urban bicycle journeys

Where to bicycle next? I am indeed sick of bicycling around Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Durham. It feels like I have seen everything. On the other hand, Tootie had an appointment to have a massage in Raleigh; why not catch a ride with her?

The Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area is not that interesting to look at but the impression is deceiving. The vibe here is special and during our thirty-five years here we have met many fascinating people, many who moved here from somewhere else. We have made many precious friends including Kirsten, who is not only a great friend but a very good masseuse. She has normal sized hands, but when you close your eyes during one of her massages it feels like you are being handled by a steelworker or maybe a stevedore. Strong! Our friend Laura summed it up perfectly; one of her massages is erotic without being in any way sexual.

How time flies. It seems like only last week that Kirsten lived in that same Laura’s Carrboro backyard house. It has actually been about twenty years since Kirsten moved all the way to Raleigh, thirty-five miles away. We had thought we would drive over to get massages but that has only happened once or twice.

To rectify this, Tootie made an appointment for a massage in at Kirsten’s apartment in Raleigh at noon on a recent Thursday. I put my Bike Friday in the back of our car and drove over there with her; I could bicycle back to Chapel Hill.

Leaving home at 11:15 AM caused a conundrum. What about lunch? I do worry constantly about my Lunch. Why not eat an early lunch at home? Tootie was not interested so I made the early lunch just for myself. When you cook without measuring, one’s dishes can vary from fabulous to meh. At 10:45 AM I lucked into making an amazing batch of Chinese egg fried rice, using brown rice, two eggs, ground pork, broccolini, and a carrot; seasoned with fresh ginger, Chinese soy sauce, and sesame oil. It would certainly hold me until dinnertime.

I put the Bike Friday in the back of our Ford Escape Hybrid and we drove on I-40 towards Raleigh. On arriving I unloaded my bicycle. Kirsten came out and greeted us. I soon bid them both farewell and cycled off.

Kirsten lives in a condo complex associated with the NC State University “Centennial Campus.” I had not realized how huge this research campus is. It is separate from the older NC State campus and was developed starting in the 1990’s on a giant tract of surplus state-owned land still only two or three miles from downtown Raleigh. There are large office buildings for private research companies with open spaces, plus bike paths everywhere. I cycled northward through this development, heading towards the conventional NC State campus.

I appreciate modern architecture. Building eighteenth or nineteenth century LOOKING buildings in the twenty-first century on previously vacant land seems particularly pointless. I stumbled upon a group of new-looking buildings built to look like the year 1810 but failing. Who does this?

As I got closer I could see the Greek letters on the obviously large new commercial buildings trying to look like old houses. Frat houses from NC State! Who else would want to look like this? Maybe they were built to replace the row of such houses that commercialism tore down half a mile away on Hillsborough Street!

There is not an easily plotted bicycle route from any part of Raleigh back to Chapel Hill. The state agency NCDOT is among the most powerful state DOTs in the country and while they throw bicyclists a special lane now and then, their central planning exhibits complete contempt for those attempting to travel in any manner other than the automobile. Over the years I have developed a complex work-around route to cycle from Raleigh to Chapel Hill, and it indeed does avoid most of the traffic, most of the time. It goes from Raleigh’s Hillsborough Street to Beryl Road, then cuts across the state fairgrounds to Trinity Road. NC State has always had an excellent architecture school. On those fairgrounds I cycled by Dorton Arena, from all the way back to 1952, a magnificent example of postwar modernism. The building exudes optimism.

Crossing over the railroad tracks I passed the NC State football stadium. Since the major universities have not been able to offer the best high school football players actual money, they entice impressionable seventeen year olds with creepy macho sculptures of a wolfpack outside their football pantheons.

I cycled onward. Trinity Road leads to a miles long hilly residential street, first called Brandywine Road then changing its name to Electra Drive then Dynasty Drive.

This leads to Morrisville Carpenter Road, but take a right at Good Hope Baptist Church, then pass by Panther Creek High School. You have to schlep the bicycle across highway NC-55. Eventually I passed through neighborhoods that were really new. In an area that was cow pastures ten years ago, these apartments were not here when I last cycled through the area six months ago.

I had scheduled myself to stop at one of my favorite coffee haunts. I have written before about how when buying a croissant, freshness is everything. In my recent cycling in France every single coffee joint had crisply fresh croissants, as had been those I saw two years ago in rural Quebec. I cycle around New Orleans as well. In all of New Orleans I have found very few spots that consistently offer truly fresh croissants (Croissant D’or in the Quarter and Celtica in Lakeview are two that come to mind.) Here in the entire Raleigh/Durham area I have also found only two places with reliably fresh croissants. The first is Foster Street Coffee in Durham. This day I was cycling up to the other one, which sits in an obscure strip mall in far western Cary, just beyond Panther Creek High School. Now the RDU area seems to be down to one. Mokka Cafe and Croissanterie is “temporarily closed until October 3.” although it was November 30. Chairs were stacked in the interior. It had been run by a family who spoke Spanish. These new suburbs are increasingly multicultural. The rest of this brand new strip mall was populated by Indian stores, as in South Asian Indians. I had cycled to this coffee shop many times over the past two years, as it is near the bike trail. I had really looked forward to my afternoon croissant and oat milk latte, one pack sugar. I sadly pedaled away. Did Mokka Cafe close for good? Possibly, as they say in France, c’est mort.

Around that strip mall townhouses built just in the last five or ten years did a pretty good job of trying to look historic.

Here in far western Cary NC, on the Wake County / Chatham County line, a lovely rail trail is just about half a mile away. I cycled over to the American Tobacco Trail.

I was still more than ten miles from Chapel Hill and I was distressed that I had not been able to get that coffee that my head was waiting for. Approaching Chapel Hill by bicycle from the southeast one does not pass by any decent local coffee houses before having to bicycle up the Chapel Hill hill. Directly on my planned route was a Starbucks within the chain supermarket Harris Teeter in the fauxville Meadowmont.

I ordered a “tall” oat milk latte, one pack sugar, plus a bag of chocolate covered almonds. Only a mile or two from home, I sat and read my Kindle. The relaxing vibe was precious. All I had left to do was cycle up the hill.