I was tired after a long day, but I couldn’t let this first cool(ish) evening go without getting out for a ride on the Surly. It was positively lovely out there. I headed over to Canal and rode over and along Bayou St. John, where lots of folks were out enjoying the cooler and drier air. I stopped and took this photo of the former City Hall annex building on Canal and Tonti. I pass this building regularly, but when I first saw it, it never occurred to me that it could be a city building. I mean, it’s boarded up and covered with graffiti, with that sign on the front that marks it as a hazard for firefighters. This summer a body was found inside. That’s scary stuff. This city is filled with abandoned buildings , and thousands of people are living in terrifically dangerous conditions inside these many condemned properties. The number of homeless here compared to the services available is simply scandalous. And this building, owned by the city, sits empty, except nothing’s ever really empty here.

I don’t know what to write today. I barely knew what to see today. It’s the fourth anniversary of Katrina, and I am acutely aware that I wasn’t here then. I was living in Hartford, Connecticut, trying to finish my dissertation, missing California, and hating the uncomfortable broken-down office furniture the college had moved into our furnished apartment. I wished I was home. When the storm hit, I was riveted by the news coverage, horrified and sad, disbelieving of what I was seeing on CNN. But I wasn’t here. I didn’t lose my home, my neighbors, my neighborhood. I didn’t find myself separated from my family and friends, unsure how to find them, or if they were there to be found. I didn’t spend the next months and years bouncing around, trying to start over, trying to find home. I didn’t face the stark reality that I never really mattered. I didn’t face survivor guilt, I’m not having a flashback as the thunderstorm that’s just starting as I type this pours rain on my roof. I don’t struggle to move on, or wish others would. I simply cannot imagine what it was like to have lived through and continue to live with that storm, those levee breaks, that flooding. I really have nothing today. I rode my bike over to Bayou St. John tonight for a birthday/anniversary party. I was surrounded by friends enjoying music, beer, conversation, a slight breeze, and the wildlife of the bayou. I took this picture of the lanterns my friends strung up, dangling in the twilight. It is so, so beautiful here. I don’t want to live anywhere else.

I left my house around 2:00 this afternoon, clipped in to my bike and hoping to run in to trouble somewhere. That’s my idea of a perfect Saturday afternoon. I started by tooling over to 4238 Claiborne, where I snapped this photo of Popeye’s. Why, you might wonder? Well, there used to be a bike shop here, called the Freewheeling Bike Shop. A fellow blogger, Jon, (thank you! I love it!) sent me a New Orleans bike license plate from a bike originally purchased from this address. There’s no bike shop here anymore. Instead, Popeye’s is part of a strip of fast food places with Wendy’s and something else. I wish it was a bike shop, even though I do like a good Popeye’s biscuit. As a culture we would do well to spend more time thinking about bikes and less time thinking about biscuits, but there’s surely room for both. I then rode over to Mid-City for a walk around the bayou with M., and then out to Lake Pontchartrain. By late afternoon the light was such that the water was almost inky, and I sat there for almost an hour, just watching waves lap and boats pass. I biked around the Treme and the Quarter and then back uptown to the Lower Garden District, visiting friends and enjoying an evening on my bike. As I was riding home, though, I saw a woman lying on the sidewalk, her Bianchi fallen to the side. She was bleeding from her ears and unconscious, though she was breathing. A woman was calling 911, and she told me she’d seen the woman riding along when she suddenly swerved and ran in to a pole, head first. The ambulance came and told us she’d be ok, and I locked up her bike with my lock carefully rode my bike home. I stopped for chocolate on the way, and ran in to an acquaintance I haven’t seen in a long time. It was one of those moments when I was really, really glad I live in such a small town. Because I needed to see someone I knew to remind myself that I was ok, and that I’d be fine on my bike. He did that, and we made tentative plans to go tubing next weekend. I hope that long before then I can reunite the woman from tonight’s accident with her bicycle. Be careful out there, folks.

