New Orleans JazzFest

Going to JazzFest in New Orleans has been a "bucket list" item for me. I had plans to go in 2020 which were thwarted by the pandemic. Then they scheduled and cancelled twice in 2021. When they announced that the Fest was back for 2022, I made plans right away.

Wednesday

Let me start with the surprising observation that there’s a Jazzfest style. Most of the music festivals I’ve attended have been largely int the jam band genre, featuring bands like Dead & Co., Tedeschi Trucks, and Greensky Bluegrass. Attendees of such events have a generally hippie-ish vibe. You’ll see plenty of  tie-dye, peasant skirts and other hippie-signaling garb, both among the greying Boomers and the younger “wooks”. Also, these festivals have a somewhat counter-culture flavor which means there’ll always be a good supply of freaky people – from the Bluegrass Chicken Man to folks in outrageous multi-colored garb.

JazzFest is different. There are fewer eccentric dressers, and very little tie-dye. While this isn’t a country music festival, it is located in the south and I saw far more women than I’m used to in the full Daisy Duke outfit of jean shorts, boots, and cowboy hats. That, and women in wide-brimmed straw hats and sundresses, often with cute shoes not completely sensible for walking around what is normally a horse track. For guys, the Jazzfest look is these boldly colorful Hawaiian shirts – not the traditional kind with palm trees, but more sort of pop-art figurative representations in bright colors. Here and there, guys even wore matching tops and shorts in that kind of print. And once again, straw hats – fedoras, porkpies, and large sun hats. Plenty of festival-goers were dressed for comfort in basic t-shirts and shorts, but overall the crowd looked a little more “dressed” than I’m used to at festivals. I think that’s in part because this is a Southern event, and people in the South are a little more proper about dress than we Yankees. Secondly, the mainstream pop nature of the artists – Stevie Nicks, Kool and the Gang, for example – means that the Fest draws a more mainstream and less counter-cultural crowd. Last, the fact that it’s not a camping festival means that people can dress a little more for style rather than for crawling around a dusty campsite.

A couple sporting JazzFest style

I knew none of this when I headed for the airport wearing my straw porkpie. A guy at the gate looked at me and said, “I know where you’re going, with that hat.” I had no idea what he was talking about. Given we were at the gate for a flight to New Orleans it was obvious he was referring to Jazzfest, but this is a hat I wear all the time. I had only accidentally adopted what turned out to be stereotypical Jazzfest garb.

I didn’t even wear my apparently festival-appropriate porkpie to the event – I had other hats for that purpose. I recently received a call from my dermatologist confirming that the funny red area on my shoulder was indeed skin cancer, so my Jazzfest daytime wardrobe was long pants, sun shirt or t-shirt with sun guard sleeves (borrowed from my cycling kit), and a really big hat. Plus goopy zinc-based sunscreen which goes on like Elmer’s Glue.

Anyway, I got to New Orleans without incident –it did feel weird traveling after two years of sticking pretty close to home. My AirBnB was a lovely little suite upstairs in a restored 1840’s house, reached by an exterior spiral staircase. The owners live downstairs. It’s actually quite a property, with a separate building which serves as a woodshop, and a lushly landscaped garden. I was staying in the Seventh Ward neighborhood, which sits midway between the French Quarter and the Fairgrounds, where Jazzfest is held – a little over a mile from each. It’s a funky local neighborhood filled with pretty antebellum homes. However you might feel about gentrification, it definitely has the feel of a hipster gentrifiying neighborhood, though perhaps without quite the pretentiousness which would accompany such a thing in New York or DC. It was really nice to stay in a neighborhood a little bit away from the touristy areas. It felt more like “real” New Orleans, and yet both the Fairgrounds and the French Quarter were close bay.

Entrance to my AirBnB

Houses in the neighborhood

Another house on Esplanade Street

My Air BnB hosts lent me a beat-up old single speed cruiser bike which was perfect for local transportation (though it was adjusted for someone much shorter than me). I took it for a spin over to Canseco’s, the local market, and bought some basic supplies – cereal, coffee and soy milk for breakfast, some water bottles for the festival, etc.

My ride

Canseco's has foods not available at supermarkets back home

That first evening I had plans to see a Baltimore musician named Cris Jacobs, who was scheduled to give a solo performance at a club called Carrolton Station across town. Cris is a great musician and songwriter who is a fairly big name on the festival circuit (note – he sat in with my band for a song once), and I figured some of the DC/Baltimore locals in town would show up for this performance. Sure enough I ran into Cornelius there. Good show, though I was the only one in the entire place wearing a mask. My introduction to the idea that in Louisiana, the pandemic is over (n.b. Cris Jacobs came down with COVID a few days after this show).

