Tour de Ann Arbor

When I set out to bike to all five branches of the Ann Arbor District Library in one day, I didn’t realize the Tour de France was going on at the same time, but turns out it was, so that was fitting. On the very first stage of the race, a spectator managed to step too close to the course with a sign and cause basically the entire peloton to crash, which was more or less the big news of the Tour de France. Fortunately, on my journey I was not hit by anything besides a vine that scratched my arm because I biked into it.

During the summer, I normally visit all the library branches in search of summer game points, but usually just one or two at a time. After five years in Ann Arbor, I’ve biked almost everywhere in the city, so for fun I mapped out a route that would take me through all the branches in one trip and realized it was actually feasible. The way the library branches are spread out, the most efficient route roughly circles the city and is about fifteen miles long if you start downtown. Even adding the mileage to get downtown, the whole trip is about as long as some of my rides along and around the Border to Border  (B2B) trail, so I thought, why not?

Setting out, I knew it wasn’t going to be the most pleasant ride, which proved to be true. I picked a time on the weekend when there was less traffic, but the drivers seemed worse than average. Given that during the pandemic lockdowns in Michigan traffic decreased but accidents per mile travelled increased, I wouldn’t be surprised if the drivers were actually worse than usual. Because I had a lot of ground to cover, I took the shortest routes, which included a lot of not-so-great roads for biking.

Library branches, in the order visited: Top right - Downtown, center - Westgate, bottom right - Pittsfield, bottom left - Malletts Creek, top left - Traverwood

The B2B and its connections through Parker Mill County Park and to the Matthaei Botanical Garden Trail are great. There are enough pedestrians on campus and downtown to keep traffic slow and drivers aware enough to make them fairly bikeable. Residential neighborhoods are also fine, and most of the main spoke roads radiating from the center of Ann Arbor have decent bike lanes, but outside of that the biking’s not super fun. Part of the problem is that Ann Arbor has an incomplete interior ring road. It was supposed to move cars around the city quickly, but because it’s so piecemeal it has more intersections, entries and exits (to shopping centers, housing developments, churches, schools, parks, golf courses, etc.), and traffic lights than a ring road should have. This defeats the purpose of a ring road because if you have development along it, it itself becomes a destination and it’s no longer a fast way to circumscribe the city. In fact, the not-ring road makes traffic in the city very messy, leading to the conclusion that I came to after this bike ride.

My primary problem with Ann Arbor is that it can’t decide whether it wants to cater to cars (ring roads, high speed limits, four+ lanes of traffic) or encourage pedestrians and bikers (sidewalks that don’t suck, bike lanes, not almost getting run over by a car every time you cross a street). Take, for example, the not-ring road. It has posted speed limits of 35-40 mph, which is too fast for bikes to keep up with and not fun for pedestrians to walk next to. However, the not-ring road has (not great) sidewalks because of its proximity and direct access to public services like schools and grocery stores that people without cars might conceivably need to get to. So the not-ring road sucks for pedestrians/bikers that need to access things along it because it’s noisy and terrible to walk/ride along, and it sucks for drivers because it’s riddled with traffic lights, crosswalks, and turn lanes. Overall it sucks for everyone because it’s not particularly safe for anyone.

I was on Reddit awhile ago and in some post about biking (probably related to the Tour de France crash) someone posted an interesting link to a video that addresses this topic. In the video, they define a road as a “high-speed connection between two places” and a street as a “complex environment where life in the city happens.” The problem, they argue, is “stroads,” which try to combine streets and roads but don’t properly do the job of either. Sounds a bit like the not-ring road that I had to bike on to visit all my library branches. Anyway, in the end, I got my summer game points, some exercise, and only a scratched arm, so I guess it was worth it.

The Rest of the Summer

When I wasn’t in the office doing research or galivanting across the state/country with my visitors, I spent the summer much as I have the last two summers. I walked, biked, and bussed my way to all corners of Ann Arbor. I went grocery shopping and attended church. I trekked through parks, natural areas, fields, forests, and fens; visited the farmer’s market; watched soccer; ate ice cream; and overall had a pretty good time.

