January 23, 2025
Lunch with Kelly and Jan
Today’s activities included my midmorning ride to Ried Park. I rode out there thinking there was enough time available morning to make a pass through the higher ground between the zoo, the bird ponds, the ball fields and tennis/pickleball courts, the residential and historic districts and the Randolph Golf Course to check out the birding area I bypassed Sunday afternoon when I ran out of time and the park was too busy anyway.
I have at least two hours available, which sounds like it pencils out given that the park is barely five miles from home, an easy ride east through the campus to the 3rd Street Bike Boulevard and then south on the Treat Street one (and yes, to the all those observant everyone’s out there, I do know Treat is an Avenue, not a Street).
And it’s still seems like enough even though I don’t leave home until 10:30 because it froze again last night so I waited for the day to warm up to something reasonable. Two hours should be fine - An hour there and back. And an hour to poke around looking for a new tree bird or two.
Two hours wasn’t enough though. It wasn’t helped by wasting fifteen minutes of my time box to find myself almost to the U of A campus and realize for the second time this week I was biking off to see the birds without my rucksack over my shoulders. No camera no point, so there’s fifteen minutes of my birding hour gone down the time hole.
And the rest of the time gets blown when I don’t remember where the area of the park I’m trying to get to actually is and so I bike the perimeter of the entire complex - residential areas, golf course, police station, pickleball courts and zoo get passed by with me staring at a few miles of chain link fences wondering where the good birding spot I remembered was.
Even if I had found it in time though it wouldn’t have done any good because when the one bird of interest does show up I pull the camera out of the bag and find it won’t activate. It turns out that my simple checklist on the door needs a few behavioral ripples mixed in, things like put the pack on your back before stepping out the door, and open the camera to make sure the battery is in it and not cradled in the charger in the camera drawer.
It’s these two moments of braindamegedness (and I’m sure it’s not my fault here - it’s the prednisone talking) that it occurs to me that it must be time to hit the problem with a hammer and give the Scientific Method a try.
The time’s not been totally wasted even without that insight though, because now I know where I want to be going the next time I’m out - at the dead center of the square, between the zoo, the baseball fields, and the historic residential quarter. It will save some time and frustrationnext time out, and maybe I’ll find any of the verdin, brewer’s sparrow, northern mockingbird, lesser goldfinch and cedar waxwing the eBirders are reporting as having seen there this week.
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So that wastes the morning, but even though I’m fifteen minutes late and Rachael is getting stressed over the fact that I’m late and she can’t locate me because the Garmin hasn’t been paired to the new phone yet, we’ve still got time to execute the. Game Plan. We’re meeting Kelly and her friend Jan at the Union Street Public Hous just off the loop along rhe north side of Rillito Wash, just east of the pedestrian Mountainview Bridge.
The game plan though is that Kelly (and I’d incorrectly assumed Jan would be with her, not knowing yet that she lives up in Oro Valley and will drive down) will bike here from the east, and we’ll arrive early enough that we’ll bike east to meet her and then turn around and bike back to the restaurant together, Rachael scoring some video as we bike past the astonishing long new mural. And Rachael’s other goal here is to arrive early enough to get a real ride in of maybe 25 or 30 miles, and it needs to be upfront like this because we’re time boxed by. Sundown at the other end.
My tardiness has erased several miles from Rachael’s ride potential, so we’re in a hurry as we bike east toward the U of A campus on University - which probably contributes to the near catastrophe just ahead when a car stops in the bike lane to back into his parallel parking challenge, leaving us boxed in between him, the curb on the right and the streetcar tracks on the left.
Rather than wait I do the obvious thing, as every other of the many bikers who come this way do in this common situation - I stop, look three ways to validate there’s no streetcar or motor vehicle driving in the track lane from ahead or behind us, and no other biker overtaking me with the maneuver I’m about to execute: a tight, bracket shaped diversion across the nearest track, past the parking car, and then back across the rail again. Something like this: [.
I nail it, because it’s easy if you cross the rail at 90 degrees - which I do because I’ve got decades of experience with it after surviving and learning from a few failures when I was younger and didn’t break as easily.
Rachael though didn’t even begin riding a bike until I bought her one just before we got married 36 years ago, and she’s mostly learned to bike safely by shadowing me for a few hundred thousand miles since then. But this one hasn’t come up often enough that she’s totally internalized it, and I’m sure it doesn’t help that we’re distracted and in a hurry. She angles it, goes down, and hollers at me.
I hear her, immediately stop, lean my bike against a bench and set my backpack on the bench too, and then turn back hoping against hope that it’s not too serious - like the time something similar happened on the Marine Drive bike path in Portland ten years ago. I hear a whump, turn back, and she’s layed out flat and all but unconscious, the most frightening day of my adult life. It’s not long before the ambulance comes and we’’re riding together to the nearest hospital on a day she still has no memory of as she repeatedly talks the same nonsense to me and later to Elizabeth who drives over to be of comfort and assistance and then drives me back to the scene of the accident to pick up my beloved green Cannondale T2000 that thankfully didn’t get stolen in the meantime.
It’s not the big one, thank heavens. She’s fine except for a cleanly scraped knee and whatever other sorenesses might show up in the days ahead. Her head’s fine, no vehicles or bikes were right behind her, and she fell on the left side - not on the right, that like the previous fall that left her with a right shoulder injury that still troubles her a decade later and likely always will at this point.
And her bike is basically fine too, except for one more in a long line of snapped off at the stem handlebar mirrors. It’s too soon to tell if anything else has been injured or gotten out of alignment but as long as it’s rideable (and we’ll shortly see that it is) it’s no big deal because it’s going in for an overhaul shortly anyway.
