I took the Surly out Thursday afternoon, figuring to get a ride in before yesterday's no-name thundershowers started. A craving for relative novelty led me to ride down to Harvard Square, over the river, and down the Dr. Paul Dudley White bike path to the Esplanade, there picking up the Frances Appleton Bridge to cross the river again at the Longfellow Bridge, then returning on Main Street, Broadway, Hampshire Street, Beacon Street, Somerville Ave., Mossland (don't ask), Elm Street through Davis Square, the Somerville Community Path, and the Minuteman, 14 miles with lots of context shifts, packed into an hour and a half that got me home before the first raindrops fell. While these are familiar haunts, enough has changed since I started haunting them 50+ years ago, and enough is changing quickly enough recently enough, so that I found a sense of strangeness mixed with the sense of my adopted home.
I paused for a look at the Grand Junction Railroad Bridge; with a bit of luck that will carry bicycle traffic one of these years. I'm not sure where that project stands, but perhaps Mr. Google knows, I haven't asked lately.
There's a tendency on this ride to look at the path, look at the river, and look across the river at the opposite shore, but sometimes anomalous things are to be found by looking away from the river. This peculiar erection, for example: what on earth is it?
Meanwhile, across the river, the familiar contours of my alma mater were crowded by BIG DOINGS in Kendall Square. I guess the 'tute had a hand in that, and alumni shouldn't complain, but this will take some getting used to.
Junior! Keep out of Arthur Fiedler's nose!
Meanwhile, the Performing Arts are alive and well in the Hatch Shell.
Over the river...
... and into the Future (or is it the Immediate Past?)
rod