Category Archives: Biking

Weekend bicycling whirlwind

The weekend’s bike trips (and restaurant visits — three in one weekend!!!):

Friday

  • South Grand — Lunch at Basil Spice, a Thai restaurant, with Matthew and my FIL.  We dined while watching construction work on the South Grand Great Streets project.  Pad See-iew for him, Pad Thai for her, both with tofu, both off of the $6.95 lunch menu.  We shared our dishes.   Both were good, though we really enjoyed the Pad See-iew.  I came prepared with my own take out containers and was disappointed with the clean plates that resulted from the smaller lunch portions 😦
  • The Hill — Errands at the Italian shops.  Purchases included olive oil, dried porcini mushrooms, farro (an Italian grain that I’ve been wanting to try), and Swiss cheese so we can make more reubens.  Unfortunately, our source for affordable dry active yeast has dried up, though I did see a mobster in the bakery, so the stop there wasn’t a total waste.
  • The CWE — Dinner at Terrene.  Terrene, with a focus on local food and sustainability, has been on our radar for some time, but until January, it was on the “allows smoking — do not patronize” list.  (Yes, two restaurants in one day — crazy for us, but we had a Groupon-type thing that needed to be used.)  I’m still a bit hesitant to whip out the camera in restaurants, so no food pics.  We ordered the flatbread, half veg sausage, half mushroom; the gnocchi, and the vegetarian meatloaf with mushroom gravy.  We enjoyed the first two items, but the veg meatloaf was missing something.  I realized later that the only trace of the gravy was three small oyster mushrooms — wish I’d realized that earlier and asked for more gravy.

Saturday

  • Tower Grove South — Winter farmers’ market.  With the beautiful weather, two vendors set up outside the church.  We purchased spinach, a HUGE head of bok choy, green onions, and carrots.
  • Tower Grove South — Trip #2 to the neighborhood for my prenatal appointment at River City Birth, followed by a stop at the new-and-improved Local Harvest Grocery, featuring a nice, spacious bathroom — the highlight of the visit for my poor, cramped bladder 😉  We also bought some bulk dry goods and a local Colby cheese.
  • After this trip, we returned home, where I proceeded to take a 2-hour nap 🙂  And then there was a car trip 😦 to Young Ethicals game night for good snacks, games, and fun times.

Sunday

  • The Grove — Church at St. Cronan’s.
  • South Grand — Lunch at Pho Grand with Matthew and my MIL.  We split a vegetarian special and a special curry, though there was some contention about the way they were split — the hungry, hungry hippo pregnant lady may be taking more than her share 😉
  • Interlude to make lemon squares (from our lemons — frozen juice and zest) and do laundry.
  • The Y — if my bike isn’t already out, I usually just walk to the Y, since it’s less than a mile away.  If I’m out and about, and know I might be biking again that day, I lock my bike up outside to save lugging it down and up the basement stairs an extra time.
  • Aaannnddd, another nap — the active transportation takes a lot out of me these days!

Pre-Valentine’s cupcakes

We celebrated the great thaw by biking all around the town on Saturday morning.  We started at the farmers’ market, where our haul included spinach, Napa cabbage, green onions, arugula, and turnips.

My take on turnips: Turnips are one of the very few vegetables that we don’t like (in fact, I can’t think of any others off the top of my head).  We’ve tried them a few times, with various preparations including roasting.  However, they say you should try a new food ten times before deciding you don’t like it, so here we go again.  These were advertised as mild, sweet turnips.  Any favorite turnip recipes you want to share?

The streets still had some icy spots, but we carefully avoided them.  The fenders were essential with all the melting and run-off.  Matthew sported his “3 Feet Please” jersey, shown next to our icy bike lock-up.

After we dropped our produce off at home, we headed back out to the Orchid Show.  I really loved the ancient Maya civilization theme they used this year — if you’re in the St. Louis area, you should definitely check it out.

Our next stop was an apartment possibility that turned out to be not a possibility at all.  Despite my very clearly asking on the phone if the entire 4-family building was smoke-free, and being assured that it was, our noses don’t lie, but the landlord did — waste of our time!

We made a quick exit and headed to lunch at Sweet Art.  Of course, the highlight of lunch at Sweet Art is the cupcakes.  We ordered four, and shared half of each at the restaurant and took the other halves home for later enjoyment 🙂  (I brought containers so we didn’t need any disposable packaging.)

Refueled and renewed, we visited one more apartment before heading home.  Probably another no-go, though nothing blatantly atrocious, unlike the other.

Sunday brought more gorgeous weather, and I followed up on Saturday’s bike fun with a bit more biking on Sunday.  I usually don’t mind winter, but the almost constant covering of ice on the sidewalks and smaller streets was really getting to me — this thaw couldn’t come soon enough!

Biking before the storm

Given the prediction for more winter precipitation headed our way, I made the most of the balmy temps (in the 40s) and improved road conditions to make some trips by bicycle over the weekend.  Over the course of three days, I visited the Y, the library, the farmers’ market, Meskerem Ethiopian restaurant, and church.

I’ve been riding Bub much more than Baby Jake this winter.  Bub’s slightly wider tires and overall geometry feel a bit more stable when riding over questionable patches, and the regular pedals allow me to comfortably wear boots or my Birk clogs, which keep my toes much warmer than the cycling shoes.

I didn’t want Baby Jake to feel left out, so I pulled him out for Saturday’s excursions.  Strangely, the ride didn’t feel that much faster to me than Bub, though the speed, or lack there of, may have been due more to the operator than the machine.

In addition to biking, I filled Friday with yogurt-making, tortilla-making (post on this coming soon), and ice skating.  When I told a coworker earlier in the week that I was planning to go ice skating, she replied, “Can you do that while you’re pregnant?”  And so it begins — and she knows nothing about the biking 😉

Who Killed the Electric Car — A movie review

Who cares???

That was my gut response to the documentary movie Who Killed the Electric Car.  I expressed my skepticism as we sat down to watch it last night.  I don’t care about cars.  I care about bicycling and walking.

Who cares if a car is electric, it still requires ENERGY to run.  Most of the electricity in the U.S. comes from coal (the movie stated that 55% of electricity comes from coal, but I’m fairly certain we’re higher than that in Missouri), which is hardly a clean and green alternative to petroleum.

Despite approaching the movie with a fairly closed mind, I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it.  It contains lots of dirty little secrets that the car companies and the government don’t want us to know.  I mentally rallied with the electric car supporters, and shed a few tears of anger and disgust at one point (watch the movie and then guess when).

Though my passion will continue to be active transportation, the movie makes a convincing case for electric vehicles being a viable and superior solution for many mid-range trips.  However, about half of the trips made in urban areas are less than three miles (with about a quarter of total trips under a mile)  — a distance that most people should be able to travel under their OWN power.  While electric cars might be PART of the solution for reducing our energy use and carbon emissions, working toward and promoting communities that support walking and biking is an equally (if not more) important part of the equation.

Conclusion: informative and entertaining, though not exactly uplifting.  A well-done documentary — I give it five stars.