Piles of Miles

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Joey here.

We biked 591 miles from Minneapolis to South Bend, then 386 more in NYC. (Zoom in to see some of the 250 pins marking our routes.)

We have 15,996 miles in the bank.

Just four short of 16,000.

Here are some tidbits from a 27 mile (43 km) NYC day we enjoyed this week.

Doing the Brooklyn Baby Biker Boost*

*We don’t photograph faces for social media without permission. Take our word for it: this is a photogenic baby.
Award-winning theater director and Marymount Manhattan College professor Roger Danforth https://www.rogerdanforth.com/ enjoys cycling in Brooklyn. Roger is descended from Nicholas Danforth, who left England for Massachusetts in 1634. (The First Nations did not ask Nicholas for his papers.)

Actors, to be actors, must understand and inhabit characters with identities that differ from their own. People who learn from Roger can cultivate the empathy fundamental to respect for human rights.
The green poop bag hanging from this Prospect Parker’s pocket suggests good intentions.

How will he manage to clean up after (by our count) 15 dogs?
Temy’s parents met in Panama. Fresh from church in Astoria, he asked to take our photo, then posed for us.

Temy knows that human rights protections are fragile. Temy and his dad planned a trip to see Dad’s native Hong Kong; the rise of the city’s authoritarian regime led them to cancel the trip.

As on every day of the Ride, we encountered wonderful people whose photos we don’t have and whose stories we didn’t record.

On Warren Street in lower Manhattan, a man held out a blue water bottle for Jeffrey—we thanked him as we passed—and sang out how great I looked! (He can’t have meant Jeffrey.)

On Caton Street in Brooklyn, a cigar-chomping man on a stand-up electric scooter spun on a dime to stop alongside us at a traffic light. He put his hand on his heart, said kind words not fully intelligible amid the traffic noise, and wished us well.

In Manhattan’s Central Park, many Spandex-clad cyclists raced past us flashing peace signs, calling out praise and encouragement, and (we think) sometimes showing a little wistfulness as they imagined what we’ve seen and heard and felt and done as we’ve crisscrossed our country.

Our journey has been long enough to take us around the world at the 32nd parallel. That line happens to mark the border between western Texas and southern New Mexico. It runs through Algeria and Pakistan, Tel Aviv and Chongqing.

We didn’t circle the world. We saw our country instead. (With a nod to Dr. Seuss.)

We’ll see more of America tomorrow.

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