But that takes another bite out of our time as we’re there for about fifteen minutes assessing her state and doing first aid on her knee, time during which Rachael is touched by the kindness and sympathy from a young women who runs up from behind and gets too Rachael at the same time I do.
Like me, her immediate concern is that Rachael is OK. This is a difficult couple of blocks on the bike lane actually right before you come to the campus, and I’ve no doubt that spills are commonly seen here. Once Rachael stands up, does a once over and sees that the damage is limited to a clean quarter sized scrape off the surface of her right knee and that leaves a light trail of blood running down her shin that looks scary at first until we see its source.
And then Rachael is further touched when this kind young woman points out that the CVS is immediately across the street and she could dash across and pick up some bandages for us. People here in Tucson are so kind and helpful, Rachael will exclaim later, and in my experience she’s right about that. But Rachael’s got it covered and pulls out the perfect square bandage from her first aid kit that covers it And fifteen or twenty minutes later we’re moving again, but down now to a really small window in the box. Rachael’s longer ride is out, but if we’re in luck and Kelly isn’t arriving early there’s still time to get some video footage.
But then I use up the last free chunk of the box when a half block later I realize that once again I’m biking down the road without my pack on my back and feel almost sick at the realization of all that I’ve just put at risk here. Rachael’s prescription glasses are in there, the ones that she’s just gotten after waiting for so long to finally obtain. My wallet is in there, with the drivers license Andrea just found not two weeks ago and returned to me; and the credit and debit cards are all in there, waiting to be stolen and canceled. Lord, please no.
But the rucksack is still there waiting when we get back, thank the Gods. And two behavior rules get added to the incipient checklists I’m already composing in my head. For the indoor list: Always wear your backpack when you step out the door. For the outside list: never set anything of value on the ground other than the bike, where you might just walk off and leave it (something that’s happened at least three times in the past, once in Truro, NS on our honeymoon tour 35 years ago. I can still remember the relief at seeing a red pannier leaning against the wall on the front of the reataurant we stopped for breakfast - the important pannier, the one that goes inside with us and undoubtedly would have included our passports). And for the outside list: never set anything of real value on the ground outside, especially the rucksack!
And about the Rodriguez, which of course is on the ground but was left unlocked and unguarded as far as I knew because We just got Roddy back from California two weeks ago too. Fortunately he was still there when we were done assessing Rachael. I don’t think I’ll add anything to the rule set for this type of emergency situation, though one will definitely added to never leave it unattended and unlocked unless there’s an emergency. I think the next time something like this handled I’d still look first to the most important thing in my life: Rachael. With luck the bike will still be there when I come back, but I could buy. or rent another bike if it comes to that. There’s only one Rocky.
But now we really have come to the bottom of the time box now and I really expect we’ve lost our chance for video. When we come to the loop I stop us while I look across to the other side, thinking I might even see Kelly biking in front of the long mural and womdering if our best bet is to turn right and cross the wash at the Mountainside Bridge or go right to the one just the other side of the mural when Rachael gets a text. It’s Kelly, who knows what the plan is and is just arriving before long, announcing she’s just crossing Dodge Street. And Rachael’s delighted to be able to show off her new earbuds that integrate to her phone and fire off an audible text to respond to the one from Kelly to say we’re on our way.
So we turn right and it’s not long before we see Kelly ahead. And as I expected, Im confident that I would have spotted her and her recumbent across the way, because they’re a colorful combo - especially Kelly herself.
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1 week ago
So we meet on time, and Rachael captures some video we’re all excited about of Colorful Kelly sambaing past the colorful hummingbirds and other desert plants and critters on the long mural, and then finally we stumble our way through the small shopping and restaurant complex there to finally find Union station where her friend Jan is patiently waiting for us and we’re happily only two minutes late.
And after introductions are done and a table partially in the sun has been selected and our orders have been taken and a totally uninteresting Stella Artois 0.0 has been served up (really? What’s wrong with restaurants like this, anyway? It’s reason enough to not return) Rachael starts up the GoPro and peeks in the viewing window to check out the video and is disheartened to see that it’s been set to capture stills instead of video. Opportunity at hand, opportunity wasted.
So there’s a rule that ‘ll go on Rachael’s indoor checklist: if you’re taking the GoPro,validate that the battery is charged and that the settings are correct before stepping out the door.
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And it’s a terrific visit, with Kelly but also with her friend Jan, whom we’ve never met and I thought I wasn’t even aware of until Kelly reminds me that this is her friend whose going cycling in southern France and Spain with her partner and was indirectly picking my brain on a possible place to hang out between the two halve of their tour. She said she a friend who wanted to come along and see Team Anderson in person, because it turns out that Jan is apparently one of those CycleBlaze lurkers who’ve got time on their hands and have been following us and our string of triumphs, setbacks and near and actual catastrophes for a considerable period of time.
So hello, Jan! It was wonderful to meet you in person after all this time. Thanks so much for driving down to share the table with us! We really enjoyed the conversation and hope to meet again someday soon.
Opportunity lost though isn’t always last opportunity lost though. And now that we suspect we’ve come away with no video there’s still time to capture one going the other direction. And I have to say - I love many of our old videos and there are some I’ve probably gone back and revisited over and over again, like dropping down the Nesque Gorge - and I’m confident that this prize is going to land in that elite circle.
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Sound track: E Luxo Sol, by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd
Today's ride: 33 miles (53 km)
Total: 219 miles (352 km)
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