A Little Cycling Goes a Short Way

About a year ago I wrote about how cycling to work every day from Riverdale helped me lose about 12 lbs and achieve much better overall fitness.  Back then and over the ensuing summer, I averaged over 100 miles per week cycling.  With a minimum round-trip length of 22 miles (and occasionally taking longer routes of over 20 miles one-way) plus frequent weekend riding, I was burning calories and shedding pounds with ease.  No matter what I ate, it seemed, I was still burning far more than I was consuming.  But at the end of that summer, when we moved to the City, …

City Living: Sunday Street Fair

This is my third post in my series on city living.  For earlier posts see

• Lessons learned from week 1
• One hectic month

The view of the street fair from our balcony looking south. You can just barely make out the kosher BBQ at the bottom here.

It’s amazing what you can accomplish in just one Sunday living in the City.

We headed out early in the morning to a party celebrating the birth of a girl to some friends living in Riverdale.  We headed out on the subway.  Although the 45-minute trip took considerably longer than it would by car (20 minutes max), it did not feel as long since we were able to eat breakfast on the train and play with and talk to the girls throughout the ride.  My older daughter especially enjoyed being able to stand up and walk around the subway car, peering out the windows.  For me, too, it felt good to be able to watch her as we went and not have to pay attention to the road ahead.

City Living: One Hectic Month

The view of Broadway from our balcony includes yellow taxis, green taxis, pedestrians, buses, trucks, and, of course, bikes.

Our first month living in the city has been quite hectic. Many of the issues raised in my first update on city living remain unresolved. We still haven’t quite figured out how to make everything fit in our apartment [it turns out the boxed set of seasons 1-5 of 24 wasn’t really our main problem]. No matter how hard I try, the girls’ room remains a cluttered disaster site [in no small part due to the counter-efforts of my daughter]. We also haven’t settled on a synagogue yet, and despite going somewhere different for nearly every single Shabbat and Yom Tov, we still have more shuls to try.

City Living: Lessons Learned from Week 1

After posting my last piece on why we are moving to the Upper West Side, many friends commented that they would like to read a follow-up piece on what it’s actually like to live there.  Now that we have been living in Manhattan for exactly one week, I have a few initial impressions and already some lessons learned.  There is undoubtedly plenty more to learn and experience, and these impressions may change over time, but for now, here is what we’ve experienced as a family with two children moving into a relatively small apartment after years of living in the suburbs.

Baby in an empty apartment, waiting to receive our stuff.

Riverdale RiverFest 2013 and the Hudson River Greenway in the Bronx

Yesterday the family and I went to Riverdale RiverFest, an annual family-friendly festival to celebrate and advocate for Riverdale’s waterfront, and especially the extension of the Hudson River Greenway into Riverdale and Yonkers.  The highlight for my daughter was the bouncy castle and the face painting.  But the highlight for me was the unveiling of NYMTC’s Hudson River Valley Greenway Link Study, a plan to extend the Hudson River Greenway into Riverdale.

My daughter enjoying Riverdale RiverFest.

Bikes and Transit

Janette Sadik-Khan’s announcement heralding the arrival of Citi Bike labeled it the first new transportation system in New York City since buses.  Bloomberg claimed the bike-share system will be an excellent complement to the city’s extensive system of trains and buses.  I hope they are right.  But if my experience yesterday was any indication, there is plenty of work left to be done.