A quick shot from our Saturday bike ride. This is on the part where we go around a sharp right curve that’s almost a turn. It’s an uphill that’s almost a downhill, or a downhill that is an uphill, I can never decide. The part just before this you can really hammer it. And within just a few feet from here you’re in the Bermuda Triangle of gear selection. It never makes sense.
Immediately after that, though, there’s a left hand turn and she takes off. It’s a three-mile stretch that suits her strong, powerful style. I slowed down, too, because my rear tire was starting to feel a bit spongey and there’s a big downhill ahead that ends at a stop sign. I wanted to be conservative there.
But then you turn left and eventually it turns into a one-mile uphill.
There was another cyclist up ahead. We caught him. I jokingly cautioned him against letting me slow him down when he passed me on the bigger part of the climb. I heard The Yankee giggling at that as I went by her. And then he passed me.
But I caught him again. And then I got stung by some sort of flying insect, just above the knee. It only hurt when I pedaled, which I had to do for another 10 miles or so.
All of it was fun, except for the bee sting.
But I don’t want you to think that all of life is fun and musical and amazing. Today’s big adventure was trimming back a huge shrub in the back yard. It was long overdue.
And now back to your regularly scheduled cat update. No bush chores for them, but they had a big week nevertheless.
Here’s Phoebe enjoying her Sunday evening nap.
We’ve recently moved some furniture around and she has had no problem adjusting to that, as you can tell.
Poseidon is living up to his name, looking for a shower this morning.
I tremble in fear at what he might want tomorrow.
That’s it for now. Please check out my Twitter for more. And you can also see the (still-running!) series of videos I’m uploading daily from our Cozumel dive trip, over on Instagram, too. Speaking of Instagram and cats, did you know that Phoebe and Poseidon have an Instagram account? They do. Check them out.
My lovely bride told me I shouldn’t put this into the world, but the forecast was for 107 degrees, and we didn’t hit that mark. So I taunted the weather. She said the weather would make me regret it. She’s really thinking of everyone else. Like I want it to be 107 degrees.
This was plenty. I’m not as young as I used to be.
More music from last Friday’s show! Here are a few clips from Barenaked Ladies, who were the headliners.
“It’s All Been Done” hit number one in Canada and landed in the top 10 in the US.
BNL’s live show comes with a lot of comedy and a bit of ad libbing and the occasional freestyle moment.
The song about pinching is a big hit.
There are also singalongs in a BNL show.
Here’s a newer tune. “Man Made Lake” was on last year’s Detour
There are classics, of course, and covers, too. We’ll get to some of those tomorrow.
No one is going to talk about this enough, but Wout van Aert had the most amazing ride in the Tour de France today. It was on the cobbles. He’d captured the yellow leader’s jersey, and was a favorite for stage five. And then it all went wrong. And then it went sideways and bananas. And then Wout van Aert showed his mettle.
He crashed once and narrowly avoided crashing into a team car. After he recovered from all of that, his team had the worst day imaginable and he had to drop back to save them. It seemed a sacrifice of the yellow jersey. But Wout is the strongest rider in the best field in the world. Here are the highlights.
So after his crash, and a near-crash, and animating the race, and giving that up to save his team’s two overall contenders, Wout van Aert still managed to narrowly hang on to the maillot jaune. He’ll give it up in the next day or two, and people won’t really appreciate his ride today as they should, but it was epic.
The setup is this … and this is similar to something that I explained here last week, but also different.
We ride bikes through a nearby neighborhood and the other end of that neighborhood ends with a T-intersection. We turn right, which is immediately into a little hill. It’d be fine if you just rode over it, but it’s just stiff enough to be unpleasant from a complete stop — as in an intersection. So when we go that way, which is often, I jump on up ahead so I can be the Stop or Go signal for my lovely bride. If the timing works out, she can just take the right turn and keep up a little momentum. And somewhere just after that hill I can catch back up to her because I have no momentum. But just after that hill we take another turn and work through another neighborhood, and there’s a particular road there where I had one good day and now I try to hit it with zeal every time. I am three seconds off the Strava segment leader. It’s a short sprint and I’m sure I’m only on the leaderboard because no one really rides that road, or rides it hard, anyway.
But now I do, because of that one good day, and so I attacked it again yesterday. I have come to realize that my average time is only three or four seconds off my best time on that segment. It’s short, and that, of course, means that even my fastest time wasn’t that fast there, but nevertheless. We get to that right hand turn and I do what I can for about 35 seconds.
I do both of those things each time we go out this way, now. And yesterday, just like last week, The Yankee passed me about a mile later. Last time I was taking a sip of water and she rode away from me. This time, she just put in one little turn of speed … and it took 10 miles for me to catch her again.
So here’s a photo from our Monday morning bike ride.
Did you know the Gin Blossoms had a Grammy nomination in 1997? Did you know they lost to the Beatles?
Had you forgotten that the Beatles were somehow still releasing music three decades after the band broke up? There’s been good money in nostalgia since the invention of surviving media, I think.
