Two wheels better

My biking husband having rammed a car from behind and suffered mild damage to a knee and having been told to stay off his bike for a while, which means he needs the car to get to work, I have become more dependent on my bike for transportation. Which I find I enjoy.

I've been exploring routes to the places I go. I have traded my short-but-riddled- with-car-traffic route to campus, for a longer route that lets me glide under the train tracks we now live on the wrong side of, instead taking the automobile overpass. The friendly little bike and pedestrian tunnel leads to a bike path along the tracks. Sometimes a homeless man settles there, a kind of itinerant peddlar, with colourful bundles spread around him, hailing passersby. A fixture. Sometimes a train whistles by, on the other side of a wire fence you'd have to be pretty determined to get over (some people are). The bike path runs behind a medical centre, a shopping mall and the high school football pitches. It takes me almost the whole way to an opening in a fence with direct access to campus, via more sports fields (grass hockey, baseball, volleyball, a collection of swimming pools and a sport I don't recognise played with polo-type bats).

I could probably get to Ikea on my bike too, but I may not be ready for that yet. No train in that direction, but a 6-lane interstate highway to cross. And how would I get my big boxes back home?