My First Day on a Citi Bike

The first question anyone who knows me would ask about why I joined the Citi Bike program is, "Um, don't you already OWN a perfectly good bike?"  This is true.  I'd been using that bike to commute to work for a few months now, ever since the weather started getting nice and I put in the effort to haul the thing from my parents' house to my apartment.  It's been working pretty well, except for the fact that for the past few weeks we've been experiencing a curious phenomenon whereby the weather forecast will predict possible thunderstorms NEARLY EVERY DAMNED EVENING.  I've had the experience once of having to take my bike through the subway because of rain, and it was an awkward process of circumventing turnstiles and navigating many more stairs than I'd remembered having to climb on foot.  In addition to that, taking my bike to work involved having to bring it in around the loading docks and up the World's Slowest Freight Elevator, with it's light fixture dripping a mysterious brown fluid and its tendency to be filled with garbage carts in the evenings.  So in short, I applied for a Citi Bike membership because I'm a whiner.

Okay, maybe that's not the ONLY reason.  When I heard that New York City was getting a bike share program I felt compelled to support it, both because it encouraged healthy lifestyles and because it might get a few more people out of their cars and off of the ridiculously crowded subways and buses.  An annual membership is only $95, and on top of that I was eligible for a discount because I have a Citibank credit card that I haven't gotten around to canceling yet.  So about two weeks ago I took the plunge.  Of course it was that very evening, after there was no turning back, that I came across an article in the New York Times about the many troubles the bike program was having, with tales of broken kiosks, bikes not locking into racks, annual passes taking forever to ship, and customer service being inundated with complaints.

I experienced the truth of at least one of these statements: the pass I ordered was supposed to ship in 3-5 days, and I found myself waiting just over two weeks until I finally received it last night.  I activated it online, and I was off to the races.

...Or so I thought.  When I arrived at the kiosk this morning I realized that I hadn't paid close attention to the directions for USING the annual pass: a long rectangular fob on my keychain with a bar code on its side.  The kiosk's menu screens didn't say anything about annual passes, and the many scanners and orifices on its front didn't seem designed to accommodate the fob.  After a few minutes of fumbling around with the kiosk I finally decided to go over and take a look at the bikes themselves, and sure enough I found that next to each bike there was a slot that the fob fit into perfectly.  No screens, no fiddling with the keypad next to each bike, just jam in the fob, wait for the green light, and then out comes the bike.  Okay, fair enough.

It took a little time to adjust to the bike, but that's always the case when I ride an unfamiliar model for the first time.  It rode well enough, and the tires were probably better suited to the streets than the ones on my regular bike.  My only complaint is that the bike just has three gears, and even the highest one isn't terribly powerful.  That made for a ride that wasn't terribly fast, although I still managed to pass the occasional slowpoke as I followed the bike lanes along my route (I was still passed by a great many more bikers, but that isn't unusual---I can't bike nearly as well as I run, though part of that may be that I haven't fully readapted to the practice yet).

When I got to the bike stand outside my office, I was able to lock the bike into place after just a couple of tries, which was a relief.  Then I headed over to the clean, normal person's elevator, and headed up to start my day.

So to sum up, I still may take my normal bike in with me on days when the weather's more reliable (and if I'm going long distances---Citi Bikes start charging extra after 45 minutes of use), but Citi Bikes do come in handy for less predictable situations, which in this city are always just around the corner.

Ireland in Six Runs

Gosh, it's been a while since I've written one of these things.  So where have I been then?  Well, most recently I've been running around Ireland.  Not the whole country, mind, but enough of it to get a good feel of the place.

The occasion of the trip was a big family gathering to trace my great grandmother's roots back to a tiny little town in County Leitrim, all the way up in the northwest corner of the country.  There were ten of us, so it became a bit like herding cats at times, but we managed to get through it all with tempers relatively intact.

