Citibike Renewal Time

I’ve just gotten a reminder of my Citibike annual dues, and I paid them, because I got paid today myself.

Nice how that works.

I wrote dues like it’s a club, which it feels like, though I’m not entirely proud to be a member. I don’t like riding the city advertising a bank, even if it’s been my bank for most of three decades.

Still: the Citibike club. I’m not surprised to read that I’ve had 471 trips in just over 11 months–I sort of thought there’d be more. I ride a bike to the West Village, have a coffee and take a stroll to Chelsea, pick up another bike and head home. I ride a bike to the Upper East Side and take a bus home. And often, as last night, I ride a bike down to the Financial District and take a cab home with my husband. I cannot fault this club for convenience and ease. I see other members on the way, citizens, moving solidly, for the most part, on the heavy heavy bikes in the bike lanes—or at least the right or the left of a road. Only occasionally going the wrong way. Which I’m totally against.

Therefore I’m grateful. I’ve always loved the wind in my hair on a bike, the feeling of freedom and speed attained for such a minimal expenditure of energy. I’ve appreciated the feeling of being a kid. A tomboyish kid, which I wasn’t really. When I think of being young and bikes I think not of my own experiences, which must have been myriad—to the pool, to school, to grandmother’s—but of boys. I think of a charming family picture in which my little tow-headed brother is squatting, his feet on the seat of a blue tricycle that looks like it’s been around the block a few times. And I remember a kid I grew up with who was always at the head of a pack of boys on bikes, doing wheelies on the long block that lead away from the parochial school we attended, laughing a just-out-of-jail laugh. (Nowadays on Facebook he posts pictures of himself on family road-biking trips, so he’s definitely consistent.)

Not exactly like navigating Sixth Avenue on a warm summer day, sucking wind in the wake of trucks that need their mufflers adjusted.

At night it’s best. When the trucks are asleep and the air cooled, the roads emptied, just me and the taxis, homeward. Then I feel like a boy-kid, laughing and free. Good.

Don’t do it, darlings

Don’t try to go to China without 6 months on your u.s. passport.

You will end up desperate and sad at the U.S. Passport Agency offices in Hudson.

Breakfast at Le Train Bleu

The one at Bloomingdale’s, not the one at the Gare du Nord in Paris.

It’s fantastic all the same, set in an old railway car beautifully refurbished on Bloomie’s sixth floor. Complete with tiny — or efficiently designed — train toilet.

We were there with Rail Europe, the company that basically invented the Eurailpass, to discuss the new train cars sweeping Europe. Very different from the green-velvet Victorian look here, the high speed rail vehicles are sleek and gleaming and changing everything.

The Paris-Barcelona high-speed trip has increased business on that run for Rail Europe by 60%. Rail is now a destination, an experience that travelers to Europe suddenly want to savor.

Though some of us have been chasing a taste for a very long time.

Take advantage of your hometown

On a beautiful Saturday we ventured uptown to Summer Stages in Central Park. Today is the close of the Brazilian Film Festival which naturally warrants a party with lots of musica. Torquinho will play tonight– all for free out under the blue skies and early summer green of the trees. The deejay who warmed up the crowd has a following, as evidenced by the number of people with real cameras, not just iPhones, taking pictures when he appeared. Gaspar Muniz plays a great set–and happens to be the son of Vic Muniz.