Towards the end of Cris’ show I made my exit and grabbed dinner at a Mediterranean place a couple of blocks up. I ate outside and had a pretty good eggplant sandwich. I had taken an Uber to the club (too far to bike - particularly on my first night when I hadn't gotten my bearings), but I’m pretty cheap and a believer in mass transit so while I was eating I got out my phone and figured how to get home by bus. I was a little concerned about COVID on mass transit, but I needn’t have been in this case, as I was the only passenger on the bus for most of the ride (a few other people got on and off along the way).

Cris Jacobs at Carrolton Station. Apparently I was visible in the live stream

Thursday

Thursday was my first day of JazzFest. I packed up my day’s supplies – sealed frozen water bottles, my collapsible camping chair, sunscreen, and snacks, and headed off to the festival by bike. Let me say that bicycle is *so much* the perfect way to get to JazzFest. While everyone else is scrambling for scarce parking, waiting on insanely long lines for shuttle buses, or waiting and waiting for an Uber, I would roll right in an out on my bike. The festival has a designated bike parking area with plenty of racks, which is even staffed all day.

I was sort of by myself and sort of with other people at the Fest. I was traveling alone, but I knew various people at the Fest. My drummer friend Brian and his wife were my sort-of traveling companions. We flew down on the same flight, and I hung out with them a bunch, but they were staying over in the French Quarter and so we didn’t see each other outside the festival.

I quickly discovered that JazzFest is a very friendly place. I set up my chair at one of the main stages near a group of eight or so people who had established quite an encampment. I got to talking with them and when they heard this was my first JazzFest they “adopted” me and said I was totally welcome to hang out with them. The group was made up of people who for the most part knew each other from having all lived in the U.S. Virgin Islands decades earlier – Nancy and Ron, Rudy, and a bunch of other people whose names I’ve already forgotten. Now they live all around the country, and they reunite every year at JazzFest. I hung with them for a while, but JazzFest has a dozen stages and so I set out wandering to explore the immensity of the place.

With some of my adoptive family 

It's a little overwhelming at first. The Fairgrounds is pretty big – at least a mile long. The two headlining stages are at opposite ends. In between there are stages which focus on jazz, blues, gospel, local culture and local music, as well as several other large-scale stages. There are also two large areas of food vendors, villages of craft vendors, brass band parades, Louisiana culture exhibits, and, spread throughout this massive event, two – count ‘em – two – places where you could refill your water bottle for free.

Billy Strings performs

Brian and I kept meeting up then splitting up again all day. His wife, not being interested in as many days in the hot sun as we were, had stayed back at the hotel to relax and enjoy the amenities – pool, and so on. Thursday was the only day I ate a real meal at the festival. While the food includes a lot of local cuisine and so is way better than typical festival food, for a combination of religious and health reasons I can’t eat much of it, so the pleasure of the festival’s food is largely lost on me. I had an order of vegetarian red beans and rice for lunch. Not bad.

With Brian

After the Fest, for dinner I ordered takeout from 1000 Figs, a nearby Mediterranean restaurant recommended by my AirBnB hosts. I biked over to pick it up and ate it back at “home”. It was actually really, really good!

Traditionally, after JazzFest ends for the day at 7 PM people go out and party all night long in the clubs. I was a little too COVID-wary to go out to crowded indoor clubs, so I stayed in and got a good night’s sleep.

Bands seen: The Iguanas, New Orleans Suspects, Kermit Ruffins and his BBQ Swingers, Mikayla Braun, Wayne Toups, Billy Strings, and more I’ve forgotten.

Friday

JazzFest is said to be awful in the rain, when the dirt track, which is really made of a combination of soil and horse poop, turns to a most disgusting form of mud. Fortunately, the forecast for my visit had only a half day of rain, on Friday morning, in it. I decided I’d skip the morning at JazzFest and do something else until the track dried out a little. The rain conveniently stopped around 10 AM. I biked across town to the newly opened Museum of Southern Jewish Culture, where I talked the guy at the door into giving me two dollars off the admission price (maybe negotiating is part of the museum experience?). It’s a fun little museum – just three galleries, really – where I learned that the first documented Jewish person in the U.S. was Joachim Gans, a metallurgist (it figures he was a professional), who arrived in 1585 in … Virginia! So there have been Jews in Virginia for 437 years, yet it’s still hard to find a decent bagel here.

