As you may know if you were stuck in traffic due to the road closures, his past Sunday was the [look up how many of these things there have been]th running of the TD Five Boro Bike Tour:
And as their official spokesperson dirtbag who makes promotional videos for them I partook in it once again.
They say the Tour de France is won in bed, which stupid, because everybody knows the Tour de France is won on the toilet, and if you don’t believe me just try to ride a mountain stage without having a satisfactory bowel movement. Similarly, Five Boro Bike Tour is “won” (even though it’s not a race) at the registration packet pickup, and on Friday afternoon I headed down to get mine.
And get mine I did.
It started out auspiciously enough, when I found a shiny new Dominical Peso on 155th Street:
The streets of New York truly are paved with gold.
From there, my luck only improved when I stopped in a Central Park restroom and had no harrowing experiences whatsoever:
That’s foreshadowing, by the way.
Emerging from the south end of the park, I forsook the city’s bicycle infrastructure and did it the old fashioned way by joining the car traffic on 5th Avenue:
I’m all for bike lanes and stuff, but this remains the best way to get yourself downtown in a hurry, and before long I found myself at the packet pickup location. This is when things took a turn for the worse–in the very mild sense than anything can be characterized as “worse” in my decidedly charmed existence:
When I went to pick up my packet last year, I had to wait on a long line, so I was quite pleased to find there was none this time. I don’t know if this was because it was during the day when normal productive members of society are at work, or because of the rain that had been forecasted for Sunday and people were chickening out, but either way it looked as though this time I could saunter right in–and saunter I did, with bicycle in tow. However, I had barely begun to wheel the Homer across the threshold when my forward progress was impeded by a staff member.
“You can’t bring your bike in here,” he informed me.
Adopting my usual attitudinal admixture of stupidity and entitlement, I assured him that yes I could and attempted to continue, though the staffer was resolute. Ordinarily at this point I’d cede the argument. However, not only did I have nothing to protect my bike but the flimsy lock I keep in the Homer’s saddlebag just for emergencies, but I also brought my bike in with me last year without incident:
So I informed him of this, to which he replied they don’t allow bikes in there because there’s not enough room for them given the thousands upon thousands of riders they have to serve, which struck me as a spurious argument since not only was the place pretty empty, but I’d been perfectly welcome in there with my bike last year when the place was a total mob scene. He then switched tacks, saying that if I were going to a hockey game I wouldn’t expect to be able to bring my bike in with me, now would I? This I found doubly vexing, inasmuch this was the registration packet pickup for a bike tour and not a hockey game. In fact even as I type this I remain deeply perturbed by the whole hockey game analogy. Sure, I wouldn’t expect to bring my bike to my seat with me if I were going to see the Rangers at Madison Square Garden, but if I were picking up my registration for a hockey tournament I wouldn’t expect to be turned away because I was carrying my stick and my skates.
During this exchange another rider arrived and attempted to enter the building with his bicycle, and he probably would have walked right in too, since the only staffer who seemed to care was currently busy dealing with me. But unfortunately for the rider, I wanted the staffer to know I wasn’t the only one who thought bringing a bike to pick up a bike tour registration packet was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and so I pointed the other rider out with great smugness. It was somewhere around this time it occurred to me I should probably stop making an ass of myself, and so I forfeited the debate, locked up the Homer and walked into the building unaccompanied:
While the Homer sat there wedged between two crowd control barriers and tethered by a lock only marginally stronger than a hair scrunchy, I had an almost grotesque amount of space to myself:
Ebulliently, more staffers guided me to the registration table:
And everyone was so friendly and solicitous I tried my hardest not to notice the presence of multiple bikes, which fit easily the venue without being even remotely obtrusive:
Clutching my registration materials, I then exited by way of the merchandise hall:
Merchandising, merchandising! Where the real money from the tour is made:
It was quite a tantalizing spread:
But I couldn’t focus on the protein-infused water:
Or the charity ride-crushing Industry Nine wheelsets:
Because all I saw were bikes inside:
And more bikes inside:
And even a car with bikes on it inside!
Just kidding:
I mean yeah, I saw all those things, but I’m not bitter. Really, I’m not. In fact I was in such high spirits I asked some lovely people to take a picture of me in front of the route map:
And while the world may seem upside down at times:
In the end the Homer was still there waiting for me when I emerged, and I stuffed my registration materials into its capacious saddlebag:
Recounting this now, it occurs to me that not only was my bike still there, but it was probably more convenient for me to leave it outside inasmuch as I didn’t have to wheel it around with me while examining the protein-infused waters and charity ride-crushing wheelsets. Moreover, as someone who not only received a complimentary registration but was also duly compensated by the organizers for making a promotional video, perhaps I should not have pushed the issue in the first place. However, there’s a word for people who are simply grateful for what they have and don’t demand more on top of it, and that word is LOSERS.
In any case, with my registration materials now safely in hand (or in bag), I rode past iconic New York City businesses such as Steinway & Sons, who make large playable furniture items:
And of course Chick-fil-A, which was founded in 1906 the Chickstein family, who used to sell schnitzel from a pushcart on the Lower East side:
Though there’s arguably no brand more commonly associated with New York City than Taco Bell:
From there I made my way over to the Hudson River Greenway, where I was finally free from the hubbub:
And where I also had another satisfyingly non-harrowing bathroom experience:
That’s more lavatorial portent, and I’ll get to it in tomorrow’s post, but in the meantime let’s admire the scale of those floor-to-waist urinals and the manner in which their grandeur echoes the arches of the nearby George Washington Bridge:
Rarely have I felt so fulfilled whilst voiding.