A bike ride, a condo, a volcano!

1. A bike ride. I've been trying to plan one from NYC (the south Bronx, specifically) to the north Jersey coast for M & E's wedding union in August (yay! super exciting!) T has a bike I can borrow, and I've been poring over online maps. Long and short story: if I did the entire ride, it might well amount to the least pleasant bike ride in the history of bike riding.

(Okay, there have been some dodgy -20 days of biking in Alaska, too, but you know what I mean.)

A brief summary of what the ride would entail before it gets pleasant in southern Middlesex County and Monmouth County: the GW bridge, Fort Lee, Jersey City, Newark (including a highly unpleasant skirting of EWR, in the shadow of the Jersey Turnpike), Elizabeth, Linden, and Perth Amboy. There are other options, but they involve much, much more riding, as they require getting east of Newark, and I really want to be able to do this ride in one day, arriving for the 5pm event.

All this because there is NO BICYCLE OR PEDESTRIAN ACCESS for either of the bridges from Staten Island to New Jersey. (Side-rant: why are a third of American adults, and 16% of American children obese, we wonder? Why are 66% of Americans adults overweight???)

I could do almost all pleasant riding if I could just ride over the Outerbridge Crossing from Staten Island to Perth Amboy, NJ, and ride from there. I found one account of a guy who ignored the no-bikes rule, in 1997, on the Goethals Bridge, but he wisely did so in the middle of the night. He writes: "I decided to sneak across the Goethals Bridge under cover of the night." Unfortunately, I really really don't want to start from the south Bronx at 2am in order to be able to accomplish same, and couldn't get a Staten Island ferry that early anyway.

So I'm strongly considering taking the NJ Transit train for the first half of it, to Elizabeth or so, and riding from there. I bet I'll be in a lot better shape for the festivities that way.

2. A condo. What J and I fly out tonight to go look for in Atlanta over a very long weekend. We're focusing on Midtown, and are both excited to get into something smaller, with a better carbon footprint, and where we actually want to go walk in the neighborhood. Those of you who have been to our place in Anchorage know how less-than-pleasant it is to walk from our house, at least the first 1/2 mile or so.

3. A volcano. To wit, Mt. Redoubt, which might keep us from making the above-referenced trip. Or not.