Stat Report

Ode to Furman

So regrettably we did not see anywhere near as much of Birmingham as we had hoped. Both of us had what we thought were some minor bike adjustment issues that we thought we could get taken care of before the Civil Rights Institute closed. And there is always the “first time you’re in a new city disorganized faffing about time suck that finds you taking far too long to feed your pie hole because after all you’re on vacation, amirite” situation that has to be navigated.

Which is to say that we will need to come back down here in the non-heat-furnace season to take it in properly. The civil rights history here is extraordinary even well beyond King’s letter from jail, the children’s crusade and the church bombings. For example, there is this fearless actionist, nicknamed the “Wild Man from Birmingham,” back when the city was called Bombingham. Today the airport is named in his honor and there is a small permanent exhibit there that is well worth seeing.

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Instead of taking in this rich history, we hied ourselves over to Redemptive Cycles to see Furman – whom I had called from DC to see whether he might have some time for any fine tuning we might need after putting our folding bikes back together because, well, such need was going to be a distinct possibility for one or both of us.
There’s a cool story about Redemptive Cycles that I won’t go into except to say they are a nonprofit that basically exists to get bicycles into the hands of low-income and indigent people – going as far as hiring some of them part-time so they can sweat equity their way to getting a bike.
Furman, in addition to being a really chill nice guy is an obsessive bike mechanic with a drive to teach people about bikes and how to repair them. Everybody who bikes and has any interest in knowing more about how to work on them would want a guy like Furman in their LBS. I needed some tweaking on the dérailleur and a brake adjustment, but Furman decided my free wheel wasn’t rotating smoothly enough so he showed me how to take it apart and regrease the bearings – and on and on; if you’re not into bikes or you’re a confident self-repair person you won’t give a shit, but for a guy like me who just blew into town, I was very impressed and grateful. I’ve read some interesting reviews about a book by some guy who extols the soul-enhancing effects of excelling at a craft (that’s probably a shitty précis but seriously look it up [and it’s not like Zen and … Motorcycle Maintenance, which is good but you age out of that shit like you do Vonnegut and then one day long down the road you find yourself reading Franzen and you think, what the fuck happened – is this where I am now?]) anyway, that’s what I thought about watching and talking to Furman – he wasn’t the kind of bike mechanic that has that weird sort of asocial disdain for the hapless Lance Armstrong wannabes (well maybe not precisely him but…) with way more money than him but woeful bike skills who basically make up a big part of the bike shop’s customer base in affluent urban neighborhoods. The man is an artist-mechanic is what I’m saying and Birmingham’s bikers are lucky to have him.
Afterward, we did have the time to at least see the 16th Street Baptist Church.
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And Birmingham still remembers that other day that touched some part of something like the nation’s moral conscience:
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Heading South

As Rachael and I continue to train for Climate Ride Northeast (Bar Harbor to Boston, September 17-21), we are going to take advantage of her need to be in Atlanta after Labor Day to spend the holiday weekend biking from Birmingham to the A. Our three-day, 180-mile journey will take us to Gadsden and Rockmart before we roll up to some fine midtown hotel on Monday afternoon. About half the time we will be on rails-to-trails – part of the Chief Ladiga Trail in Alabama and then the entirety of the Silver Comet Trail in Georgia. Should be a pretty fun trip except it’s still going to be summertime in the Deep South.

The wisdom of the Internet (well, one guy’s blog) says we should avoid riding between noon and 4 pm, which is probably pretty good advice though we’re not likely to follow it to the letter. Instead, our plan will be to get up while it is still dark and set out just as first light is breaking. This should get us out of Birmingham Saturday morning without much concern about traffic, but it does mean we’ll have to have some good lights with us. Besides getting Rachael up at that hour, we’re going to have a problem with breakfast, and more importantly, coffee. My friend Roger (who I biked across country with) recently wrote about his solution during a solo ride from Manhattan to Cape Cod. He got a cup of coffee the night before and then reheated it in the microwave in his room. Not great but certainly beats not having any; definitely will keep that in mind – especially if there is no in-room coffeemaker.

Final preliminary note, we are taking our folding bikes, which we will also ride for Climate Ride. Rachael has a Bike Friday and I have a Tern. Both of them pack into a regulation-size suitcase and fly for free on Southwest. Rachael’s bike is already packed up and ready to go; my Tern has front and back racks, which means I’ll be carrying the panniers.
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That’s it for now, but there will be much more to come.

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Winner winner duck dinner?