Besides going to the arboretum a fair amount, I visited a couple of parks that I hadn’t been to before. Both were nice areas, but both were also plagued by my number one complaint about Ann Arbor parks: traffic noises. Is it really nature if you can still hear the cars roaring by at fifty miles an hour? If a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there- Anyway, Furstenberg Nature Area on the east side of Ann Arbor features woodlands, prairie, wetlands, and marshes along the Huron River. It also connects to Gallup Park, which I’ve biked through on the Border to Border trail. I saw the river, some swans, and interesting clouds.

Clouds

All the way at the southeastern corner of the city, technically in Pittsfield township, is Lillie Park. I biked there, discovered the Costco and airport, did not get run over by any motor vehicles, and biked back, for a total distance of 21 miles for the day. Again, the park itself is nice, but it’s nestled right up in the intersection of I-94 and US 23. Nothing like some motors revving to go with the birdsong and wind rustling through the leaves. I walked some of the trails through the woods and across/around a couple lakes and learned about eutrophic ponds. In a eutrophic pond, plant matter accumulates faster than it’s carried away or decomposed, so the pond will eventually fill up and become moist forest or a meadow.

The eutrophic Duck Potato Pond

After peony season at the arboretum, I went back a couple times. In summer, it’s quietest when it’s raining, right after it rains, or when it might rain at any second, because that keeps the drunken tubers off the river and the fair-weather, also possibly drunk, picnickers away. My discovery of the season was very tall grass. It was taller than me, which sometimes isn’t saying much, but this was tall grass.

Very tall grass

Additionally, there was another visit to the botanical garden for yet more cactus/succulent photos. We survived another year of art fair. It was not a good year for the artists. Every single evening, it poured, and the high winds flipped at least one tent. As usual, I walked around but did not buy anything. I volunteered at a couple of engineering outreach events. At one, I mixed two hundred pounds of cornstarch with water to make a viscoelastic pool that I then walked across. It felt like I was being initiated into the ChemE secret society, except it was in broad daylight and a couple dozen middle school girls were watching. At the other, I was the photographer and got paid for the first time ever for photos that I took. I can now say that I’ve been a paid photographer. And finally, the two ice cream flavors I tried at Blank Slate this summer were peanut butter cone crunch (peanut butter butterscotch ice cream with caramel and chocolate covered waffle cone pieces) and campfire s’mores (caramel ice cream, chocolate ganache, graham crackers, and marshmallow cream). Would recommend both.

Winter

Back in Ann Arbor, winter was creeping into the city when I returned to work. I stayed in Michigan through Christmas and New Year’s; there was snow, sleet, ice, and a day of negative 40 wind chill; I trekked through the Arboretum in the middle of a snowstorm, in single digit weather, and while the entire thing was a giant ice slick; then one day we woke up, the snow was gone, the weather was warm(ish), and spring had arrived. That actually sums up all of December, January, and February pretty well. Michigan did get some snow, but the roads stayed clear and the temperatures (mostly) high enough that I ended up biking to band a couple times in January and February, which was not the case last year. At the end of January/beginning of February, the university declared classes cancelled for two days for extreme cold. Air temperatures were in the single digits with wind chills of negative 30 to negative 40. I agreed with the first day of no classes because a significant number of students have to travel to campus, wait for buses, walk to class, etc. The second day was cold, but not that cold. Cornell semi-regularly got down to negative 30 wind chill and their response was to send out a mass email telling people to wear layers and be careful when walking to class. This time, I did, however, wear my winter jacket for the first time in four or five years.