Our trip started out with a package tour out of Dublin, and I took the bold/foolish initiative of running around Dublin on the morning after my first night in the city when my ability to sleep failed me after ten hours.  Dublin was by far the most urban of the places we visited, so I had to keep an eye out for traffic, and I still hadn't yet gotten the hang of looking for it coming from the reverse of the directions I'm used to.  I kept to running around the perimeters of parks as much as I could to avoid that.  Parks also had the advantage of being rectangular, which I soon discovered the value of when I had to veer off of them down the city's winding streets, and I ended up doubling back over a mile out of my way.  I eventually found my bearings and managed to get back to the hotel somehow.

Our next stop was Cork, which was slightly smaller and split up among a number of islands.  Our hotel was actually on an island so small that you had to cross its sole bridge to another island in order to really get anywhere.  There were some lovely parks there as well, and one bridge I crossed immediately took me up and up and up a hill, until I was looking down on the entire city (while also keeping an eye out for cars on a narrow road that was flanked by walls where you'd normally expect to find sidewalks).  I got lost a bit again on my way back, but not as badly this time.

After that we headed up to Killarney, which had the biggest park of them all.  Mists were still on the lake as I ran past lounging herds of cows and elk in the early morning.  The presence of large animals and the state of my jet lag-addled brain brought the experience to an almost surreal level.

Fourth up was Limerick.  Or at least that's what the destination was called.  I never saw Limerick, or anything else that would show up on a political map with any degree of detail.  Our hotel was a Radisson in the middle of farm country, which happened to have the cocktail reception of a wedding going on in its lobby as I headed out in my exercise clothes, feeling so out of place that I actually started to be a little proud of it.  The run consisted of me running up a road for two miles without hitting an intersection, then running back for two miles along the very same road.  There weren't any sidewalks or shoulders, and the bushes grew high on either side of the road, so I had to rely heavily on drivers' ability to see me as they came around a bend before splattering me onto the pavement.

Limerick was the last stop on the tour proper, so from there we piled into rental cars at Shannon Airport and headed north to Strandhill in County Sligo---the nearest place to my great grandmother's hometown that had sizable accommodations.  Right after we checked into the hotel I had my most beautiful run yet---nothing but picturesque countryside set between the mountains and the sea.  There was even a bike lane, which gave me some breathing room from the cars.  At one point I hit a fork that gave me the choice of running back on the side of the mountain I'd come from or circumnavigating it, and I regret that I didn't quite have time to take the longer route.

The last destination had what would prove to be the most challenging run of all: Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.  We stayed at a hotel that was literally right next door to the Causeway, known for its unique seaside rock formations that resembled five- and six-sided crystals.  We all had fun hopping around them after our tour.  When I asked about hours for the Causeway at the front desk, I learned that the waterfront and the trails around it were always open, and that what we'd payed admission for was essentially just access to the Visitor's Center.  That's when I hatched my scheme to run as much of the shorefront as I could the next morning.

From what I was able to learn about the waterfront, there was no way that I was going to go all the way along it.  The full system of trails extended for 33 miles, which is far beyond the limits of even my insanity.  I ended up going only about eight and a half miles, but within that space I went from beaches to dizzying five-hundred-foot-tall cliffs, past railroad tracks and around golf course, and up and down dramatic undulations so steep that I had to slow to a walk even when going downhill in some places.  The mist turned to drizzle, until I wasn't sure how much of the water soaking me was rain and how much of it was sweat.  I finally stopped and turned around when I came across a pack of rams that was drinking from a pool at the edge of one of the cliffs.  They'd somehow managed to get beyond the fence that separated the trail from the farmland beyond (though I should note here that there wasn't any similar barrier between the trail and the sheer drop a few feet away from it).  The rams started to trot away when I saw them, and rather than follow in pursuit I decided that my madness had driven me far enough, so I ran back to the the hotel.

The runs were only a small part of the vacation, and I have an avalanche of memories from it that I'm still frantically trying to copy all down into a journal.  Seeing as how I've already passed a thousand words here though, I think I'd better wrap this entry up and save the rest for another time.