It is about time to turn the Westeros saying, “winter is coming”, on its head. Winter has been here way too long and now it is time for it to be going. It got into the mid-seventies yesterday, but I was a too busy being a wage slave to truly enjoy that balmy weather. It was colder today, in the fifties and is suppose to be colder still tomorrow, forties, but winter is definitely on its way out and I hope that it doesn’t let the door hit it on the way.
We launched on our first bike ride in about a month. We launched at the crack of noon. Beautiful Wydown Avenue, the best bicycling road in Saint Louis is now a total disaster area. The car lane has been a mess all winter, what with its slurry seal popping off to make shallow potholes all over it, but the bike lane had been immune to that. Now the bike lane is even worse than the car lane. New water or sewer lines are being laid and the asphalt patching is more amenable to full suspension mountain biking than it is to road cycling. The only silver lining to all this mess is that sometime this summer all new road pavement will be laid and Wydown will return to its exalted status of bicycling nirvana.
The knights that say Nerf were battling it out by the Confederate war memorial, as they do most Saturday afternoon’s in the warmer months. As we approached, their hand-to-hand combat had spilled out onto the bike path. We were going to stop anyway, so it’s not like they were really impeding our progress. One of their company engaged me in a friendly manner, they are always looking for new members to hack off. I asked him if I could take their picture and he said sure, then he asked if I wanted a group shot. I said yes and the above photo resulted. He even had his company hustle into position, which was a nice touch.
There were bicycle races going on around the Muny mile. At first, we though that they had ended, but the chase car soon instructed us on our error and then chased off the course. We hung around for a couple of laps and I got a couple of decent photographs with the GoPro. Thank you, Jay and Carl. Its burst mode really worked well in this situation. Shooting three photos instead of just one automatically gives you good, better and best or at least that is how it is supposed to work.
We continued on into the Central West End. Anne had called her mom to wish her a happy birthday and had gotten the name of a book that she wanted. We went to Left Bank Books to find it, but unfortunately they did not have it. The Our former neighbor, Curtis Sittenfeld, had her book in the window, Sisterland. She’ll appear at the store next month in an event with another author from Esquire. Cake by Peat Eyes was outside the bookstore. In addition to this shopping errand, we also posted some mail and did a little banking.
After all of this ‘hard work’, we were ready for a little something. Fortunately, we found ourselves in the Central West End. We were going to go to this one restaurant, when Anne received this rave review on the new place next to the first from a departing dinner. We were sold and so had lunch at Cucina Pazzo. As the name implies it is Italian. It has taken over the space vacated by Duff’s, after its long run, near Euclid and McPherson. The food was good. I especially loved the chopped salad. It was so finely chopped that it was totally infused with the dressing. The prices were very reasonable. We split the salad and the grinder and because of a very minor delay in the delivery of the grinder we were gifted by Jeffery with a small plate of pasta. It was very nice, but it totally defeated our going in strategy of not eating too much. Then on the way home, Anne suggested doing hills …
I can’t wait for the really warm days!