http://www.sonyclassics.com/itmightgetloud/

Check out the trailer.

http://childrenspoetry-nav.blogspot.com/

I’ve been listening to the Assad Brothers quite a bit lately. Many of their pieces sound unfamiliar to me but their technique and interplay is just jaw-dropping. This past weekend on our trip down to DC I brought along a few of their CDs to check out and heard a piece that I immediately recognized: Baiao Malandro by Egberto Gismonti. WBB readers will know that a few years ago I went through a massive Gismonti period. He is not only an amazing composer but also plays guitar unlike anyone else. However, I’ve only ever heard his Baiao Malandro performed by him in a small trio setting. Hearing the Assad Brothers perform the piece it seems to almost be written intentionally for two guitars.

So but anyway, here are a couple of youtube performances of the piece by the brothers. The first is the better of the two performances: it is less rushed and feels more like Gismonti’s version of the piece. The latter is a much better video recording of the piece and makes (at least for this guitarist) the clip more interesting to watch.

We just spent some time in San Francisco and have been traveling a lot to NYC recently, so I enjoyed noticing the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in architecture, geography and attitude that DC offers to the traveler. The layout of the city makes it a joy to navigate and traveling in late spring when the greenscapes and parks are flourishing–but before the stifling heat and humidity set in–is a great time to be in Washington. Not as nice as the height of cherry blossom season, but still awesome.

We drove down on Friday and spent the night at a friend’s house off of Connectticut Ave in Kensington just outside of the city. We had a great dinner and I got to hear some of the interesting international travel stories from a friend of ours who is a federal agent. The next morning we made an early departure for downtown.

With several hours to kill before we had to get ready for the wedding in the late afternoon, Kel and I ditched the car at the hotel and headed down to the Mall to the Air & Space museum to buy some astronaut ice cream for the kids. The instant we walked into the museum I started planning our next trip down to DC with the kids. I definitely think J. (esp. with his recent obsession with the Star Wars movies) is ready for the Air and Space museum. I’m thinking that we could probably drive down with the bikes on the roof rack and bring the bike trailer along. If we could stay at a hotel close enough to the mall and then use the bikes to get around to the various monuments and museums down on the mall we could probably cover a lot of ground without the kids getting exhausted and cranky from too much walking.

Anyway, after spending way too much money in the Air & Space gift shop, kel and I split up for the rest of the afternoon. Kel met a friend for an al fresco lunch at a nearby hotel and I took the metro up to woodland park/adams morgan. I had a specific destination in mind: City Bikes.

Some backstory: I recently converted my trusty and oft-ridden 1992 Cannondale T-600 to an Xtracycle so that I could more easily transport kids/groceries, etc. around town. I LOVE the Xtracycle. I find myself looking for excuses to run errands on the bike. “Need a case of beer? Sure, be back in 10 minutes!”

So but anyway, part of the motivation behind converting the Cannondale to an Xtracycle was that I’ve been working on doing some long-distance riding with an eye towards a century ride (100 miles) or two this summer and a 200k ride in the fall. I’ve got a client whose office is about 12 miles away from my house and I’ve been commuting down there on bike at least one time a week and the aluminum frame on the cannondale makes for some serious vibration on Jersey’s crappy roads. My plan has been to convert the cannondale for shorter rides/utility cycling and buy a new steel frame tourer for the longer road rides. As an Xtracycle, the cannondale’s new longer wheelbase makes for a more comfortable ride, but not really practical for centuries and such. So I’ve been looking at the Trek 520, the Raleigh Soujourn and the Surly Long Haul Trucker as possible steel frame tourer bikes. After a lot of reading and research I’ve decided on the Surly (though if I were a bit more budget-minded I’d probably opt for the Raleigh since it is an amazing bike for the money).

Anyway, the deal with Surly is you have to order them from your local bike shop but it’s rare that the local bike shop actually has them in stock for you to test ride.  Having a pretty good sense of how I like a bike to fit, my body size/measurements put me right in between a 54cm Surly frame and 56cm frame. Unfortunately none of the bike shops in jersey stock either one of those frames and i was hesitant to order a bike if i was unsure of what size to get.

When I realized we’d be heading to DC I sent some emails to a few bike shops and found that City Bikes in Adams Morgan, amazingly, had both frame sizes in stock so that I could test ride them both back-to-back and make a decision.

