Summer Begins!

Inevitably, John has to work every good 3-day holiday weekend. So we decided to kick off the summer tomfoolery season the weekend prior, by loading our bikes up on the back of the car and heading up to Cape Cod.

Friday night was uneventful, as we arrived well after dark, with the exception that we had our first ever Honey Dew doughnuts, and discovered FREE DOUGHNUTS WITH BEVERAGE PURCHASE AFTER 7 PM! That was a happy discovery.

Saturday morning we awoke to find that Cape Cod really lives up to the audacious pretension "Door County of the East." It's lovely! We cruised around the Cape Cod Rail Trail a bit (a lot, John will tell you, perhaps too much), making it all the way from our campsite at Nickerson State Park on Cape Cod Bay to Chatham on the ocean (sound? I am far too much a Midwesterner to know where one ends and the other begins). It was neat that the bike trail is in such common use that it has ROTARIES (oh yes! More than one!) to manage the traffic flow and restaurants and ice cream shops oriented entirely to bike traffic. This is one of the little salt ponds we passed:
On the trail:
Sunday it was rainy and grey, so we headed up to Provincetown and swooned. What a lovely town, even in the grey mist.
And a gratuitous photo of me showing off my new camping percolator coffeepot. After several trial runs, it makes good coffee to feed an army!
I know, I should probably consider a camping accessories modeling career. I've heard it a million times.

Rock to Rock

I just wanted to put in a quick plug for this great event for which I volunteered in late April, mostly just because I got this great photo of New Haven Mayor John DeStefano all bike-geared-up:
I am so in favor of activities that promote awareness of cycling, because in my experience inadequate public education is the thing that keeps more people from riding their bikes in cities. I could say more about this, but it would go on for 10 posts. What really impressed me about Rock to Rock, even more than the spiffy green T-shirt I got, is their thoughtfulness about adhering to their stated goal. How many times do you attend an event like this, with a purported purpose that has some environmental component, and scratch your head at the hundreds of wastebaskets filled with half empty mini-water bottles, provided unlimited and free of charge by the event organizers? (I must take a moment here to disclose my hatred of bottled water, so perhaps this gets on my nerves ridiculously more than it gets on your nerves. But certainly you get my point?) The thoughtful and thorough organizers of Rock to Rock, composed of paid staff and unpaid board members from organizations such as friends of various New Haven parks and Common Ground, did not fail to notice this irony. Instead of providing *bottled water,* they provided a water bottle, which participants could fill as much as they wanted, from big ole reusable jugs of water. And not just any water bottle! A compostable, biodegradable water bottle! Huzzah!