The 5 Boro Bike Tour --- 2005

As I was reading my NYC niece's blog post today she mentioned that the New York City annual Bike the Boro's Tour had passed right through her neighborhood yesterday, and chills ran up and down my spine!! That's because riding in this event was a dream of mine for a number of years. We all know what a heavy-duty bicyclist Paul is (i.e. Alpe d'huez last summer) but I personally just love riding flat terrain with maybe just a little uphill so there is some downhill to enjoy. When I heard about this exciting, 42-mile ride through the "canyons" of NYC and over multiple bridges with NO traffic along the entire route... I knew that was my kind of event! Now, under normal circumstances, this wouldn't have been too enticing to Paul but the fact that he had had a major ATV accident the June before and was still recovering, this ride was enough for him. Perfect! I signed us up! I understand it was a beautiful, sunny day in New York City yesterday. I wish I could say the same for 2 years ago. As we headed down to the starting line at Battery Park, it began to rain. Then we turned a corner and suddenly we discovered the other 30,000 participants. Whoa... did we know there were going to be 30,000 other bikers? Not really... Suffice it to say, things went downhill (and not in a good way) from the starting line. After standing in the rain and cold for over an hour waiting for the ride to begin, it became overwhelming to Paul and we decided to bail out. We took off a few streets away and headed back up in the direction of our hotel. This was early 8 a.m.ish on a Sunday morning so there was very little traffic anywhere. We had our own little adventure trying to navigate our way back to 31st Street. When we finally got there and looked a couple streets away, there was the ride sailing right on up the Avenue of the Americas and by then the rain had subsided so we jumped back in again only to discover it is quite unnerving to ride with thousands upon thousands of bicylists ready to cut you off any second. We did ride up through Central Park and into Harlem before it just wasn't going to happen.... and once again we headed back to our hotel; cold, discouraged and relieved. But don't feel badly for us; we had a great adventure. We calculated that we probably rode about 20 miles around Manhattan and got to see lots of places up close and personal. Maybe someday we'll go back but probably only if we can be the only two bicyclists on the route.