Five Borough Bike Tour - 2011 May 1
The day was perfect for riding. Not too hot, not too cold. Not too humid. I rendezvoused with my teammates Jane and Tamara at the corner of 70th Street and Columbus Avenue at 6:20 AM. After pumping up our tires and adjusting our bicycles, we headed downtown five miles to the starting line. Because we were riding for them, Noelle Ito of BronxWorks arranged for us to start near the head of the pack, enabling us to get moving soon after the starting gun (it wasn't really a gun, but rather big jets of flame emitted from the starting gate). The first few miles, north on Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas, for tourists) were slow, but we began to move more smoothly once we entered Central Park. We rode north along the eastern side of the Park Drive, exiting at 110th street and continuing north through Harlem to 138th Street, where we cut over to the Madison Avenue bridge and the Bronx. We didn't spend long in the Bronx, returning to Manhattan by the Third Avenue Bridge ...