Bike Trips, Books, and the End of Summer

In which I ride my bike from Boston to Provincetown, think about time, and miss my mom.

Greetings from Provincetown!

       I’m in my favorite place in the world, at my favorite time of the year. By the end of August, some of the kids have gone back to school. The air’s a little cooler. But the ocean water is warm enough for swimming, the beaches and the roads are less crowded, and, if you can ignore the Halloween candy displays in the drugstore and the Pumpkin Spice lattes at your neighborhood Starbucks, you can hold onto summer with both hands and make another year’s worth of memories.

       Every year since I was a kid, I’ve been coming to Cape Cod. Only this year, for a change of pace, I rode my bike part of the way. Since I started riding again, I’ve been trying to do one long ride every summer. In 2021, I rode the GAP and C&O Trail from Pittsburgh to Washington, DC. In 2022, I rode the Empire Trail from Buffalo to Albany. Both rides were in the 350 mile neighborhood, over seven days. I felt very proud when I finished. Also very tired!

Last summer I didn’t have a big ride – I did three days solo from New York to Poughkeepsie in the spring, then a three-day ride from Philadelphia to Gettysburg in the fall. This summer, I was determined to make it happen, even though scheduling felt like threading a needle, finding the sweet spot between dropping my younger daughter off at camp in LA, visiting my older daughter in New York, spending a week in the Berkshires with my non-cycling spouse and this, our end-of-summer last hurrah on the Cape. I was reading up about the East Coast Greenway – that’s the One True Path that will someday link ALL the other bike paths, creating one giant path that will run from Maine to Key West, like an Appalachian Trail for cyclists.

       My big, someday dream is to ride across the country. A lot of cyclists are planning on doing it in 2026, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first 2000 cyclists who rode Adventure Cycling’s newly-unveiled route. These days, there are two ways across the country – the Southern Tier and the Northern Tier. I don’t think taking three months off in 2026 is in the cards, but, someday, I am going to ride that ride. Meanwhile, I was delighted to see that there is a 240-mile loop between Boston and Provincetown. Perfect! I downloaded the route onto my Ride with GPS app, loaded my bike onto the train, disembarked in Boston on Tuesday afternoon, and spent five days on the road before meeting up with my husband and younger daughter in P-town.

In Boston, at the start of the ride.

       If you followed along on my Instagram, you got the highlights. It was a glorious ride. At least, the part of the ride on protected trails was glorious. The road riding felt a little fraught because of a recent tragedy back home in Philadelphia. A 30-year-old physician riding in a bike lane, with her helmet on, was killed when a drunk driver veered across the strip of paint that’s the only thing separating the bike lane from the traffic, and hit her. It turned out that her killer had been arrested back in 2009 for driving, drunk, the wrong way down a one-way stretch of Pine Street.

Barbara Friedes’ death, and the subsequent public reaction, reminded me of two things:

1.   Riding a bike on a road with cars is dangerous, and

2.   People are happy – or, at least, willing – to sacrifice a few bicyclists’ lives to protect their own convenience.

Bikers are inconsiderate! they’ll claim. They don’t stop at red lights! They don’t respect the rules of the road! They scare me to death! And besides, what am I supposed to do if I can’t pull right in front of my front door to drop off my groceries? How’s that little old lady supposed to get to church on Sunday mornings?

It’s true that some bikers don’t ride considerately, and that protected bike lanes would make it harder for residents to drop their groceries off at their front doors – or drop kids off at preschools. But it’s also true that if someone on a bike breaks the traffic laws, the worst thing that happens is a driver getting scared, or annoyed. If a driver breaks the laws, it can have lethal consequences.

As a parent and a bike rider, I, personally, would be willing to pay for a parking spot, and walk with my kids or carry my groceries a few extra hundred yards if it meant no more bikers or pedestrians would die. I’m hoping that Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker – who has, so far, refused to meet with the activists who wanted to present her with pro-barrier petitions – will do the right thing.

Back to the bike ride! I made it safely to Cape Cod, and began my personal Greatest Hits tour: chocolate-covered apricots at the Hot Chocolate Sparrow, a sandwich and some pie at Sam’s, some of the best pastries in the world at P&B Boulangerie, iced coffee at Jams, and, finally, a plateful of fresh oysters at Mac’s in Provincetown. I feel lucky I’ve been able to come here for going on fifty years, and even luckier to be able to share such a beautiful, fun, funky, embracing place with my family. In the past week, I’ve been shopping at the Atlantic Spice Company, hit the bay side beaches in Truro and Provincetown, done my traditional swim across Gull Pond, enjoyed happy hour at Victor’s, and ice cream at Lewis Brothers and Sweet Escape. We found a tidal flat near our house to roam around in – Phoebe, my younger daughter, has been a CIT at the Audobon nature camp she attended every summer, so she knows all about the flora, the fauna, and the various kinds of crabs you’ll see. And Lucy will be joining us today, and spending the rest of the week.

It’s always a little bittersweet being here. Cape Cod was my mom’s favorite place. It’s where she spent part of every summer since Lucy was a baby spending time with my daughters – taking them swimming and clamming, teaching them to ride their bikes. I miss her a lot, and I feel very lucky to have my girls with me (and even luckier that they still want to spend time with me). But God, it goes so fast….and that back-to-school, end-of-summer feeling in the cool night air makes me think about how quickly the seasons are passing. Lucy’s almost done with college; Phoebe’s halfway done with high school. Sunrise, sunset…  

I hope you’ve all been having an absolutely wonderful summer, and reading a lot of good books! I’ve personally been on a bit of a book-to-film streak. I am reading THE TERROR by Dan Simmons, and watching the limited series on Netflix. I’m not a huge historical fiction reader, but the story of two British ships trying to find the Northwest Passage, or die trying, is so vivid and well-written, and the little twist of horror is keeping the pages flying. I read FELLOW TRAVELERS by Thomas Malle, also the basis of a limited series on Showtime, and it’s been so interesting to compare and contrast – THE TERROR on TV, so far, has done a lot of cutting and compressing, where FELLOW TRAVELERS’ showrunner invented entirely new story arcs and two brand-new main characters to round out the story of the Lavender Panic and two men in love in the midst of the McCarthy Hearings.

Stay tuned for another close reading – we’ll be analyzing some political speeches and looking at cliches. Meanwhile, if you’ve got any cycling questions – about equipment or routes or just getting started – drop them in the comments!