Scenes from a Commute...

As I discussed in a previous post, I've become a pretty serious cyclist. I commute 15 miles (24 km) to work by bike at least six days a week (weather permitting), which has gone a long way to the successful completion of 'Operation Iron-Carlo', the code-name given to my loss of the weight I gained at the end of my Ph.D. As an added benefit, having a decent bike allows me to avoid taking Washington D.C.'s umm, shall we say 'unreliable' Metro system1 for ~8 months out of the year.

I've actually been recording my total distance biked (as you can see on the right side of the blog). This actually isn't arbitrary, but is rather quite precise2 due to a little toy I got for my birthday this year:

I managed to get a really good deal on a Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS exercise 'watch'. It's a bit more pricey than a cycling computer, but it can also be used for jogging and tracks all kinds of stats that you can use for endurance training. While biking, it gives you total distance travelled, current velocity, heart rate, and altitude among other things, so it's pretty nice.

There's a docking cradle that allows the unit to recharge and transfer its data automatically to your PC (or in my case, Macbook) where your routes can be displayed in Google Maps and all kinds of stats and metrics can be compared between laps or trips.

Anyways, the real purpose of this post was to say that I've recently decided that I should take a bunch of pictures in and around Maryland/DC before I move away in a few short months. I just got a new, much better digital camera to replace my previous ailing unit, and so to test it out, I took a bunch of photos along my bike ride this morning and have uploaded them into a Picasa Web Album:

Home to Work Bike Ride (29th July 2011)

The photos aren't quite as impressive as my buddy Martin's pics from his recent trip to the Netherlands, but they're ah... quasi scenic, I guess. Lots of road and trail, or whatever.

1As a guest in this beautiful country, I've tried to avoid complaining about things like public services - for the most part, they've been great. However, I have to agree with many of my friends that the Metro system here in Washington is truly abysmal. The trains run infrequently except at 'peak' hours and there are frequent technical difficulties causing unexpected delays. The real 'killer' though is that in the 2 years that I've been here, there's been near constant weekend 'scheduled track maintenance' where trains run on single tracks or entire stations are closed down for days, creating 30 to 45 minute waits between trains. Stories of people waiting for an hour without seeing a train are not uncommon, and are extremely aggravating. The issue seems to be a consistent state of under-funding leading to aging equipment in a shoddy state of repair. There's actually an entire blog dedicated to ranting about the DC Metro: Unsuck DC Metro.

2I always round fractional miles from each trip down to be conservative.

Comments

[TheBrummell]

Hey, thanks for the compliment! If you take enough pictures, sooner or later you'll accidentally take some good ones - this is the approach I use (I took nearly 1500 pictures during my 2 weeks in the Netherlands, down from my usual "spray and pray" rate of hundreds per day).
You have one of the nicest-looking commutes I've ever seen posted, anywhere. Of course, you took your pictures on a nice day, I'm guessing it's a bit less pleasant when it's rainy and windy. Still, pretty cool. Presumably you'll be able to continue to bike to work and put my lazy ass to shame when you're in California.
For some reason, I'd always pictured your building in my mind as grey concrete with plenty of windows, and no taller than about 3 stories. Huh. Thanks for putting up the pictures - did security hassle you at all about taking pictures on the NIH camups?

[Carlo]

It is a nice commute, and the weather is typically sunny but extremely hot (it's pretty much high 30s [sometimes low 40s] every afternoon these days with high humidity). I'm thinking about writing a rant about the weather someday :-)

Re: Taking pictures of Government buildings. I didn't get hassled but it's always a contentious issue here. Every once in a while, there'll be a crackdown on taking pictures of government buildings downtown. I don't think that they typically care about 'general' pictures of buildings, but they don't like when you take pictures of guards at security gates and things like that. There's always a huge crowd hanging out by the White House taking tons of photos, for example.

I've actually been making an effort to take photos all around the NIH lately as a souvenir of my time here and would like to post them on the blog sometime soon.