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Wutheringbikes Home -- TransAm Bike Ride
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June 17th 2004
After
a long flight in which we could see various bits of offshore Canada, we
landed amidst thunderclouds, at Washington Dulles Airport. Then the wonderful
Metrobus took our bikes (on the front of the bus) to the centre of town.
The International Hostelling Youth Hostel was easy to find, but not bike
friendly, they didn't want to have our bikes inside the hostel (clearly
this isn't France where they are happy to display your bike in the hotel
lobby!). Anyhow, having now been awake for about 36 hours, I (Steve) haggled
them inside. They are locked in a remote part of the basement, against the
stern will of the management! Washington's best bits look like Paris (e.g.
the Old Administration Building), I think! But the capitol has a Sacre Coeur
wedding cakey feel that's quite nice I suppose. And the White House is impressive,
again white for purity of political intention no doubt (hype over reality
I guess). The picture is of a Washington DC bike policeman, interrupted
in the performance of his duty in order for us to take a photo. Nice to
see bike police - not a common site back home in Bradford sadly!
At
the Smithsonian Air and Space museum we saw the story of flight. It's
nice to see that there, at the very beginning of the story of modern flight,
is the bicycle. The Wright's were cycle manufacturers who decided to try
branching out a bit. The rest is history. The picture is, according to
the notice, a bike that the Wright's made and used themselves. Washington's
wide streets lend themselves to cycling though we didn't see on-road cycle
routes marked. The Smithsonian museums are free, and compared with most
major museums, they seemed empty of visitors. We were able to get a good
look at various world famous Monets and Renoirs without any jostling and
the curators didn't need to resort to riot control techniques. Such a
contrast to the rugby scrum atmosphere in the Louvre or the Van Gogh in
Amsterdam.
On the 'plane over to the states
a retired boeing employee was reading a best seller about some Chicago World Fair - he recommended (Devil in
a White Dress?)
it very highly and talked about his time as part of the boeing contribution to the satellite
business. He said that US drivers weren't used to cyclists and that they might well
react with surprise and not be very good at overtaking. I think we later sent him
an email link to our web pages as they were during the bike ride (at www.geocities.com/bradfordbikes).
The policeman we photographed was in the middle of a
call and I blundered in asking for a photo. He was on his walky-talky all the time.
Our meal that evening was a first introduction to the cheap chinese food that sustained
us through a large part of the USA - especially in the West. The day concluded with a huge
thunderstorm - it had been building up all day. We had been worrying about cycling in such
intense humidity - it did seem as hot and, above all, as humid, as the tropics. Arriving at the hostel
in the late evening was an atmospheric introduction to America. The immigration control had been
more relaxed than we expected - though he got tetchy when Guy and I tried to act as a couple - we had to
go through one by one. The bus was great - though we were worried that the bikes were about to go flying
off the front since the bus driver hurtled through the suburbs at a huge speed and things outside seemed
a blur (this may have been connected to having heen awake for 24 hours). We'd printed off instructions for using the bike carrier on the front, but it still took a few
seconds to get the bikes on board, so we felt very much the two blundering tourists. Most people on the bus
looked like they were on their way home from work - two birds of paradise blown into a commuter bus.
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Wutheringbikes Home -- TransAm Bike Ride
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