Anyway, this was that song for the Gin Blossoms. They were the feature act in a show with Toad the Wet Sprocket and Barenaked Ladies, a concert we caught last Friday night.
That record sold five million copies and stayed on the charts for three years. And all the old fans — we weren’t the youngest people there, but we might have been close? — still sing along.
Jesse Valenzuela remains the band’s true weapon. Here’s his standard solo on the Doug Hopkins hit.
Robin Wilson makes a joke
This one was an initial release on the Empire Records soundtrack in 1995.
Anyway, “Til I Hear It from You” was re-released as a single the next year. Billboard hailed it as “the closest thing to a perfect pop song to hit radio in recent memory.”
The soundtrack, by the way, is holding up better than the movie.
It’s a coming-of-age movie and most of those don’t age well after the desired audience ages. No one was interested in Gen X at the time anyway, so that film was destined to flop, which it did. (It doesn’t hurt that it isn’t any good.) It does have a minor following for two lines of dialog but is otherwise not as good as the soundtrack, which was fronted by that Gin Blossoms tune. At Variety, Ken Eisner famously wrote Empire Records was “a soundtrack in search of a movie,”
Anyway, that song was number one in Canada, and in the top 10 on virtually every American chart. It is frozen in amber.
adventures / cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on I was breathless, she was tranquilo — a bike story 28 Jun 22
I like riding from behind. First, the pace is your own. Second, you don’t have to worry about bumping anyone directly in front of you. So it is never a bad thing when there’s a little space created between my front wheel and my lovely bride. But I also like riding out front, because that gives her something to chase.
So it was the best of both worlds today, which almost makes it the worst.
Let me explain. I’d attacked her twice, springing ahead early, twice. First, because I can play traffic cop at a key intersection. I get to a downhill T-intersection and can tell her to go through or stop. It’s a little helpful because when we take that turn at the stop sign you go immediately uphill. No momentum. But she’s finally learning to accept that I have a healthy respect for empty roads and she will go into the intersection when I wave her on. Advantage: momentum!
I have to start at a dead start, but better one of us than both. And, besides, I’ll catch her near the top of that little hill.
We take another turn, and go over some rollers and then turn right into another neighborhood. I am tied for third on that segment on Strava, just three seconds off the leader. There are two datapoints in that sentence which make no sense in the way I ride, but I had a good turn one day a month or two back and now I’m interested in attacking this particular road when we take that route. (Recently I equaled my best. This also doesn’t make a lot of sense.) So I attacked that again, today, and found myself four seconds off my best time.
But about a mile later, The Yankee went by me. It wasn’t an attack, she just outpaced me. I reached down to grab a sip of water, put the bottle back in the bidon cage, looked up and she was down the road.
This photo is merely a recreation. I did not have time to take pictures today.
She did this on the big galloping rollers. All of those comes down to legs. Some days I’m stronger there. Often, she’s powering away from me. Today, I could tell that I wasn’t making a lot of cuts into her advantage. And then she perhaps got a break in the traffic that I didn’t at an intersection, and she was gone.
All of this time, I was riding hard. With abandon. I did not have to worry about the pace of anyone in front of me, because the road was empty. Hands on hoods, hands in the drops. Legs alive and burning. Lungs dead and burning.
It was one of the faster rides of the year, I think. It was one of the better, harder, rides I’ve had in a while. I don’t know if I could get more out of my bike, but for two hills where I lagged a bit.
I got to the house and she was sitting on the back porch, all casual like. She asked me if I was OK. I was fine. My bike felt like it was floating over bumps. One of the tracking apps said I hit 49.9 miles per hour.
She had already put her bike inside.
So she’s recovered from her crash 10 days ago. The rest of us are just chasing.
This was written for a Friday, two weeks ago. That’s the way of it around here for a bit as we go over our amazing travels. So, if you’d be so kind as to cast your mind back two weeks (and also 78 years ago) …
Like many panoramas, this one lives at the intersection between beautiful and enlightening and distorting. Like all panoramas on this site, if you click it, you can see the larger version. We were there two weeks ago.
We caught a morning train out of Paris to head west to Bayeux.
And in Bayeux we rented e-bikes to ride all over the beautiful countryside of Normandy. It is beautiful. We rode all over the countryside. And not all of it on roads. The Yankee suggested Normandy, and I said I wanted to go here, if we could, and after a lot of pedaling, this was our first stop for the day. (Note that upright stone just on the left margin.
If you stood at that stone and look left, you would see Utah Beach just beyond that point.
And if you stood at that sone and looked to your right, beyond the other point, you would see Omaha Beach.
And if you stood at that stone memorial, you’d be wear Ronald Reagan delivered one of the truly great speeches of his presidency.
Peggy Noonan had found his voice by then, and it didn’t hurt that the topic was such a dramatic moment, and the audience included some of the heroes he was talking about.
