Bokrijk Nature Preserve

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There are twelve of us altogether. Three went long from the house today. The elite top 25%. The other nine of us, the proletarian 75%, drove just over an hour each way to “ride under the water”. Which meant four to five feet under the surface of a lake on a bike path that divided it. Supe cool.

The driving was not fun, and our parking plan had to be altered due to the setting up of a carnival, then Bob got kidnapped inside Aldi, or so it seemed, so patience was the name of the game. We didn’t get rolling until just after noon.

I managed to fix my computer connection glitch and got the route pre-loaded which meant I was able to drive the train. Which I did. All day. I kept it steady and did my best to keep the group together. It’s always a little tricky given people’s different ages, levels of fitness, and general preferences. No one got too mad at me. I don’t think.

From now on, I think I’ll ride from the base camp. It literally took all day for a shortish/flatish ride. And the last thing I want to have happen twice is getting stuck in the car for more than two hours with Dennis. My Olympia homeboys will understand.

Avelin as Moses. His commandments are still forthcoming.
Griffin in latte withdrawal. Not a pretty sight.
Your intrepid reporter.
Belgians. Help. What’s this communicating?
Gotta love how they mix commercial and residential.

Wow Wow Wow

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The inaugural ride from base camp in Barvaux to Huy and back (via different roads) was off the hook.

Props to Dennis for plotting the route. And Belgium for the scenery. So beautiful. We rode through smallish farm after smallish farm and saw very large cows, lots of corn, windmills, groovy modern stone and glass homes topped with solar panels, and luxury German cars. Happy to report that Belgium’s farmers are doing alright.

We stopped a lot to debate whether to turn right or left. Dennis said if we pay for his trip, he’ll come over a month early and pre-ride the routes so we won’t get lost as often. I said I’d contribute.

Mid-ride we lounged for a long time in the center of Huy mostly so that Griffin could get his latte. Shortly after halftime, we split up because only a small subset wanted to do the famous climb. I found myself at the front of the chickenshit subset. I stopped after cresting a longer but less steep climb so that we could regroup. One problem. No one came up from behind. Oops, I missed a turn. My mistake. I had no business being on the front since I couldn’t get the route to upload to my computer.

I descended a wee bit, followed a local through a turn, a total Hail Mary, and looked a kilometer down the road and saw Greg’s flaming yellow jersey. Reunited and it feels so good.

Things broke up on the return. Greg, Skip, Alex, and I rode together. Them boys be strong.

If someone said to me, sorry, you can only ride that loop the rest of the week, I’d say, “Cool, let’s go.” Epic start to the week.

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This badass bike belongs to A Young rider named Alex.
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Shy, not shy.
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I dig modern, stone, and glass homes.
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Suck it British Airways
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I know the people wanted a closeup.
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Kilometers and kilometers of this. Trump is afraid of windmills. LOL.
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Mid-ride confab.
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Griffin explaining why Belgian lattes are so small.
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Literally and figuratively brightening up everything.
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For my Belgian readers

Fetterman, Be Better Man

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Hobson and Hughes with a technical knockout of John Fetterman. Their haymaker in the opening seconds of the first round.

“One morning in June, three paralyzed military veterans in wheelchairs from rural Pennsylvania arrived at the office of Sen. John Fetterman for a long-awaited meeting to discuss legislation that would improve their care. 

Fetterman’s staff greeted them with bad news: The Pennsylvania Democrat had to cancel. He’d told his staff he may have eaten something bad and wasn’t feeling well, according to people familiar with the matter.

Less than an hour after his staffers met with the veterans in his place, Fetterman walked into his office, showing no signs of illness. He had an appointment he didn’t want to miss, he told staff: an interview on Fox News to discuss Israel and the war in Iran.” 

Ron Swanson of Parks and Recreation fame could have learned a lot from Fetterman.

“Our Teams Are Working Hard”

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So says British Airlines. Dammit BA, what did I ever do to you? I was hoping to have started including you dear reader in my Belgium cycling adventure by now, but major baggage feck ups have delayed that. It started in Seattle when someone apparently sent 85 people’s baggage to arrivals instead of departures.

First world problems of course. I am coming to you from a warm apartment, drinking coffee, and I have quality company, so I will be A-okay. I even have my bike, contact lenses, and a change of clothes since two of my three delayed bags arrived yesterday.

Still missing . . . cycling kits, all bike tools and other accessories, among other things, so I will be the only no show at today’s shakeout ride. The loneliness epidemic.

