"I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride it where I like."

Bike paths abound in the Nation's Capital.

My favorite took me from Georgetown, along the Potomac under the Kennedy Center, up over the Memorial Bridge to Arlington, down the Virginia side of the river to National Airport, then home via Roosevelt Island and the Key Bridge.


The loop is 12 miles with breathtaking vistas of the monuments and river at every turn. Riding across bridges is especially cool.

Knotts Island is flat and ideal for biking. I'd ride from the garage, to the ferry landing, past the elementary school and the winery, to Donald's house on the tiny northern tip that is in the state of Virginia. I'd return via the market


post office, police substation, and MacKay Wildlife Preserve.


This loop in 16 miles with stunning vistas of Currituck Sound, Back Bay, and a thousand acres of wetlands. Occasionally, I'd ride across the causeway to the mainland. Riding across bridges is especially cool, even weeny ones!


Now the big one.

Looming outside of my window is the top of the west tower of the George Washington Bridge.

I am told that, if I can find the entrance, one can ride all the way across the bridge and (presumed) back.

The breathtaking view from the GW Bridge.

Thank you for visiting.

Jack

"Sunday will never be the same."

Last night was my first alone in 5B.

Wonderful.

Yesterday, before leaving Knotts Island, I enjoyed a final walk through the Mackay Wildlife Preserve which I will miss.

I bid a fond farewell to Nancy Tillery (landlady) and her sister Barbara (next door neighbor and pool proprietress.) Nancy's husband Terry was off to the mountains on his Harley, so the ladies were headed on a Thelma & Louise like assault on Target and Wal-Mart (28 miles away.)

It's been a wonderful year of writing, new friends, and GREAT food!!

I brought up another car-load of stuff from Knotts Island yesterday leaving one final fall trip for books and CDs.

Over a life time of back and forth, I have spent countless Sunday afternoons trying to negotiate the George Washington Bridge. Today, while walking around Fort Lee, I was, at last, the happy object of :

"if you lived here...

you'd be home now."

Very cool.

My Sunday routine is now forever changed.

Most notably, my excursion to get the NY Times has been reduced by 25 1/2 miles (each way!) I also now have a stove so I can cook the few Sunday morning things that my diet permits. Oh well, it's just nice to know that I could cook bacon, eggs and pancakes if I wanted to.

I will miss the grill which, you readers may recall, was my one capital purchase on Knotts, but I'm a city slicker now. 

Fittingly, my one major capital purchase here was a 37 inch Sony 1080 LCD TV. It will arrive any day. All of NY is abuzz about Bret Farve's arrival to the Jets from Green Bay. I won't need to miss a snap! Redskins?! Yesterday's gone.

The noises here differ from Knotts Island. Daybreak there brings the rooster, followed by birds of every variety, followed by turbocharged ride-on lawn mowers, industrial grade weed wackers, ginormous supercharged pick-up trucks, and two 6 year old girls (one, actually, is 5) roaring all over creation on their ATVs.

Daybreak here brings the pulsing plaint of air horns from the 18 wheelers jockeying for a slot at the toll booth overlaid by the soothing sound of the 13 air conditioning units atop of the Walgreens strip mall five floors below.

Fort Lee is a tidy little town. The library and hardware store are down the street, and little shops and restaurants abound.

This is going to be fun.

Thank you for visiting.

Jack

"Oh, hail to New Jersey, it's the best in 48."

Our mother occasionally sang during long car trips. It was years before I understood that she made up these songs as she went. Over time they became as embedded as if they had been written by George M. Cohan himself. Who were we to doubt her?

One of her favorites was O Hail to New Jersey, a tribute to my father's birthplace and adopted home for the rest of us (but for sister Barby who was, in fact, born there.) She would present it with all the gravitas of an anthem:

O hail to New Jersey, its the fresh and Garden Staaaayaaate
O hail to New Jersey, it's the best in fourty eight.

She also concocted songs that tied in the names of the states that we were passing through at the time:

What did Della wear, boys, what did Della wear?
Well, she wore an old New Jersey, yeah to wore an old NJ.
We were all proud to be from New Jersey because, well, for most of our young lives, that's where we were from. Mom was from Quebec Canada and, had she ever felt unfairly exiled, she never expressed it to us. She was the drinker of the New Jersey Kool Aid in our family.

In retrospect, it could not have been easy. Her mother-in-law (my grandma) was a force. Her family had come to Parsippany several years after the Mayflower landing. Mom's father-in-law (my grandpa) was three generations removed from Scotland. His grandfather came to Patterson to lay the bricks that were needed to house the industrial revolution. They still lived in the same house in Elizabeth, not far from our new home in suburban Summit.

Grandpa had served six terms as a Congressman from the state's 6th District before I was born. He was a Republican whose tenure exactly overlaid those of President Franklin Roosevelt. I often wonder what it must have been like to be a Congressional Republican facing the tsunami of New Deal legislation during that period (not to mention WWII.)

Grandma's claim to fame was that she had created the New Jersey state flag (which is to say she put the state seal on a flag and got the state legislature to adopt it.)

So mom would sing away while trying to instill some piece of historical fiber into the back-seat brats (only on car trips) that were her four children.

New Jersey was a great place to grow up, but once I arrived in Massachusetts for prep school, it became a liability ("you're from the armpit of the nation??!!) Fortunately for me (at that moment) my family moved from New Jersey to Brookline Massachusetts. I never looked back. To the world and anyone else that was curious, I was theretofore from Boston.

My prep school friend Ford Fraker is from New Jersey and proud of it (Ford gave as good as he got when taunted about his home state.) Upon hearing about my move to Fort Lee, he sent a note welcoming me back home. At first I bristled, but then I smiled. Thanks Ford. It is good to be back!

AND, for you faithful blog readers who joined me at whatknotts.blogspot.com, you will be delighted to know that, within three months, I will have to register a vehicle and get a New Jersey driver's license.

The best in 48? I sure hope so!

Thanks for visiting.

Jack