I remember reading about this anniversary, the 40th, in the second grade, before any of this made any sense to me. I remember a quote from one of the Rangers who was at that event. They’d taken them to the shore line and they looked up the cliff face in wonder. How in the world did we do that? That quote is now 38 years old, and as much as anything, I owe my awe to the moment to that awe of the men who did it.
The guns were located so that they could cover both Utah and Omaha. They could do terrible damage to the troops coming ashore, or to the vessels waiting off the coast. So they sent in the Army Rangers.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff planning Operation OVERLORD assigned the Rangers of the 2d and 5th Ranger Battalions, under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel James E. Rudder and organized into the Provisional Ranger Group, the mission of destroying the enemy positions on the cliff top. Unbeknownst to Allied planners, the Germans failed to believe that U.S. military command would consider the cliff top accessible by sea. The Americans, however, considered it an accessible assault point and reasoned that with a well-trained force, soldiers could land on the narrow beaches below at low tide and ascend the cliffs with the assistance of ropes and ladders. When Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley told Rudder of the assignment, the Ranger officer could not believe what he had heard, but he understood the importance of the mission at hand. In his memoir, A Soldier’s Story, Bradley wrote, “No soldier in my command has ever been wished a more difficult task than that which befell the thirty-four-year-old Commander of this Provisional Ranger Force.”
The original ornate plans were ruined by rough seas, which put the entire Pointe du Hoc timetable well behind schedule. They were forced to improvise.
The delay gave the Germans enough time to recuperate, reposition their defenses, and lay heavy gunfire on the incoming Rangers from companies D, E, and F. The Rangers, no longer able to follow Rudder’s original plan, were now instructed to land all companies to the east of Pointe du Hoc on a strip of beach about 500 yards long and thirty yards wide. They came under heavy fire from the Germans while coming ashore. As the soldiers at the front exited the landing craft, the Rangers toward the rear laid down covering fire as their comrades ran to shore and took shelter in a small cave at the base of the cliff or in craters along the narrow beach.
[…]
The Rangers experienced much difficulty climbing up the cliffs that day. Many of the ropes that caught hold of the cliffs that morning were completely covered by enemy fire, making the number available for climbing severely limited. The wet ropes were slippery and soldiers were weighed down by damp uniforms and mud clinging to their clothes, boots and equipment. German bullets and “potato masher” grenades rained down from above. Nevertheless, the Rangers climbed to the top of Pointe du Hoc while under enemy fire. Several German soldiers were killed and others driven off from the cliff edges when Rangers opened fire on them with Browning Automatic Rifles (BARs).
The guns they were sent to capture, their primary objective, weren’t there. The Germans had moved them back from what they’d thought was an impregnable position. A two-man Ranger patrol later found five of the six pieces of heavy artillery and they were subsequently.
After scaling the 110-foot cliff face against brutal German fire, gaining the top and then fighting the enemy for two dys fewer than 75 of the original 225 who came ashore at Pointe du Hoc on D-Day were fit for duty. It’s a testament to bravery and grit, and courage and honor. We were fortunate to have been able to visit it for a brief time.
From there we rode our rental bikes to the Normandy American Cemetery. We weaved through traffic, passing gobs of cars (it was oh so satisfying) stuck in traffic in time to see the evening’s flag lowering.
The World War II cemetery in Colleville-sur-Met, Normandy, France covers 172.5 acres and contains 9,388 burials. In the gardens are the engraved names of 1,557 servicemen declared missing in action in Normandy.
In that building you’ll see massive maps describing the planning and the D-Day assault itself, and also the push all the way to the Elbe River.
None of this was a certainty when D-Day began. And it took about two months of hard, deadly fighting, before the Allies could claim Normandy as under their control. Great losses were absorbed and delivered to get off that beachhead.
On the cemetery’s chapel there is a carving in the marble of part of John 10:28, “I give unto them eternal life and they shall never perish.”
The cemetery looks over a bluff onto Omaha Beach. There are 304 unknown soldiers at rest in the grounds of the cemetery.
It also contains the graves of 45 pairs of brothers (30 are side-by-side), a father and son, an uncle and nephew, two pairs of cousins, four chaplains, four civilians, three generals and three Medal of Honor recipients.
We were about 30 miles into our lovely afternoon bike ride, and we were starting to eye the clock. The bike shop we rented from closed at 7, and our train was coming at about 8:30. So we had to race back. (Nice bikes, would rent again. Would check to make sure my back brake worked before I set out next time, though. I had to feather off the front brake for the entire day!) We made it just in time, which was the shocking theme for the whole day. Just caught the morning train. Arrived with our bikes ready, got lost twice and still made it to the cemetery just in time to see the flags lowered. Lingered around that hallowed place a while, giving us just enough time to get back to the bike shop, which left us enough time to get a bite to eat at a place next to the train station. Which put us safely on the train.
It was an important day in important places. I’m glad we did it, and that it all worked out as it did, which was to say, perfectly.
She planned another great trip, and we’re just getting started.
We still have two days in Paris, where our adventures will continue.