I do have lots of reading material. Yesterday, I read a long New Yorker article about the kidnapping crisis in Nigeria. Kinda put my British Airway “problem” in perspective. Long story short, it’s mostly in the Northern Muslim part of the country and it’s fueled by economic desperation which is a fancy phrase for poverty. Nigerian police don’t have anywhere near the resources to fight kidnapping and it is working in the sense that most people pay ransoms. Brutal numbers, stories, scenario more generally, with hardly any hope for improvement any time soon.

Meanwhile, I wait for my expensive cycling kits, computer, radar, etc. And you wait to come along for the ride. Boohoo for you, boohoo for me.

Going Against Type

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My mom was famously antisocial on planes, which is a bit odd since she was quite personable. She’d literally psych herself up not to talk to her neighbor(s). And she had strategies. Other people in my lineage lean anti-social.

So on my way to London yesterday, I decided to blaze a new path of airplane neighborliness. My next-door neighbor was a young, East Indian man with two phones. Uber courteous when I first sat down, he took my man purse and stowed it for me since there were no seats in front of us. An hour into the flight I dishonored my mom by asking him, “Are you from London?” He smiled and said, “No, I’m from Seattle, but I travel to London frequently for work.”

Definitely the most interesting dude I’ll meet on my two week Euro sojourn. When I told two of my friends that in Heathrow, they were hurt, but I clarified “most interesting new dude”.

Can’t believe I didn’t get his name because I’d love to follow his career. 33 years old. Ohio State grad, but let’s not hold that against him. Got a PhD from Rice University in Oncology at 26. Works for Eli Lilly doing “small and large” drug development deals. Was on his way to Barcelona for a conference.

I knew he had serious science chops when he was familiar with Multiple Systems Atrophy. We talked about Lynn’s passing and his grandfather dying in India right before his 90th birthday. And him, afterwards, moving his parents from Chennai to Lynnwood, WA.

He met his wife when he was 19 and she was 18. Despite him spending the next 10 days in Barcelona, they’re trying to get pregnant. They’re vacationing in Japan in October.

He speaks English, Tamil, Hindi, French, German, Arabic, and Spanish poorly. He learned Arabic while teaching English in Cairo as a part of his high school education.

We bonded in ways my mom would never understand. So much so, when British Airways informed half the plane, him and me included, that our bags didn’t make it on our flight, he felt comfortable bitching about it. “What am I going to wear out to dinner tonight?” First world problem for a high flyer, figuratively and literally.

Do Not Delay, Find This Book

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The opening four paragraphs of the most glowing book review I have ever read.

Dwight Garner in today’s New York Times.

“In the souk that is contemporary publishing, much attention has gone recently to the minimalists and the tinkerers, to writers of short novels steeped in irony. It’s been a meal of small plates, reflective of short attention spans.

The Jamaican writer Marlon James’s new novel, “The Disappearers,” at 600-plus pages, is instead a maximalist’s banquet: It is humane, blood-flecked, disturbing and sustaining. It takes James 90 pages to say hello. It’s another 70 pages before his story settles into your guts and begins to twist them. It’s yet another 150 before you fully comprehend his loping authority and the scale of his ambitions. Booster rockets fall away. Disparate coordinates begin to converge.

Why not just say it? With this novel about gay experience and murderous homophobia in Jamaica and elsewhere during the 1980s and ’90s, James has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far.

It deserves to be talked about alongside Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” for its tumult of language and its crisscrossing post-colonial themes; Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” (James picks up on a revenge scenario from that novel); and William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” — the greatest American novel, I’d argue — for many reasons but especially for the way James, like Faulkner, hammers his themes like a Vulcan, rolling over them relentlessly from new and sometimes oblique angles, advancing and enlarging his attack each time. This is another way of saying “The Disappearers” was one of the signal reading experiences of my adult life. It sank knives deep into my heart. I’m still in recovery from it.”

The Disappearers

Perspicacious

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I read this sentence on Tyler Cowen’s blog today.

“I once had on Sam Bankman-Fried, now a convicted felon.  It was an excellent episode, and I will point out my lines of questioning were more perspicacious than many people since have realized.”

Cowen is explaining to his readers why he’s going forward with an interview on his podcast with a well-known Chinese internet intellectual, who recently was accused of plagiarism.

I did not know the meaning of “perspicacious”.

I try to be as perspicacious here as possible, but ultimately, that’s your call dear reader.