The museum

19th Century Southern Passover recipe

Gold bagel from the "Krewe of Jieuxs"

Biking back - note the streetcar

After my museum visit I biked back via the French Quarter, ate the previous night's dinner leftovers for lunch, then headed to the fairgrounds. My adoptive festy family had texted me their location, so I stopped by to say hello. I won’t bore you with a play by play of going from one stage to another – I’ll just say that on the second day I knew my way around a little better and so it was less overwhelming. Bands I saw included: Tribute to Art and Charles Neville with the Funky Meters, Ivan Neville, etc., Chubby Carrier, Sonny Landreth, Adonis Rose and the New Orleans JazzOrchestra, Elvis Costello and the Imposters, and some more I can’t remember. Plus, my mud avoidance plan worked - by the time I got there the hot sun had dried most everything out.

Chubby Carrier

Elvis Costello

Me!

Bike parking, early in the day

In the evening I biked over to Frenchman Street, a street of music clubs and nightlife near the French Quarter. I had no intention of going into any of the clubs, but I knew that even staying out on the street I could hear the music and mix with the vibe. My dinner was a portabello Po’ Boy sandwich, which was tasty but incredibly salty. While I sat outside the restaurant eating at a picnic table, a group of partying tourists asked if they could share the table. I said “sure”, and the group of us got to talking. It turns out they were from the NY/NJ area, were Deadheads, and were in town for JazzFest as well. We chatted for quite a while before they headed off to a club and I biked home. This was a totally random interaction between people who live in different parts of the country and who were in the same city only because of a music festival. There was no way I would have any mutual connections. However, when I posted a picture of the group of us to Facebook, Cornelius, who knows positively everyone, tagged one of the people – he knows her! Too strange.

Frenchman Street

Random people - at least one of whom knows Cornelius

Saturday

JazzFest doesn’t start until 11 AM and I’m an early riser, so every day I had time to fill in the mornings. On Saturday I tried going out for breakfast for a change, but the closest neighborhood coffee place had nothing but coffee – no pastries, no food, no nothin’ – and the other wasn’t open that early, so I went back and ate breakfast at home.

The idea of eating lunch before entering the fairgrounds had worked well, so I did it again. This time I visited a vegan soul food restaurant very close to the fairgrounds. It was soooo good. Okra gumbo, vegan mac and cheese, and sweet potatoes. I could eat there every day.

Vegan soul food!

My plate

Once again I met up with Brian and Amy inside the fairgrounds. I also noticed my neighbors Lawrence and Hannah had been posting pictures from around New Orleans and so messaged them. They were at JazzFest too – we sat together for a band. The last act I saw was Mavis Staples, where I ran into local Realtor® and music impresario Tori McKinney. Tori loves all things New Orleans (she lived there at one time and still has a condo there) and all things music so it was no surprise that she was at the event. A lot of fest-goers were excited about seeing 73-year-old Stevie Nicks, but I skipped her to instead see 82-year-old Mavis Staples. I later watched some video of Nicks’ performance. Sadly, her voice isn’t what it used to be. She cleverly relies on backup singers to hit the high notes while she sings in a narrow range. Staples, on the other hand, still has a voice which nearly set the tent on fire. Her only visible concession to age was that she sat down between songs. I chose right - it was one of my favorite performances from the event. 

Mardi Gras Indian. He must have been schvitzing in that outfit

Buckwheat Zydeco Junior

Rickie Lee Jones

More Indians

With Tori

The great Mavis Staples

Lawrence and Hannah (and their son Isaac)

I decided to eat dinner in and so stopped at Canseco’s Market again on the way home. The market was busy with other fest-goers, but not too bad. While I was on line to pay, two kids – one maybe 14, the other 10? – approached me and the older one asked if I wanted to buy any water (there are any number of people outside the gates selling bottled water to fest-goers). I said no, but he persisted. Sometimes he would just ask again, “Do you want to buy any water?” and other times he would riff about his product or on things I had said in answering him. This was cute for a minute or two, but he just wouldn’t stop. It got past the point of fun and into being harassing. Being a paranoid New Yorker at heart, as soon as the kid started talking to me I slid my left hand down and kept it in place so that I could feel my wallet and keys, just in case his goal was to distract me while the younger kid or some other accomplice picked my pocket. I even sent them off to talk with someone further back in line – but they returned to me. It was a little weird, but they laid off once I got to the cash register and I didn’t see them again.

