Radio Silence

I suppose I should explain why things have been so quiet around here lately. Last week, we bought a house. It's a cool little house in a great location; centrally located so that my ride to work is still only about 1.5 miles. Consequently, we spent pretty much all of our free time last week shuttling things over to the new place. On Saturday we rented a big moving truck and hauled all of our furniture over, making the new house our full-time primary residence. Now that we're down to cleaning up the old place and settling in to a new home, I would expect that semi-regular updates will resume.

Two days in to my new commute, I'm struggling to find the optimal route between our house and JVIC. The first route that I tried had me mostly on Kickapoo and Trafficway. It wasn't too bad, but cross-traffic doesn't stop when you are trying to cross St. Louis on Kickapoo, so I had to cross four lanes of unimpeded traffic. On the way home yesterday I took Phelps, which is a cool street located down in a sort of industrial park that runs alongside the railroad tracks, but the tracks that cross the street at around Washington Ave. do so at a strange angle and the crossing is in pretty bad shape, which could be somewhat dangerous on a bicycle. I'm finding that maybe sticking to larger, relatively bike-friendly thoroughfares is the way to go. This morning I divided my east-west route between Walnut and Trafficway, which made for a nice ride. I'm thinking something along the lines of the route below will be my first choice from here on out.