The Arboretum in a snowstorm

In the middle of January, I returned to Hill Auditorium to see the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra play Mozart, including the Requiem accompanied by local high school and community choruses. A week later, Ann Arbor was hit by a snow storm. Naturally, I thought that was a great time to go to the Arboretum to get some pictures. It was a fantastic time to go to the Arboretum. The only other people dumb, I mean hearty, enough to be there were runners and other photographers. The next day, in 11-degree temperatures, I returned to the Arboretum for more pictures. Funnily enough, I only saw about 11 other living things there – five cross country skiers, two snowshoers, some people walking, and two dogs. I made one last winter trip to the Arboretum near the end of February, when the snow was packed down and had gone through several freeze/thaw cycles so all the paths were pretty slick. Not dangerously icy (and still better than the sidewalk outside of my apartment that spawns black ice every time it sleets, or rains and freezes, or snows and melts and refreezes), but I wouldn’t have recommended it for children, the elderly, or anyone who hasn’t had to run for the school bus at six thirty am on partially shoveled frozen sidewalks.

One day later.  Eleven degrees at the Arboretum

The last of my winter adventures were a walk at the Barton Nature Area with a family from church and a bike ride on the Border to Border trail to Gallup Park on the first moderately warm/clear day in March. I’d never been to the Barton Nature Area because it’s in one of those areas of Ann Arbor that’s a pain in the neck to get to without a car. It’s next to Bird Hills Nature Area, which I also still haven’t been to, and has some unpaved trails and a dam. The Border to Border trail, on the other hand, is fairly accessible. I get on the trail about halfway along its path through Ann Arbor, and on this occasion, I biked in the Gallup Park direction. It was in the low forties, with sun, and unfortunately I wasn’t the only one taking advantage of the break in the weather. Most of the time the pedestrians and bikers are decent at staying to the right, giving signals and/or space when passing, and generally not running each other over, but not this day. There were multiple people walking straight down the middle of the trail, stepping into my path, and weaving back and forth.

Top: Melting Arboretum.  Bottom left: Barton Dam.

Bottom right: The Huron River from Gallup Park on the Border to Border Trail.

So that was winter. Research, questionable outdoor activity, and I also TA’d, again, possibly for the last time. I might write more about my teaching experience, or I might post another five hundred words on the contents of my refrigerator. If you’re really fortunate, you might get both.

Minutes, Miles, and Numbers

This is the time of year when I divulge how much little I biked, practiced the clarinet, read, and wrote last year. I did, however, watch a fair number of movies and TV shows. And yes, I really do keep track of all this information, because I like numbers and it makes it easy to give book/movie recommendations, which I was recently asked to do, so there.

Because of my tendency to leave for my class that was a mile away from my office five to ten minutes before class was scheduled to start, a few early December bike rides meant I rode my bike in every month of 2017. I only rode once in the months of January, February, and March (twice out of necessity, once on an unseasonably warm day to the farmer’s market), but once counts. In July alone I covered over a hundred miles on twenty-two days. A lot of those were short rides between my office and apartment, with longer rides across Ann Arbor on the weekends. My highest single day distance was 16.5 miles, on a day when I went grocery shopping and visited two library branches and the mall. Over the whole year, I biked 105 days (29% of the year) and rode 467 miles (about the distance from Boston to Washington, DC).

Biking mileage for 2017 by month

Since my return to concert band, I’ve been practicing the clarinet on my own again. I tried/try to be reasonably consistent about practicing. Looking at the graph below, there must have been something hard about our third and fourth concerts last year to get me to practice that much in March, but I don’t remember what. I definitely also took a break over the summer when I didn’t have any concert band music to work through.  Practice total for the year: 73 hours.  This doesn't include playing for fun, band rehearsals, or concerts.

Time spent practicing clarinet in 2017 by month

I also watched 62 movies, including close to two dozen musicals, and read 61 books, roughly a quarter of which were nonfiction and three quarters were fiction. I spent my summer reading research papers. My brain could take only so much educational material. Coming soon – a post with some of my favorite books and movies I watched last year.

Finally, I’ve been writing (or not writing) here for over five years now. The picture below sums up five years of writing.

Graph of blog posts vs month for the past five years
(Click to enlarge)