The bike ride itself was a party - the JazzFest spirit expands into the neighborhoods

Dinner that night was a corner market hodgepodge of soup, salad, bread and fruit. I didn’t go out in the evening.

Bands seen: Buckwheat Zydeo Jr., Rickie Lee Jones, New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars, Mavis Staples. I took it a little easy and didn’t go rushing from stage to stage in the heat, but there must have been more than that.

Sunday

Sunday morning I biked down to Café du Monde in the French Quarter and had their famous coffee (with chicory and hot milk) and beignet. It being New Orleans, while it was only 8 AM, there was a brass band playing for tips outside the café. Brass band version of Big Chief with breakfast :)

Coffee and beignet

Jackson Square

Front entrance to my AirBnB house

After once again eating the previous night’s leftovers for lunch, I once again rode to the fairgrounds. I didn’t hear from Brian, so spent most of the day by myself; however, once again I noticed FB posts from JazzFest from yet another friend. I met up with my friend Linda and her beau for Kool and the Gang. Linda used to live in Arlington. Our kids were friends many moons ago. Now she lives in New York and so we never see her, except somehow I keep running into her at concerts – last year it was Dead & Co. at CitiField in New York, and this year JazzFest. Kool & the Gang took a little while to find their groove, but a few songs in everything clicked and the rest of their set was great.

Gospel group

Kool and the Gang with Linda

It was hot and sunny

I once again took it a little easier. JazzFest weather is pretty hot, and seeing shows at many of the stages involves baking out in the Gulf Coast sun (fortunately other stages are in large tents, where you can get a break from the sun). I sat for a little while in the racetrack grandstand, which is air conditioned and less packed with people than elsewhere. There are no performances there; it’s just a place to cool off and, if you are so inclined, wait in enormously long lines for some of the few real bathrooms in the place.

I did go see Trombone Shorty’s big closing set, but I left a little early. On Saturday I had experienced the crush when everyone leaves, and I wanted to avoid being in that wave again.

People put up flags or other markers to mark their spot

On the way home I stopped at Nonna’s Pizza, which offers mediocre pizza and poor service, and jacks their prices up for JazzFest – but it was convenient. It was my last night in town and I was tempted to go out to a club, but ultimately opted to stay true to my vow not to hang out in clubs. I stayed in and packed.

Bands seen: Trombone Shorty, Kool and the Gang, Tribute to Dr. John, Dwayne Dopsie, Chris Thomas King, some gospel group (don’t remember the name), and more.

Monday

Monday morning I biked around City Park, then headed to the airport. My flight was delayed for four hours, but I made it home safe and sound.

Biking at City Park

Swan boats at City Park Big Lake

Streetcar by City Park

Another cool house

All told, a great trip. A chance to hang out in New Orleans which was both non-touristy (staying in the 7^th Ward and commuting by bike) and ultra-touristy (JazzFest). Good food (unfortunately I am constrained in this regard, and was eating alone so didn’t go to sit-down restaurants for the most part). Great music. The festival is very hot and sunny, something which worried me given my recent skin cancer diagnosis. I made lots and lots of visits to the water refill station – hydration is key. Had a fun time with fun people. Great fun, but not necessarily an event I need to go to every year. Maybe if I went with a group. Given that I kept gravitating towards local music, next I might try French Quarter Fest, which is all local bands rather than national headliners. We’ll see … 

Slimy sea creatures for sale at Canseco's

New Orleans lizard!

The Five Borough Bike Tour

 I awoke bright and early Sunday morning, having slept surprisingly well in yet another whatever-is-lower-than-one-star Brooklyn AirBnB experiences. My accommodations were a couple of nearly windowless basement rooms with bare bulbs for illumination, a semi-finished bathroom and a kitchen area with a countertop supported by raw 2x4’s, but it was clean and the bed wasn’t bad – except for the lack of a top sheet. Brooklyn AirBnBs are always an adventure. But it didn't matter - after last year's last-minute cancellation (due to weather, not COVID), the Five Borough Bike Tour was on and I was raring to go!

After a quick breakfast and final decisions about layering for the day’s weather I struggled out the door with my bike and gear – to get the bike out I had to open the apartment door and wheel the bike into the barely-large enough-for-a-bike vestibule, close and lock the apartment door behind me, go up a very steep and narrow stairway to open the outside door, come back down, carry the bike up the stairs and out the door, close the door behind me, go and open the side gate, wheel the bike through the side gate, close the side gate, go down three steps and open the front gate, carry the bike down and through the front gate, close the front gate.

