Friday afternoon, I took the Ocean Air Cycles Rambler and rode East.
This is the weekly hills & traffic drill that I ride through the lumpier paved bits of Arlington, Medford, Malden, Melrose, and Stoneham, with options on Saugus, Wakefield, Winchester, and Woburn. It's challenging enough to improve my riding skills and stamina with practice, and although I can stretch the miles out, the tendency to fold the route through the hills means I'm not necessarily all that far from East Arlington. No need to ride to Worcester County for hills practice. Riding in urban traffic improves a different set of skills, and there are plenty of opportunities for that, some in the flats (as shown here), some in the hills.
So, it's easy to think of this route as starting and ending with the Kurukulla Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies, and while I do stop there at least once on every instance of this ride, the presence and absence of photos substitutes an illusion for reality (the Buddhists would agree, I think).
^^^ Here's the Kurukulla Center as visited after I had already turned the bike towards home, but the real bookends of the route are Medford's High Street hills, rising in West Medford, climbing to and passing through the Winthrop Square rotary and then after a final short climb, rocketing down into Medford Center in a whizzy descent (in traffic). On the return, that descent turns into a strenuous climb (in traffic), followed by another tilt at the rotary. This afternoon, an MBTA bus chased me up High Street from Medford Center, its driver barking incomprehensible orders through its PA system; it may be that he shared the sentiments of the driver of a pickup truck encountered earlier on the ride, in Melrose: "You should ride your bike on the sidewalk." A little Buddhistic detachment went a long way in that situation. Eventually, the effective travel lane widened, and he took his bullhorn and rumbled away.
Regular practice keeps me ahead of things.
rod