So after kel left for lunch, I headed up to Adams Morgan. This part of DC was always one of my favorite neighborhoods back when we lived in Silver Spring. It’s become even more vibrant and busy over the past 10 years. It’s got great restaurants and outside food vendors and has a great vibe. The bike culture is also fairly pervasive in this neighborhood, too. Here I noticed a big difference though between the bike culture of San Francisco and the bike culture of DC/Adams Morgan.

In SF, the infrastructure to support mass amounts of cycling for utility transportation is ubiquitous and well-used. (Ubiquitous compared to central jersey where there is NO cycling/pedestrian infrastructure). There are well-marked bike lanes and lights for cyclists and at most intersections you’ll see bikes and cars waiting together for the lights to change. In Adams Morgan, on the other hand, there is minimal or cursory infrastructure support for cycling. There are bike lanes, for example, that end suddenly and inexplicably in the middle of an intersection. There also seems to be almost no enforcement of cycling rules (either explicitly with cops issuing traffic violations or implicitly on a social/bike culture level). As such, cyclists all over adams morgan appear to make up their own rules: riding on sidewalks, going against traffic in car lanes, going against bike traffic in bike lanes (I’ve heard cyclists who do this referred to as salmon and it’s a wonderfully suitable term).

My sense here is that Adams Morgan represents what happens to car/bike/pedestrian traffic when bike culture grows and spreads more quickly than the transportation infrastructure can keep up. With no infrastructure (or worse yet, cursory infrastructure) in place, people just sort of wing it. I can see a lot of situations where winging-it in the absence of a framework can result in great things. However, when you’re talking about 20 pounds of steel taking on 2,000 pounds of steel, there are better alternatives than winging-it.

SO but anyway, I walked from the metro, over the Duke Ellington Bridge, looking down on the Zoo, and up to the heart of Adams Morgan and found the City Bikes shop. True to the email I received from the shop a few days earlier, they had the 54cm and 56 cm Surly LHT ready to roll. I left them my license and credit card, borrowed a helmet and cruised around town for a while on each of the bikes. The folks at City Bikes were very helpful, knowledgeable and a pleasure to deal with. If you live in DC and are going to buy a bike, you could do worse than buy your bike from them. I felt a little sleazy test-riding their bikes knowing that I was just getting a feel for frame size and would order the bike from my own local bike shop in Shrewsbury, but there didn’t appear to be any hard feelings.

The guys at the shop also encouraged me to ride a Jamis touring bike. At 55cm the frame felt pretty good but I didn’t love the components or the way it rode compared to the LHT. (In the end, I ordered the 56cm Surly from Shrewsbury Bicycles. My knees kept getting caught up in bars/shifters on the 54cm. The top tube is the right length for me on the 56cm even if the frame itself is pretty tall).

After riding all around Adams Morgan, I got my license and credit card back, had a burrito for lunch and took the metro back downtown to meet kel at our hotel.

The wedding itself was extraordinary. The mass/ceremony was at the Georgetown chapel. I liked making our way through Georgetown to the campus. Such a great part of DC and such a distinct neighborhood feel to it. The reception was at the Hay Adams Hotel. Having lived in DC for a couple of years, Kel and I thought we knew the best places for rooftop cocktails with a view. Clearly we were playing in the minors back then.

Having never been to the roof of the Hay Adams before, we were blown away with our view of the Whitehouse right across the street.  It was a beautiful afternoon, warm, sunny and clear. We drank gin and tonics on the roof to the sounds of great live jazz and watched as secret service men on the roof of the white house kept an eye on our party through their binoculars. Definitely the best view of DC I’ve ever had. The rest of the reception was equally awesome.

The next morning I got up early, despite feeling a bit slow from the g&t’s and went for a run down on the Mall. Hands-down the Mall is one of the best places to run in the US. The steps of the Capitol Building, the views of the monuments and great open space in the middle of a city all make for great distractions. So but anyway, DC was awesome on so many levels — a nice vacation, a great wedding and I got to ride some sweet bikes.

Here’s the first movie, enjoy! (right click, save as . . . and open it in Quicktime. It’s a pretty big download).

http://vimeo.com/4189528?sec=&hd=1