The Five Borough Bike Tour starts in lower Manhattan and ends in Staten Island. Riders are on their own to get home from the end point. For many people that means waiting on a really long line and then taking the Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan, which leaves you close to the starting point. I was going to be in a hurry at the end of the ride and my next destination was Brooklyn rather than Manhattan, so I decided to drive to Staten Island early and take the ferry over in the morning so that I’d have my car right there at the end of the ride. It turned out I was not alone in this idea. When I got there around 7 AM the parking garages were already full, though on-street parking was readily available. There was a long line to get onto the ferry (which cost 25¢ in the old days but is now free!), but I made it to Manhattan in plenty of time for my 9:15 AM start wave and amazingly, easily found Gail and Chris among the 30,000 riders gathering in lower Manhattan.

Waiting for the ferry to Manhattan

Boarding the ferry

Statue of Liberty through the ferry's grimy windows

Meeting up with Gail and Chris

Riders waiting at the start

The group of riders spent some time bunching up and inching forward with other cyclists at the start. Once we got the official go ahead, everyone started rolling. I had my phone mounted on my handlebars and, thanks to the poor paving of NY streets, almost immediately hit a bump which made my phone fly out of its holder and hit the pavement. The screen protector over the camera lenses cracked, but the phone seems to be OK. Also, I almost immediately got separated from Gail and Chris, who I never saw again the whole day – I did the ride by myself (well, by myself among 30,000 people).

The cool thing about the ride is that they close the streets along the route and you get to ride places which would ordinarily be off limits (or suicide) for cyclists. The ride goes up the length of Manhattan  up 6th Avenue from bottom to top, crosses into the Bronx and then almost immediately crosses back into Manhattan – this quirk of the route is a legacy of the bad old days of the 70’s-80’s when you wouldn’t want to be in the South Bronx any longer than you absolutely had to (my brother tells me that crime is up in New York, and it’s starting to feel a little like those bad old days again).

Official Photo

In addition to my phone I had a GoPro camera mounted on my handlebars. GoPros are made for filming action. People use them for whitewater kayaking, skiing, etc., and so they're designed with very secure mounts. However, the streets of New York are bad enough that somehow the GoPro, which is designed to be used in action conditions and had been securely mounted to the bars, bounced off and hit the street. I was not doing well with electronics.

The ride continued down the FDR Drive and then over the 59^th Street Bridge (also known as the Queensborough Bridge, and now apparently officially known as the Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge – though no one calls it by that name). On my first attempt of the Five Borough Bike Tour in 1987 my bike broke down on this bridge, but this time I had no problems. I learned later on that Gail had a bad experience on the bridge this time around – more on that later. The bridge is something of a chokepoint. People bunched up and everyone wound up walking their bikes across the bridge.

Bunched up at the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge

In Queens the route funnels you into the first rest area (a dumb idea which again bunches everyone up and slows everyone down - the other rest stops along the way are off to the side, like highway rest stops) and then you ride through the streets for a while. At one point we passed a familiar looking waterfront park. When I spotted the adjacent Costco I realized it’s the park where you pull ashore and wait for the tide to turn when you’re circumnavigating Manhattan by kayak. Five boroughs by bike, circumnavigation by kayak – I really need to learn to just take the subway around the city like a normal person 😊

A rest area in Queens

Passing through Greenpoint and DUMBO in Brooklyn I was amazed at how those neighborhoods had changed over the years – what had been rundown industrial neighborhoods were now chic, the boulevards lined with trendy shops and the streets packed with people. Further along I saw that even Industry City, formerly a decrepit warehouse complex, now houses a West Elm, a vinyl record shop and a chocolatier, a distillery, and … well, you get the idea.

Finally, we got to my favorite part of the ride – the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE). It’s mind-boggling to me that they close off this major highway for the better part of a day. The ride enters onto the part of the BQE known as the Gowanus Expressway – a 1930’s Robert Moses project which, as Robert Moses projects tended to do, provided a valuable piece of infrastructure but wantonly destroyed neighborhoods in the process. The Gowanus runs in an open cut (which split the pre-existing neighborhood in two) for a while before rising to run elevated above the Sunset Park and Gowanus neighborhoods. As an aside I’ll say that New York City is pretty flat and it was amusing to see many cyclists, unaccustomed to hills, struggle on the uphill from the below ground portion of the Gowanus to the elevated portion.