Today’s ride took me Uptown and over to Mid-City via Carrollton to meet K. and M. for coffee and work. The ride was tiring because of the intense humidity. I mean, my glasses were fogging up as I pedaled over the bayou. Today was one of those bike rides where I just kind of zone out–though always alert to safety!–and watch city change, neighborhood by neighborhood. You just can’t get a sense of this place stuck inside a car, and walking is simply too slow, for me anyways. After coffee we headed over to Bayou St. John to check out the dozen or so white ducks who were recently let loose, much to the joy, or chagrin, of neighbors, depending on who you ask. It was so beautiful out early this evening, and I thought I’d end up blogging about the ducks. But then I rode home, turn up Broad, and then here, at the corner of Tulane and South Galvez. This is only about fifteen minutes riding distance from those ducks and the water and the canoes and kayaks, but it looks like it has been bombed out. The sign is broken, the green overgrown, like nature might just reclaim this corner. This is a different sort of nature than the ducks raised in someone’s garage, given a ramp to get in the water more easily, and hand-fed bread by eager neighbors. Damn, those ducks are cute.

It was another seventy degree day in New Orleans, and I got up early enough to get a nice long ride in before my night class.  Jack and I rode out Elysian Fields, because Googlemaps said there’d be an amusement park at the end.  Now, of course I know better than to think there’s still an amusement park over there, but I just wanted to see what was left there.  After a short argument with a security guard about my rights to bicycle around a parking lot, I found my way to the beach and to this broken-down structure.  It’s overgrown, with a sagging floor and broken roof and a bent metal staircase.  The underside is covered with graffiti.  Pontchartrain Amusement Park was opened in 1928 for “Whites Only,” desegregated in the 1960s, and finally closed in 1983.  I don’t know what this building was, if it was part of the amusement park, or a grandstand, or what.  I wonder what it looked like when it was new.  I wonder who used to come here.  Today there were folks fishing out on the pilings, a couple eating crawfish on a cement slab, and some guys in a back of a pickup truck with a camera, taking pictures, just like me.  I stood out in the sun, thankful that I can ride my bike anywhere I like, and am only a short ten miles from this place.  I left the beach, called S. for directions home, and headed over through Mid-City on Wisner along City Park and Bayou St. John, up Jeff Davis,through Central City back Uptown.  Perfect.

Today is my 200th blog post.  That’s a lot of writing, and a lot of riding, my bike around, every day.  Today’s ride took me through so many different parts of New Orleans.  Jack and I set out from my Uptown house and rode through Broadmoor, a neighborhood actively still rebuilding from the levee break after Katrina.  I took a right through the B.W. Cooper public housing project, passing active construction and a snoball stand on one side, apartments that look like they should be condemned but are occupied.  A left on Earhart took me next to the I10 off ramp and then over to the bike lane on Jeff Davis.  I rode up Bayou St. John after a quick stop at a bike shop I’ve somehow managed to miss.  Wisner Boulevard took be to Lake Pontchartrain, where I snapped this photo from a bench on its banks.  Can you believe that sky?  That water?  I sat there and stared for a good thirty minutes, watching fish leap out of the water and jet skis mess up my view and men reel in fish that weren’t still on the line and water lapping on the cement steps leading down to the water.  Yeah, I thought, this is the life.  In ten miles I can see so, so many views of this incredibly interesting, beautiful, ugly, sad, peaceful place called New Orleans.  Here’s to two hundred more blog posts, and even more rides.

I got up this morning with a gleam in my eye. Because today, my dear friend K., picked up her new bike. And she wanted to spend the day riding all over town, stretching her legs and her new chain. Well, I’m certainly up for using my sunny Saturday afternoon like that, so I met her at the bike shop in the Quarter. We then rode through the Marigny to the Bywater, where I had a quick brunch while K. zipped around. Then we hopped on the St. Claude bike lane over through Mid-City and along Bayou St. John, and then back through Broadmoor to Uptown for yet another New Orleans festival. Lovely. I stopped to snap this picture of an abandoned Albertson’s grocery store at Jeff and Tulane Avenue. Like many buildings in town, this one feels almost ghostly, as if one day the life just disappeared. And I guess that’s sort of what happened. I stopped to take this photo, though, because it was so strange to see an Albertson’s in this context. I’m from Boise, Idaho, home of the very first Albertson’s. That was my grocery store for my entire childhood. I remember when the tore that first one down. And rebuilt it on the other side of the parking lot. But I didn’t think the store made it all the way down here! But it’s closed now, just like many of the Albertson’s stores in the west, sold to Key Foods, I think. What do we do with the stuff–the buildings, the gas pumps, the land covered over with concrete–when things change and the stuff isn’t needed anymore? I want more gardens.

