The last day started, for me anyway, with another bike ride. This time I rode into the wind first, a journey that took me from the hotel southbound toward the boardwalk area. I should have checked whether you can ride on the boardwalk here. In some places you can before stores open, plus at least for part of it, OC has both a boardwalk and a parallel wide concrete path. That would have been fun. It was still fun.
Lots of people don't like riding in urban areas. I grew up in Brooklyn and rode all the time, and when I moved back to New York in the late 70's the previous occupants of the apartment had left a beat up 3-speed old Schwinn girl's bike- the perfect city bike, indestructible and worthless: too old and ugly to be worth stealing with even minimal locking up. I rode all over Manhattan on that bike. Okay, not through Times Square or anything, but anywhere most people would be comfortable driving a car. So I don't mind.
It's not like I don't know the risks, but for all the risk in urban areas, people are generally moving slowly compared to on suburban roads, and the principles are the same. You ride far enough from parked cars to avoid getting doored. Even if you're not going to actually stop at a red light, be ready to and more generally, respect the rules even if you're not going to follow them to the letter. But above all ride without fear.
I don't mean that you shouldn't be cautious. I'm an extremely cautious rider; I've been riding 100-150 miles a week for the past dozen summers without even coming close to having an accident or fall. But what I mean is that you can't ride around fearfully, expecting trouble at every moment. You can't do that well any more than you can drive that way. You look for and anticipate potential trouble spots, and once you've taken a course you go with it, ready to react but not expecting to. So cautious, but confident. I don't know, it works for me.
So anyway, I don't mind riding down the street in Ocean City, which hardly qualifies as urban anyway. There's a shared bus/bike lane; it's the only place I've seen such a thing, but if you can keep up a decent rate of speed, the bus won't ever catch you. Going into the wind that's not entirely possible, but with the wind I actually put distance on the bus behind me and almost caught the one in front.
Then it was time to pack and get out of town. The students, I have to say, were remarkably efficient at cleaning and packing. In past years there's always been some group that trashed their room and required major cleanup. But not this year. So we got out on time and headed for an amusement center.
Unfortunately, most of the parks don't fully open until June 1, but we found one with go karts, mini golf, bumper boats, and a couple of other things.
And then it was time to go home, so off we went. It was fun. Very hot and muggy, but fun. And now we're off for home.
Once I've had a chance to process this, I'll do another post on my overall impressions, but we'll be back at school shortly and I want to get this done
No comments:
Post a Comment