Lasr night with the threat of rain looming, coupled with an air of something angry or dark about town, it turned out to be a solo exploration ride.  I headed West and explored the South side of I-94.  Peolple have no idea just how far the latin quarter/Mecican town extends out from the Bagley and 96.  It was near dearborn I decided to head north through a mixed bag of Architecture.  Central have is a mix of industry and fractured nieghborhoods partitioned by both I-94 and 96.  As I explored the South side of the I-96 coridoor I encounterd numerious Arts and Craft pieces, some magnificent Art Deco gems and a few Victorian pieces intermixed.  Weaving in and out makeing mental notes I ended up on Forset Ave and high tailed it on over to the Motor City Brewery.  Had a great talk with Joh and Dan as we discussed the new raised vegtable garden across from mario’s on Second Ave.  I wonder if the people who built that know about wholminized wood?  Couple that with the petrolum based black liner and you have a somewhat toxic garden.  i would not eat vegtables out of any of those beds as leaching is sure to be an issue.

5/14/09 What fun.  The whole city was a-buzz with the new bike trail opening the D-cut was in bloom.  Poped in the Green Garage to see part of the presentation of the proposed Bike infrastructure.  Wow what a dream come true.   We had a Gal come in from Chicago to join us on the ride.  7 of us headed out including Dan from Motor-City-Brewery and made our first ride.  We stopped at the Hiedelberg Project for some push ups and photo’s then onto Belle Isle.  The good weather had the car drivers mucking up the place with Spring fed amped up driving energy, which made it hard to cross over the road via the white lines.  What ever, we made a partial loop and got the hell out as Marky Mark would say.  Down on the waterfront and over to Andrews bar for a cold one.  It was there that the Gal from chi-town said, “no way in hell could you rid ebikes like that in her city!”  So Haaaaaa we have something the rest of the big cities don’t have so lets use it for our enjoyment and bring people here because of it!!!  Anyway’s finished up at HJ’s and it felt like we were all on Vacation and we did not have to schedule the time off nor drive a car to get there!

Bike Detroit!

5/12/09 Today was the day I decided to ride the mountain bike thru the awaiting muck so as to garner how well our winter efforts were when it came to actual bike riding.  The Southfield/oak Park section was muddy but fun.   There was one are that i did turn around on because to go any further would have been a slippery mud bath.  Cutting through the streets I arrived at the second trail section near the corner of 9 and evergreen, wonderful on the way in but…. as I was starting to sink in one of the mud boggs I stood up to put some heavey down pressure, picked up a stick and snapped my derailure in two!!!!  No phone I hoofed it  back home and four miles later said to my wife that I enjoyed the walk.  Long and the short of it is we still need to do more work out in the woods so riders beware…

Jim