return from exile
how can they do this to me?!
For the past couple of months the Lexington DPW has been working on the bikeway, and for the last three or four weeks they've been working on the part of the bikeway that I use to get to work. For some reason they didn't let me ride through, though I'm sure I could have gone around the trucks and things on the grass. Instead I was exiled to the road, forced from my calm and secluded path onto surfaces much less convivial. In fact, I'm pretty sure some of the drivers were trying to kill me.
In their defense, they were just trying to get to work, and they probably didn't know that I was too. Also their vehicles are much bigger, which gives them greater moral standing; and I had the potential to hold them up, while if they got in my way I could just go around them. So it was totally fine for them to honk and try and run me off the road!
Actually, it wasn't that bad. I'm pretty confident on the bicycle, and probably just as much of a jerk as most of the drivers—I totally know how to take the lane if necessary. When the detour had me going through Lexington Center I even occasionally enjoyed being able to outpace traffic-slowed cars over a mile-and-a-half distance. Still, while thrilling, the experience was not particularly conducive to a generous state of mind upon my arrival at work: something about people threatening your life to get somewhere 15 seconds faster tends to bring out the rage, I'm afraid. And when the work shifted west a bit and I was driven onto this—well, forget it!
But now the barricades are down and my early-morning peace-of-mind has returned. I can ride as fast or as slow as I want, and my mind is free to wander to plans for the garden or future blog posts. All is right with the world—or would be, at least, if the two months of closures had included time for repaving all the sections of path that were ripped up for the work. Oh well, at least I'm better off than the roller-bladers.
comments
Welcome to my world. This is why daddy drinks.
Haha, yeah. I'm sure I wouldn't survive your commute every day: I'm too much of a country mouse. I do want to take a trip into the city one day though just to see if I could hack it.
The Charles River path is really excellent and its just the million pedestrians you have to dodge on a sunny day, we should do a 20 mile weekend run to the Esplanade and back whenever you're up to it.
Totally! I think of it often, especially when I feel like I'd rather keep riding than stop at work. When the weather gets warm again.