Entries this day: bicycle

bicycle

4:20pm Monday 3 September 2001

I just rode my bike around downtown for about 2 or 3 hours. I'm pretty tired; I won't describe each detail. Mostly, I explored slowly around Buffalo Bayou and Bayou Place and the new thing being built where Jones Plaza used to be. I rode down a lot of steps at Wortham Center, through a lot of mud on the other side of the bayou after where the sidewalk ends. So much history underneath the bridge, with a large water(?) pipe suspended from the bridge by ancient rusted framework, rivulets of water from broken rusty pipes drizzling into the bayou, in progress construction with rebar describing where concrete retaining wall will soon snake along the water. Past that was mud super soft a few inches deep, and I mostly could ride through it in 1st or 2nd gear. My tires coated with mud, shoes covered in mud, I 2nd geared up a gently sloping sidewalk to street level again, where I sought clean water to wash my tires, and clean sand or rocks to scrub off the mud.

I rolled in lazy ovals and figure 8s in a medium sized puddle, casually washing away the muck. Up an old parking lot in search of gravel, I found myself next to some railroad tracks.

Over the small barricade, I rode in 2nd gear about 200 yards along the back side of the downtown post office, from near UH Downtown all the way past the Amtrak station and under I-45. Slowly slowly slowly through their parking lot and through a tunnel that leads from their parking lot under the new entrance/exit of the I-10 HOV lane to the post office. Around the corner I found myself at the very entrance of the HOV lane. It was blocked, but I had come in from behind the barricades. The entire HOV was empty, beckoning me to ascend slowly hundreds of feet over the I-45/I-10 interchange, then exhilarate down the other side, some 2 miles away.

                             PEDESTRIANS
                                 AND
                              BICYCLES
                             PROHIBITED

Except for that one detail, it seemed like a great idea.

A section of missing fence allowed me to easily visit the construction on Jones Plaza. It's being built into an ampitheater of some sort, with winding stairs and some weird constructs whose purpose I can only guess. Many bags of Textured Blasting Sand were stacked; they were not being used to sandblast, but to provide a level surface for laying bricks as the walking surface of the theater. This surface will make it pretty skater unfriendly.

I discovered an door in a wall with a ladder in the floor, but chose not to explore down the ladder. I'm pretty sure I can guess what type of stuff I would find, plus I was feeling watched, or at least somewhat conspicuous.

Toward YMCA for a drink and discovered that the new Enron tower has a cool walkway from building to building across the streets. It's perfectly circular, and connects buildings on three of the four corners of the intersection. Very fine architecture skillz.permalink