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Cyclogues

Barry Dredze
9 min readJul 7, 2020

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“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.” Ernest Hemingway

Bridge over the Missouri River, Creve Coeur Trail, near St. Louis

Home is where the greenways, rivers and old railroads are. Because of these, there are those bicycle trails that make a street address a home; and my home is only a couple of blocks away from access to hundreds of miles of designated mixed-use trail systems.

In winter months, I have no real use for stationary bicycles and a diminishing tolerance for riding in single digit temperatures. So, in any given year my butt will not feel a bike seat for several weeks at a time; a fading muscle memory from the few unseasonably warm days in mid-December in which, with luck, I can count on to put my old 1972 Schwinn Varsity on the crushed limestone of the spurs, stems and tributary trail systems of the Illinois Prairie Path — America’s first mixed-use trail system — until about late February or March.

The Mother of All Bike Trails; Illinois Prairie Path, Main Stem, Wheaton, Illinois

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Barry Dredze
Barry Dredze

Written by Barry Dredze

Just another mortal, tweaking my cognitive map on the fly.

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