Subject: Re: Best bike in a blackout?
Author: Roberto Munoz
Date: Aug 16, 2003, 5:12 AM
Post ID: 1714168882
David, glad to hear you had some Fun.....Great write Up...
Roberto.
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Washburn" <guzzi-@yahoo.com>
To: <Loopfram-@topica.com>
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2003 9:08 PM
Subject: Best bike in a blackout?
| A loopframe, but you knew that... We had a little power outage here in the baked apple, 50 million consumers affected. The lights went out at aproximately 4:15 p.m. and I was on the Queensboro Bridge putting along on the Eldo/SP. When I reached the Queens side of the East river it became obvious something was amiss, no stop lights! I always found them to be a nuisance anyway. I got home a little faster as a result but what is a home without a significant other to cook your dinner? The Bonster(She Who Must Be Obeyed) was trapped in lower Manhattan. She had to borrow a cell phone from a colleague to give me her location: The vortex of NYC traffic insanity. Forty minutes of lanesplitting, curb-hopping and pleading with cagers got me to the Five Points. (See Gangs of New York for historical significance). There traffic stopped inching and came to a halt. My bike was showing signs of heat prostration so I shut it down and turned pedestrian, pushing my bike on the sidewalk until I could fire it up again. I cut though a reeking alley, past some police barricades and made my way to my rendezvous outside a Chinese funeral parlor off Mott street. My wife ditched her corporate suit, slipped on her denims, boots, gloves and helmet and we weaved our way out of Chinatown by ignoring one way signs and scraping past cars in the gutter or passing them using curb cuts to ride the sidewalk. Once on the Manhattan bridge headed to Brooklyn we were O.K. The river breeze was cooling and we had a fantastic view of the crowds of pedestrians thronging the Brooklyn Bridge to our right. The inbound lanes had become the worlds largest pedestrian arcade. The Brooklyn Queens Expressway was another 30 minutes of lanesplitting as every exit spilled back onto the highway. With no traffic lights the local streets were pandemonium. When we made it home I cooked dinner on the grill and we had a nice candlelit meal in the backyard. No planes overhead, no rap n' salsa serenades from the neighbors, just a big yellow moon and crickets and fireflies for company. The power came back on this morning at 8:00 AM and the Eldo got an oil change and a wash and wax as a reward for a job well done. David in NYC |