Brooklyn Navy Yard

On the BQE

Signage along the BQE

The BQE led us to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, a 2 ½ mile long crossing of New York harbor between Brooklyn and Staten Island. When I was a kid the Verrazano was the longest suspension bridge in the world – a record which held until 1981. As of this writing it is the 18^th longest in the world and still the longest suspension bridge in the Americas. I mentioned above that New York cyclists aren’t used to riding hills. I saw quite a few people – some much younger than me – walking their bikes up the mile+ uphill side of the bridge. Heh – wimps.

Up until this point the ride had been a marvel of organization – New York does an amazing job with mass events like this. The start was smooth, and the rest stops (save for that first one just over the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge) were well organized and well stocked with water refill stations and snacks. The weather was perfect, and all told it was just super fun. Then the end of the ride funneled into the Finish Festival, which was held at an outdoorish shopping mall. The event itself wasn’t bad. I browsed at the logo gear store and (contrary to my usual practice) bought a FBBT t-shirt and a hat. I listened to music from a mediocre band (there had been much better bands along the route) and ate a decent BBQ pulled chicken sandwich. I even discovered that Pocari Sweat, a rather ickily named Japanese sports drink I became familiar with when I made some business trips to Korea in 2005, is now being marketed in America – they were giving out free bottles at the festival. All was good.

But then I tried to leave.

All riders in the bike tour were issued two identifying items – a race “bib”, which you wear as sort of a personal license plate pinned to your chest, and a plate to attach to the handlebars of your bike. As you entered the mall’s parking garage you were told that upon exit your bib and plate would be checked to make sure the numbers matched – that you left with your own bike and not someone else’s. This security measure would have been easy enough to defeat, and in practice all did was create a huge line to exit, since it turns out there was only one person at the exit checking the numbers. I didn’t time it, but it took a good 20-30 minutes to get out of the garage.

Once out of the garage, there was metal fencing up with only one possible path forward – to the ferry. I explained to the staff that I didn’t want to go to the ferry and that I. along with lots of others, would want to get out to the street to return to our cars. The staff remained firmly opposed to letting anyone out, saying I’d have to wait on the whole ferry line then exit to the street from the ferry terminal. This was ridiculous, as it would have meant probably an hour or more wait for a ferry I wasn't even taking. Finally, a cop standing nearby said I should go around the building and go out the other side. Well, it takes a while to walk around a whole shopping mall, and when I got to the other side I discovered that there was no way to exit there. In search of a way out I ducked into the parking garage, figuring maybe there was a ramp to the street there, but the only exit ramp was the one leading me right back to where I had started except, lo and behold, the same staff and the same cop had moved one of the fences and were now letting people out to the street there. Another 20-30 minutes wasted.

By the time I got back to my car I was running late. I barely had time to make it back to my dingy little AirBnB and shower before heading out to meet a friend for dinner – in fact, I got there 15 minutes late – and then to see my brother’s latest show (a musical based on Sarah Silverman’s memoir).

Meanwhile, I wondered why I had never heard from Gail and Chris after we separated at the start. When we split up we said we’d try and meet up at the Finish Festival. Given my time constraints I would have skipped the festival, except I was expecting to reunite there with my “team mates”. Well, it turns out that they never made it. They were doing their ride together on a tandem bike, which turned out to have been a bad choice – tandems aren’t very maneuverable, which is a significant issue when there are 30,000 other riders weaving around you, and in fact they suffered a crash. It was low speed and no one was injured, but it was their first ever crash in 20 years of tandem riding and it rattled them. Still shaken, Gail had a full-blown panic attack when they reached the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge. As I mentioned earlier, the ride bunched up on that bridge; everyone had to walk their bikes and you wound up spending quite a while standing around and inching forward to get across the bridge. Somewhere on the bridge Gail had an acrophobia/agoraphobia panic, and when they finally made it across to Queens she dropped out and took the subway back to their hotel in Manhattan. Chris, ever the trooper, finished the ride solo on the tandem, but wound up skipping the Finish Festival.

All told, it was a great experience, marred slightly only by the Finish Festival. I would also recommend not having a tight deadline for evening plans after the ride as I did feel a little rushed through the experience, knowing I had to get the ride done somewhat quickly because of my evening plans. But I do recommend the approach of driving to Staten Island early – but maybe skip the Finish Festival.