I ride my bike three miles to my local transit station and then hop the train the short fifteen minutes to Midtown Atlanta’s Arts Center Station. I take the elevator at the Woodruff Arts Center to the plaza above and then head out from there across the City of Atlanta.
Sometimes (like yesterday) I first visit the High Museum of Art (which I love, and to which I get unlimited entry for just four dollars a month). Sometimes (like yesterday) I continue on beyond Atlanta to Decatur and then Clarkston (see free bike tours numbers 7 and 8), where I steward a Sharing Garden at a community garden for refugees. I like that this used to be my five-days-a-week life before the pandemic and I know my way around well.
I like being able to ride my bike of choice ( my road bike Attica, whom you met in my book in Chapter 2: The Bike in the Attic) at my skill level (not on cracked, uncomfortable sidewalks and not with that asinine BikeNoodle) without the constant indignities and “bike-friendly” greenwashing of my Metro Atlanta city. (I don’t like that the first three miles to the transit station are the worst part of this trip — I avoid it at the end by taking two buses home instead. I do like that I have access to MARTA trains and buses* and that bikes are allowed on them at any time.)
I like the way my muscles ignite; the way strangers are friends; the way art and fruit and fun punctuate my path. I like supporting local businesses (#BikesMeanBusiness, especially when ridden by women**). I like that I can ride twenty five miles without one f*cking problem. (No, it’s not perfect but, my god, comparatively it is heaven.)
I’d like more of this, please:
* How to load/unload a bike on a bus:
** Why it makes sense (and dollars and cents) to make your city safer for women on bikes (I didn’t even add the part about likelihood of organ damage/death, due to our in-general smaller size than men, when hit by drivers of increasingly-larger vehicles — see Little Me, Big Truck):
Traveling at the Speed of Bike 