Snacks the Pegasus: Textbook Weekend

This was a textbook weekend in that I was too busy having fun to catch up on any of the work I should have been catching up on. I hope there are a lot more like it this summer.

On Friday night I went, last minute, to a Yankees game. 'We' lost, but ah well. I had cheese fries and a corndog, so I, personally, won.

I inadvertently took the same photo, day and night.

After the game, a coworker, Ryan, and I headed toward Pennsylvania for VeloFest, the bike swap on the infield of the Valley Preferred Cycling Center track, aka T-Town. We stayed the night with a couple of his friends before heading out for the swap early Saturday morning.

Here's a late-in-the-day, badly done panoramic photo of VeloFest. About a third of the booths were gone by this point. But hey, I was too busy selling old bike junk to get out and take photos.

Here was our table, which yielded a surprising amount of cash for us. We got rid of a lot! That's Ryan on the left, and his friend Keenan on the right.

A little after 2:00, we loaded up the car with what was left of our bike gear and hit the road, listening to a book on CD that Ryan found on the free table at work - the young adult book about dragons and magic and such, Eragon. Ryan had brought it along as a joke, but I don't joke around when it comes to audio books.

I got home later than planned and wound up hastily figuring out the logistics of a trip into Brooklyn the next day. I planned to take the train down to New York, then take the metro/bike around the city. Just before leaving in the morning, I realized I had left my cycling shoes at work and didn't have time to get them - I would have to wear tennis shoes while pedaling my bike with Candy pedals on it. (In the end, it wasn't as bad as I had imagined.) I had planned ahead and brought sunscreen, which was something I had forgotten the day before.

This was new 'natural' sunscreen that I had just bought... after smearing it all over my face, I figured out that 'natural' meant terrible, terrible chalky zinc sunscreen that makes you look like a ghost. Or not even quite - there was a just a hint of it that made me look vaguely sick. It was terrible.

Neverless, I managed to have fun. I happened upon the TD Five Boro Bike Tour, which is a huge event in the city. Security was high after the Boston bombings. I rode with the ride over a bridge, car free, with the group. It was quite the sight. After I got into Brooklyn, I met my friend Tyler and we hit up the Brooklyn Flea Market. It got pretty busy as the morning wore on.

We happened across some kind of outdoor food fest in the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and I couldn't resist having a ride on Jane's Carousel.

It's been a long time! I did my best to pick out the prettiest carousel horse, but as I was about to hop up on one, a woman and her young son appeared on the other side of it. She asked if she could have it, and I asked if her son had his heart set on it. After all, I had carefully deliberated this and they had seemed to just appear all willy-nilly on the other side of my pick. But she said that yes, her son (who looked suspiciously ambivalent) would have no other horse. After briefly thinking about shouting 'NO!' and getting on anyway, I conceded and got on the second-prettiest horse.

You had better be enjoying that horse, kid.

It is a beautiful carousel, though, with quite the view. It was flooded during Hurricane Sandy, but it looked pristine. I couldn't see any sign of it.

I didn't get a pic of my pick, but here's Tyler enjoying his ride.

After that we had a late brunch complete with margaritas - it was Cinco de Mayo, after all - and met a couple of Tyler's friends for some biking around Prospect Park.

I was all set for New York with my fixie, which I just got back over Christmas. (I sold it to a friend when I left Milwaukee, then bought it back this year.) Cruelly, after getting sunburned and roasting in jeans the day before, this little number left me chillier than I had planned, due to a drop in temperature and a cold wind off of the water.