Friday Fun! 19 March 2010 7:18 pm
Posted by Tracy in : consumerism,cookies,dessert,eating,fun,nyc,random,silly , trackbackHello readers! I know, long time no nothing. Such are the ways of Spring Break (wooo!) even when the earlier part of this week was mostly spent hiding from positively Oregonian-winter weather, and I maybe could have been writing instead of just watching trash TV on Hulu. But no. Spring Break! Woooo!
Today, however, the weather was lovely, and I was positively energetic, which I proved by going on my first New York City bike ride of the season. How is this at all related to TracyFood? Well, I’ll tell you: I needed this bike ride as a test drive (so to speak) for a ridiculous plan.
You see, tomorrow is Macaron Day, and a bunch of NYC bakeries are giving away said delicious treats to celebrate (and do a little self-promotion, but hey: free treats!) And because I am ridiculous, and because the weather is just that lovely, I got it in my head that maybe I could ride my bike from bakery to bakery, collect macarons from all seventeen participating locations (and if I were indeed going to eat seven almond merengue sandwiches with delicious sweet filling, I would need the bike ride to prevent myself from spontaneously combusting on account of all that sugar. So here’s how I schemed.
Here is a big map of all the bakeries, patisseries, chocolatiers, and other purveyors of sweets and deliciousness involved in Macaron Day NYC 2010:
That’s a screenshot because Google Maps won’t embed that big a mess, but if you’re really curious to zoom in and out you can look here.
That’s a grand total of 42 miles (give or take the fact that I don’t always agree with Google Maps directions). But totally within the range of what I can ride in a day when I’m in relatively decent shape (say, bike commuting all the time like I did in Eugene). Of course, I’m not exactly in that kind of shape, and even if I were, New York City bike riding is, um, shall we say a tad more mentally and physically exhausting than — I can’t even say “its Eugene equivalent” because there really is no Eugene equivalent. Every bike ride in the city is an awesome, epic adventure — which I love, because even when I am totally out of shape, I can still feel like a stupendous badass just for having the ovaries to ride in the city.
Like I did today. That said, what I rode today was a piddling little 8 miles, mostly just to make sure that my bike was in working order (true, but I’m still going to have to take off that noisy rear fender) and verify that there are more ways on and off the Hudson River Greenway than Google Maps knows about (answer: yes.) That route looks like this:
What I ride when I want just a short loop. Full zoomable version here
Oh, and I ran into a high school classmate on said Greenway, which was quite a trip. Anyway, as I told her, the full 42-mile tour seems excessive. So first I tried to cut things to restricting myself to visiting only one location of the two bakeries that had multiple locations. Which helped: for one thing, by saving me an expedition to Park Slope. Also I could skip stops at Wall Street, the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Center, all of which just might be kinda sorta packed with people on a beautiful spring Saturday, doncha think? Here’s the map for that effort:
I call this one “Macarons minus redundancies”; a zoom-able version is here.
The predicted total there is 33.5 miles: more do-able than 42, but still a little daring considering how I barely exercised, let alone rode my bike, all winter. So then I decided to restrict myself only to the locations on Manhattan (again, without the redundant locations that also happened to be at tourist magnets) and came up with:
Macarons on Manhattan, screenshot from here.
That’s a very do-able 21-odd miles, with a lovely long stretch on the Hudson River Greenway… wait a minute, I thought, if I ride that route backwards, with the Greenway part at the end, I’ll have the option of cutting the ride short at any time by bailing out to the Greenway to go north. Awesome! So here’s my final route:
Macaron Day NYC 2010: it’s good to have a plan.
and now I am looking forward to this adventure quite a bit. Time to take the fenders off my bike (the rear one is squeak-rattly and sad) and find the charger for my camera batteries, because this exploit is definitely in “pictures or it didn’t happen” territory. Happy weekend, party people!
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the big M
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Cha
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Betty
