle held together by a suspension.



And fixies, of course, though Randall's has the biggest chain ring I've ever seen. I'm not sure I could ride his bike except for downhill and with a tailwind.



And to file one under learn-something-new-everyday, I accidentally learned a tiny bit of Italian. Corinna noticed Ken's bike and told me, 'Look, there's a red Barchetta.'



But no, a barchetta is a two-seat car with no roof, a fine thing to be sure, and while Ken's bike certainly has no roof, it seats just one. A bacchetta is a stick, one used to punish. A switch, basically.



I get that the bike is stick-like in construction, but what a perverse bit of branding.



The compact bikes remind me of Roj's BMX when he put the tall seat post on it so he could clip in with SPD pedals.





At 18th & Vine, there was a drummer set up in front of the Parker Memorial, apparently shooting a video.





Corinna found a dog's jawbone by Cliff Drive. I'm not sure why, but the most logical thing to me seemed to be to mount the electronics for a Blue Tooth into it and use it for hands-free cell calls. Why not?



There are group rides where everyone rides as if it were a race; there are group rides that are mainly social, but where the riding is fairly continuous except for pauses to group up and with for stragglers.



Then there's a group that stops because it's a beautiful day to shinny up a cliff, or to watch a rider doing so. Corinna's done some rock climbing, and she said the face he went up was pretty low in technical difficulty, but with damp moss and SPD cleats, I think he gained four or five points, easy.



I had ridden to YJ's from my Mom's house. I had gotten there with enough time, and I was hankering for a longer ride than what I've typically been getting in lately. Thirteen to seventeen miles has been the norm, and I guess there have been a few commuting days where I get a pair of those in.



The trick was figuring out when to break off from the pack, because while the Three O'Clock ride has a more or less fixed starting point, as far as I can tell, it goes until so many people of peeled off that it no longer constitutes a 'group.' Then everyone who's left finds a place to eat dinner.



I should have peeled off when it was decided that we'd go to Riverfront Park. But I thought I could get the trail there and follow the river to downtown.



I didn't have to backtrack much, I took Front Street. But the winds. ¡Hace viento!



I knew I had a tailwind coming out, but it took forever going back.



For as long as I was gone, I'd have expected to get more than 33 miles in. For as whipped as I felt after, too.



But I got some neat shots of the ASB bridge.





And downtown.





Including the almost finished performing arts center. Kind of getting curious to hear what it's like inside.

Magic Hour in the West Bottoms

I spotted a photographer shooting what I suspect are publicity stills of a guy, a musician I'd imagine. The West Bottoms is a great place for that, lots of funky old brick and wood.



Except for the area right by the turd ponds, I really like the West Bottoms.



When Corinna referred to the 'West Bottoms Renaissance' in one of her poems, my initial reaction was surprise. I'd heard of no such thing.



But it's for real, and thanks to the bursting of the real estate bubble, I doubt if real estate prices are being run up by speculators.



Don't get me wrong, I love the Crossroads, but the West Bottoms is still in the exciting stage where unknown artists can get a foothold, where young entrepreneurs can try their hand at running a nightclub their friends will want to hang out at.



I'm sure some people don't see the potential of the area, or figure we already have an artsy urban neighborhood. But there was a time when you couldn't give away real estate in the Crossroads.



And, not that long ago, there was almost no place you could even legally reside downtown. Lofts, people seemed to think, were for big cities, nobody would live that way here.



I'm sure there are plumbing nightmares and electrical dilemmas with some of these buildings, but I'll also bet that, given their age, these buildings are mostly really well built.



I got a little carried away with the camera, the charm of the neighbhorhood. It was a beautiful evening to begin with, but the light was just fantastic. Especially when we got by Jerry's.



The light was even still good when we got up to Minnesota, in KCK's downtown. It was fading fast, though. I'm not sure that magic hour lasts a whole hour.

Hace Viento Suburban Rind Tour

Most of the riding around Gardner I've done with the Chocolate Fairy has been in the dark. Well, there was the Chocolate Fairy tour, but that was more about spreading the gospel of theobromine than it was a ride.





This was more of just a ride around. We did stop and visit Pastor Kurt, who had an even bigger fleet of bicycles than last time I visited him, many of them destined for Africa. I've been wanting to introduce Corinna to Kurt for awhile now.



There was a strong south wind. A woman at Bonito Michoacan taught me, the other day, to describe this condition in Spanish and for once a Spanish lesson stuck. Hace viento.



We fought the headwinds first to get a tailwind coming back, but of course it wasn't quite that simple, we ended up considerably north of home before it was done. Going south, I was grinding up a gentle grade and decided I might have to resort to my granny gear when I realized I was already in my granny gear.




Then coming north, I was averaging around 20 mph in the flats with little effort, thinking I could actually use a bigger front chain ring.





We saw a dairy cannon, one I remember seeing on a ride last year. One of those times I wanted to stop for a picture and decided I'd get it next time. Which is always a mistake, you have to stop and take the picture or there often isn't a next time.



For that matter, I remembered it being a pair, something I thought was funny since 'dairy cannons' usually do come in twos. Maybe my memory is faulty, or maybe they got rid of one. There was a spot on the lawn that could have been the former home of a second gun.

I even managed to deliver some bike & hike action, not maybe as glamorous as a levy, but a train was parked across Clair and it was either go around it, backtrack, or grind out several miles of gravel further from home and probably not get back on time.

It was further than it looked to walk around the end of it.

We finished with a visit to the condemned bridge. When I moved to Gardner, you could still drive across it if you were brave. Now you can stand on it and watch the trains, which doesn't take as much nerve. Sure, it's condemned, but if it were about to fall with us standing on it, the railroad would probably have taken it down as a precaution.



An empty coal train came around the bend and right as it got to the bridge cranked up the diesels in a serious way. It was startling, deafening, and very literally awesome.



The homeless camp had a generator, they said they got six hours of TV out of a gallon and a half of gasoline. The train is the opposite sort of thing: as enormous and efficient as the camp generator is tiny and inefficient.




I'm not a big fan of passenger rail, it's not all that 'green' in most cases, but it's a fantastic way of moving large amounts of non-perishable freight.

Corinna has led me on plenty of explorations of what gets labeled the 'urban core,' so we were overdue to look around the rind of the metro area.

Chocolate Fairy at Epstein Gallery

The gallery this gig went down in is in a nursing home. Or retirement community. Whatever the preferred term is. A very upscale nursing home, actually.



The smell I remember from the ones my late stepbrother spent his last few years, well, I just hope his sense of smell was one of the things disabled in his accident. This place doesn't smell like that, it's more like a Holiday Inn.



So if you needed another reason to up your 401(k) contributions, a clean and comfortable place to be assisted through your last days is a good one.




The show was geared to kids, and since the kids were massively outnumbered by so-called adults, the grown-ups felt obligated to fill the 'kid' role. Okay, not obligated, privileged is more like it. I know I had fun.





I tried and failed to get Em to come, and with her small food thing, she'd have had a blast.





Mo really enjoyed the affair, to my pleasant surprise. She didn't want to go in, initially, but when she figured out it was a deal with art, stickers and chocolate, she settled in and got busy.










The Chocolate Fairy was sandwiched between a nutritionist and the clay artist who had the kids making small food. It went over well, including these two little guys writing with dark chocolate.



There was some cool art on display, too.



My favorite, I think (there was another that didn't photograph as well by the same artist that impressed me too), was this one called 'The Babysitter.'



When I was the age of the boy in the picture, the babysitter would have been the most interesting, tantalizing and scandalous thing in the room.