I have been riding my bicycle to and from work almost every day for a week. The total distance is about 19 or 20 km each way.
Still life with bike
A good stretch of the route is a shortcut along a forest path. It has been very windy the last few days, so there was a surprise:
Many stretches are very sandy – this is characteristic of this area – so I am riding my mountain bike.
The purists among you will forgive my footwear and pedals
I managed not to crash taking that picture, thank you very much.
Coming out of the forest, the rest of the way looks something like this:
This path runs along a busy carriage way – can you tell?
And if you look around, you see this:
Can you see the direction the wind turbines are pointing? That’s the way I was going.
I just took these pictures today – they are a lot nicer than those I could have taken yesterday, riding into the wind and rain…
My primary motivation for being hard core and doing this every day is that I want to enjoy being able to do it while I can, because – a month from now – I will start my new job, and my commute will look much different.
Ooh. One of the nice thing about being back in a country with proper roads—and no drop-bears—is that I’m back on my own fiets.
Is nice.
Very! :)
What’s the new job, Steffi? A nice one, I hope. (Apologies if you posted about it and I missed it, I’ve been away and a bit busier than usual recently).
I love your pictures, especially the one of the legs and pedals!
You haven’t missed anything, Maxine – I have managed to contain myself and not let the cat out of the bag yet! I am going to work here and have written about what that’s all about a little bit here. I am very excited, but this is also a big step for me: I am finally leaving ‘my kind of science’ behind.
I love riding to/from work… clears the head beautifully.
This was the view I would get riding to Uni a few years back…
but it meant tackling this monster first, with the added bonus of very fast and furious descent :)
The ride here in Vancouver is much more urban, or at least it was until someone stole my beautiful mountain bike last week. Now I’m reduced to walking :(
Aaargh, I hate bike-stealing vermin!!! I had three stolen: one in Hamburg, two in Southampton.
Very impressive climb, Darren. As an undergrad, I lived on top of a mountain at the outskirts of Goettingen – very handy to go downhill with a hangover in the morning, but a bugger to get back up after a long day in the evening…
Wow, what a cool trip! My current job is too close to my house to bike. It’s an odd problem I’ve never had before. For the first time ever I’m considering joining an organized bike ride this weekend just to get a reason to take the bike out again.
Darren, if you lived in Toronto, I’d have a a bike for you! The one I have now (the one I never use anymore…) was one that I got a few summers ago when I had TWO bikes stolen in the same summer. (The one that I only had for 6 weeks was my favourite bike ever [sniff]). I then got a free bike from a friend: it’s a “scholarship bike”. She got it for free when she really needed one, and so did the previous owner, and she gave it to me under the same conditions, and I’m planning on giving it away to someone else who needs a bike. It’s a road bike, and people who know about things have said that it’s a pretty good one at that. But I’m not riding it all the way too Vancouver, that’s too far.
Yeah, they’d better hope I don’t catch them :)
That climb certainly got the heart rate up!
I have actually been riding around Goettingen for a couple of days, great town and some very nice riding too! A friend of mine was living there a few years ago doing a language course on his way to taking up a VonHumboldt Fellowship at GBF in Braunschweig.
Darren: the world is so tiny :)
Eva: get your butt out there on that bike!!
The first bike I had stolen in Southampton was my most favourite ever as well – a beautiful titanium bike when they were still it, and which I’d worked bloody hard for. What ticked me off was that the police reckoned it was sold with a whole batch of bikes for only about 15 quid each – I guess I figured at least the thieves should have asked for what it was worth!
Stolen bikes? Tell me about it. I live in Southampton, Steffi; happened to me a few weeks back (provoking the first line here). So I’m also walking. But that’s not all bad in flowering spring with its birdsong and blooms.
Congratulations on the new job – don’t get in the way of that beam!
Thanks Stephen!
Lee – did I mention that the world is small?
Sounds fascinating, Steffi (the new job). It seems incredibly high-tech compared with my couple of times working at DESY (the Hamburg synchrotron).
I’ll have so much to learn, Maxine – in many ways, this job will be very close to what I was doing in the US Antarctic Program, but in other ways it will be completely different and new! I am sad to leave science publishing behind so quickly – it could have suited me so well – but this is a very exciting new challenge.
Congratulations Steffi! I hope you’ll be able to blog a bit about your new job!
Thanks Cath! I’m firmly planning on blogging about it. Actually, I did mention my blog during the interview – I was asked to give a half hour presentation about myself – and that went down rather well (to my surprise!).
Congratulations Steffi, and way to go for going the distance on your biking commute. So many people I know live much closer to work than you and will still drive. I hope I’ll have the chance soon to commute under my own power. It’s a much more satisfying way to travel.
And thank you as well, Eric!
My next commute will involve 1.5 hours by public transport each way… to be fair, I have some additional motivation for the bike commute: the beautiful landscape and the fact that it’s summer – I need to carry less clothes with me to change into at work (no, I don’t sit at my desk in my cycling shorts). The fact that I know I will only be doing this for a limited amount of time also helps – I did cycle (and also ran – but that only one way) a few times last year, but never really started doing this regularly.
Maybe you’ll come back to the scientific publishing sphere, Steffi, at some point. From my perspective of having an article expertly edited by you, I think you are very good indeed at it!
Steffi – good news, and you must be in fantastic shape. Cycling in tunnels wouldn’t have the same charm, eh? And how did you take that photo #3?
Heh – #3 was taken holding the camera over my head. I had to take a few of those to get a really good one :)
By the way, Eva: if you leave your bicycle unattended for too long, it may end up like this:
Abandoned bike on university campus, yesterday
In the interests of Truth and Accuracy in reporting, I have to add this morning that – according to my GPS – the distance with the shortcut through the forest is exactly 9.95 miles (16.01 km) door-to-door. So I overstated it up there and it’s a breeze, really.
And to think I TRIED to get my bike stolen in Southampton and never succeeded! The thing was so old and gnarly……beautiful photos Steffi, though I don’t envy your upcoming 1.5hr commute each way, are you planning to move closer?
Hey Rhian! Nope, we’ll stay where we are – it’s beautiful here and suits us well. The commute should be doable – I’ll spend most of the time on this, so there should even be some time for reading and thinking :)
You should book yourself a permanent seat…..:0) Good luck with the new job!