The Count Down is On

I can't believe the school year is winding down and the end is in sight. That means I only have a little over 1 month to see all of St. Louis I intend to. So I better get busy.

This past week I did a few long rides out in West County. I decided to ride my mountain bike. This was a good thing because there was a lot of curb hopping to be done due to the traffic and road construction. The sights are truly beautiful if you are willing to ride about 10 mile of horrendous city traffic before you get to the rolling hills.

I must qualify this last statement. To really see the beauty of the landscape one must have a well developed sense of imagination. One must also suspend one's belief in the wisdom of humanity. For me it is a coping mechanism. I can and I must imagine how breathtaking it was before the advent of The Subdivision. Truly, this category of development is the bane of the contemporary American landscape.
The street names are so trite and ubiquitous. Does any suburban area not have countless streets with such whimsical names as Ridge Crest Ave, Stony Pointe Drive, Aspen Bluff Blvd, Springwood Court, Lost Pines Lane? Do the masses understand the irony of those former bluffs, springs, ridges and crest having been bulldozed to make way for these idyllic little Pleasantvilles? No, I thought not.

But I did enjoy my many miles immensely, in spite of. And I found hidden pockets of treasure in the form of strongholds of un-pretentiousness. In one case, I was winding my way along a county road with a 6,000 sf house every acre or so and I noticed a sharp left that dropped precipitously down along a roaring stream. It was definitely the road less traveled and it felt like I was in an entirely different zip code. The homes were all the river-side cottage types and the inhabitants looked like your average blue collar, hard working folk who maintained their own lawns and kept their own gardens. It was so quaint I could not believe it had not been co-opted by developers. The reason surely being that this area is obviously in jeopardy of major flooding ever 50 years or so. The best part is that the road ended in a trail that took me back to the road from whence I came. Just like in New England.

And then the weather gods were smiling upon me. I left for 3 days to attend a Foreign Language Conference a the University of Kentucky in Lexington. It rained here in St. Louis the entire time while the sun shined on me in Kentucky. It stopped raining upon my return to St Louis.

At the conference I was lucky enough to attend talks on such topics as: The Argument/ Adjunct Distinction in Syntax and the Semantics of the Spanish Subjunctive, Transitivity and Subcategory Gustar in Spanish, Syllabic minimality in Spanish Truncation. Exciting stuff. Well, if not exciting at least interesting. I also attended a few workshops on language technology. It is amazing what some people are doing in the classroom with technology. Mostly at the university level since it requires an investment in technical infrastructure. Most public school do not possess funds for this kind of techie-bling . Unfortunate.

A Cycling Advocate's Nirvana

In Belgium they truly "get" it. They understand how how to live without the car. It certainly doesn't look like they are suffering deprivation as a result. Bikes and more bikes everywhere. Gaggles of teenage girls, older, stately looking gentlemen, well-heeled movers and shakers cruising to and fro on two wheels . By golly I even passed a convoy of aged 60+ white haired ole gals out for a country spin together. I kid you not. I could not make this stuff up in my wildest imagination.

So allow me to describe for you some of this life style's manifestations.... I would say there are 200 bikes for every car on the road, but it could be 300. People don't just refrain from driving their cars, they don't own them. Morning rush hour does exist and it is dangerous but the danger involves bikes and buses and not a helmet in sight. Overflowing, double-length buses rush back and forth around town dodging cyclists as they merge, cross, cut-off, and pass on roads that were originally built to a width that would accommodate horse and carriage. Yet road rage seems not to exist. Bike lanes inside the city are a matter of course, and come with their very own bike stop lights and cycle-exclusive, round-abouts. Bike headlights, tail lights and bells are legislated and enforced.

Bike rental is cheap, 17 euro for three days. So off I went to explore the countryside. I bought a bike-by-number map of the region that laid out all of the bike paths that connect all small towns and cities. Most paths are not alongside roads but their own independent entities cutting through scenic pasture lands. My map contained over 600 kilometers of bike path and this map was just 1 of 6or 7 for the country. It was impossible to get lost with the map because the numbers on the map corresponded to the numbers on the paths, very well marked. I managed to spend two days, from late morning until the sun went down, leisurely (as in less than 10 mph) tooling around, drinking it in. This is the perfect place to take kids on multi-day tours. It is safe and there is a village to stop at every 10 k or so, a farm animal to stop and pet every few hundred meters, WWII bunkers to explore.

We attended a series C1 cyclo-cross race. This event was well attended by young and old alike, most sporting their obligatory galoshes. The fans were as fervent as any respectable crowd at a futbol match in England, minus the bad manners.

The highlight of Tony's trip surely occurred at a pub in which he was drinking (too much) deliciously hoppy (his words), Belgium beer and engaging in a passionate conversation with a local about this race and cycling in general. The local was so impressed that an American knew so much about Belgium's national sport that he insisted on buying him a sampling of Belgium's best beer. It was at this point that I excused myself and returned to my hotel to read my book in peaceful, non-smokey solitude and allow Tony a night out on the town with the boys.