It was an absolutely beautiful day today.  I mean, look at that blue sky.  I hopped on Jack and rode over to Mid-City to pick up some tickets to Wednesday’s Hornets game that I won in a drawing.  The tickets are so, so good–seventh row, “premium club,” with concierge service, near center court.  I am so excited, and so glad I bother filling out the raffle ticket at the Alternative Media Expo a few weeks ago!  I then zipped over to Bayou St. John, where I snapped this picture of a house being built on serious stilts at Toulouse and Moss.  The house is not really close to finished, with shiny aluminum (?) sheets stretched over the wood frame.  It is still strange for me to see houses built up like this.  They always make me wonder if there’s a magic height that would ensure floodwaters would never get in.  Here on the bayou, though, it makes a whole lot of sense to elevate, though of course, in New Orleans, it always feels like just a matter of time until the place gets swamped again.  Days like today, though, push that stuff to the back of my mind.  Today was like spring, still cool, and the air felt fresh after the thunderstorms and gray of the past few days.  Yeah, today was a day to ride a bike.  I wonder who will get to move in to this house-on-stilts on the bayou, and I wonder if they would like some company.  Because I have bike, and do travel.

Look at that sky–isn’t it beautiful? It wasn’t sunny today, but the overcast sky at dusk was it’s own sort of beauty, don’t you think? I spent my day writing and reading and then took Jack out for a long ride along Bayou St. John. I took this picture of the General Beauregard statue at the entrance to City Park at Esplanade right before setting off with the hopes of making it to UNO. It was such a nice evening for a ride–cool and breezy. Every time I looked behind me I saw my skirt blowing around in the wind, and I just love that feeling. But then the sun was down and the streetlights were off and my tiny headlight was doing the best it could, but it wasn’t enough to feel safe on the unpredictably rocky New Orleans streets. I tried riding on the bike path, but it was in significantly worse shape than the newly-paved stretches of road. But of course that’s where the cars were. So I went ahead and turned around to head home. That’s when I realized that it wasn’t just breezy. It was downright windy. I shifted to an easy gear, but I still felt like I was battling just to stay upright in some of the gusts. While making this ride home I kept thinking how much safer I’d have felt if the streetlights worked and if the bike path was better paved and if I could trust drivers to be paying attention enough to see me and my bicycle, even on a road with no shoulder where bikes are rare. I ride my bike everywhere and anywhere at any time, but some lights and some lanes would sure be nice. Fortunately there is so much about riding in this city that is pure delight. I finally made it home, brought my bike inside, and felt grateful for another day on the roads.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day weekend here in New Orleans, and folks are already wearing green.  Tonight’s parade–which I missed in favor of a concert–took place here, at Molly’s On the Market on Decatur.  I saw people painting this flag and shamrock on the sidewalk a couple days ago, and already it looks like more than a parade has walked all over it.  It’s amazing how quickly a drunken crowd can take down some sidewalk art.  But I like that this town decorates.  For everything.  Even the sidewalks.  My bike ride tonight took me from Uptown, through the CBD and the Treme, over to Bayou St. John, and then back through the French Quarter.  It’s one of those rides where you really get to see how neighborhoods are organized and where home values are highest and lowest and the effects of these values on things like street and sidewalk quality, number of trees, streetlights, etc.  This part of the ride felt almost fake, with the highly orchestrated sense of celebration weaving its way through the Quarter.  But sometimes that orchestrated show is fun.  Tonight, though, I just wanted to fly on my bike through the cool air.  There’ll be more fun tomorrow–that’s right, there’s another parade.