urban bicycle journeys

I put my new bicycle in the back of the Prius and drove a hundred miles east from Chapel Hill NC to Rocky Mount NC.    I found a parking lot downtown where I could leave the car for a few hours.  There is plenty of parking in downtown Rocky Mount.

 

 

Yes, I have a new bicycle!    It is a Bike Friday made to order in Eugene, OR, somewhat like my PBW that broke in half six months ago.  I will try to be more careful this time.   On the new bike I chose an eleven speed rear cog with no front derailleur, skinny 20 x 1.1 115 psi tires with Schraeder valves, and drop down handlebars that separate into two pieces when packing the bicycle in a suitcase.   I had had it about a week when I took this ride.   It is taking me a little time to get comfortable on it.    Of course it feels much lighter and faster than the Surly Long Haul Trucker.    I will keep the Trucker for occasional use.

Rocky Mount, population 55,000, despite its name has almost no rocks or hills.   It was built at the site of one small waterfall of the Tar River, which provided power for textile mills.    It sits in the vast coastal plain of Down East.   Its downtown is quite vacant, but there are a few signs that life is springing up, here and there.

 

 

 

The NCDOT “thoughtfully” designed the principal road through downtown as a one-way, to handle the vast amount of traffic on this workweek day.   Not.

 

Two blocks over is what used to be Rocky Mount’s principal shopping street.   It sits with the main line double track New York to Florida CSX railroad running down the middle of the street.

 

 

One can travel easily north / south from Rocky Mount by rail, to places like Richmond, Washington, and New York, from a nicely restored station Amtrak station. The size of this station says that in about 1912 Rocky Mount was an important place.

 

I decided to bicycle over to Tarboro, about twenty miles to the southeast.

 

This would take me first through the south and west side of Rocky Mount.

 

Eventually I found myself on razor straight country roads.

 

 

 

I have been told that Tarboro, population 11,000, has a highfalutin sense of itself.   It is one of the prettiest towns in North Carolina.  Its newspaper, until it closed quite recently, was the Daily Southerner.   Locals will tell you that like Boston, Massachusetts, Tarboro has a Common, a parklike space in the center of town, between the residential area and the commercial strip of downtown.  Of course (of course!) there is a Civil War statue on the Common.

 

 

Downtown Tarboro does have some vacant storefronts but it certainly looks more in-use than downtown Rocky Mount.  I  had vaguely heard about a restaurant downtown called On The Square.   It was lunchtime.

At lunchtime at On The Square where one orders at the counter there was a small line of men in khaki pants.   Khaki pants are popular in The South.

Another Man in Khaki had stepped out on the sidewalk to take a call.

 

My lunch was the special of the day, ham and cheese sandwich with a side of tomato soup.   I read The New Yorker on my Kindle.

 

What else to do but bicycle back to Rocky Mount?   I took the same route, it luckily had been almost traffic-free.   That kind of bicycling route is hard to find.