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So Rohan duck breast with blueberry sauce, mashed sweet potatoes (with a really nice star anise-infused vegetable stock) and sauteed romano beans; not bad for a Thursday night. I think I cooked the duck just a bit past where it really should have been, but the 2012 Lemelson Pinot Noir made up for the lapse. The process of cooking a duck breast is quite simple – just score the breast in a cross-hatch pattern so the fat will render in the pan and then finish in the oven. The flavor of the Rohan duck is more pronounced – a deeper, slightly gamey and more ducky taste than the standard Pekin bird. Is it worth the extra money? I guess it depends; few people make duck very often so it’s already sort of a special occasion kind of thing and if you use it all – render the fat and make stock – the $4.49/lb price tag doesn’t seem too bad. I’ll wait until I do up the legs and the wings to render a final verdict.

Here’s how the breasts got from saute pan to dinner plate:
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Duck day

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There’s a new breed of duck in the market thanks to the folks at D’Artagnan. Called a Rohan (presumably to bring to mind the French Rouen duck), it is a cross between a Mallard and a Pekin duck. So the other day I biked up to Union Market where Harvey’s Market had them on sale for the not-bargain but not-bad price of $4.49 a pound. I didn’t want to roast the whole thing (there are only two of us) so I set about carving it up.
The first thing I discovered is this duck had what seemed to be an extremely long neck. Here it is protruding from the body like something out of Alien.
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That’s the wishbone you can see beside it. If you want to carve up any bird, it’s a good idea to cut the wishbone out first to make removal of the breasts much easier. See how long the neck is?
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Removal of the legs is pretty straightforward. Similar to a chicken, you just cut through the skin down to the leg joint and then twist the leg to expose the joint and tendon that attaches the thigh to the body. A quick cut through the tendon and a curve around the bone and you’re home free. The wings always give me a bit of trouble as I find it harder to locate the joint so there’s always a bit of slicing and hacking that goes on.
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Once that’s done, you’re left with a very nice looking breast, which I considered roasting but decided against because I wanted to use the carcass to make stock. At $4.49 a pound, I figured I’d take advantage of everything I could. So this next operation is a little like doing an autopsy (or so I imagine). This photo is unfortunately a bit blurry, but basically you cut down along the breast bone and then work your knife along the bone to separate the breast.
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Because you’ve already removed the wishbone, the breast comes right off.
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Once more, along the other side (which I always find to be a bit trickier because you’re doing it wrong way around) and you’re done.
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Those little strips of flesh are the tenderloins from the breast; once you remove the tendons that run down their length, you can saute them up for the chef!

Now while I render the fat and make stock from the carcass, I have to decide whether to cook the breasts or the legs tonight. Guess I’ll have to see what sort of wine is on hand!

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Back to Manitowoc

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Two years ago, Roger and I wound up at Manitowoc on the western shore of Lake Michigan and took the SS Badger across to the Wolverine State and the Eastern time zone. This time, Rachael and I would reach our northeast terminus here before rolling down the lakeshore back toward Milwaukee. But the ride from Appleton to Manitowoc would be our longest and most “hilly” to date so our late departure out of the Paper Valley on a cool, drizzly afternoon necessitated some focused riding. Happily, with the occasional good wind and some rerouting onto empty roads, we had another splendid day.
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Once past Appleton, one of our first sightings was a cruel architectural abomination that rivaled the anticlerical destruction of the French Revolution:
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Though this picture doesn’t do it justice, for aficionados of Wisconsin supper clubs, here is one of the icons – Van Abel’s of Hollandtown, evidently around since 1848 (in some guise):
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We never found out what this is but it was impressive from a bike perspective:
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While I stopped to take some more farm pictures:
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Rachael crushed the hills (see if you can spot her in the distance):
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Hilltop Road was a fun ride with as much in the way of “rollies” as we would encounter. By late afternoon, we reached downtown Manitowoc and some familiar sights.
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Manitowoc used to be an important port town, and with the onset of WWII, it had a bit of a heyday building submarines and other watercraft for the war. The loss of the Mirro Aluminum Company a decade ago or so (I took a bunch of pictures of the old plant two years ago) knocked the town back a bit but there are some signs of recovery. The old theater has been recently restored:
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and has become a focal point for the town’s cultural life. Local Hmong farmers bring their produce to market a couple of times a week, and the Courthouse Pub remains Manitowoc’s see and be seen watering hole. But it was The Fat Seagull where we ran into “poor mad Tom,” who deserves a post of his own.

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On the Road to Appleton

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The threat of rain is a strong motivator – so much so that Rachael agreed to setting an alarm for 6:15 so we could get from Ripon to Appleton before the forecasted storm. Braving once again the smothered comfort smell of the motel waffler, we broke our fast in silence on the biker’s delight – toasted English muffin with peanut butter and a cold, dense, boiled egg. And then we were away in the early dawn; ha ha, just kidding we didn’t actually get all organized and leave until about 7:30 but with the rain not projected until 1 pm and about a five-hour ride ahead of us we were in good shape.

Just outside of Ripon, we passed the Wisconsin winery that had been recommended to us by a guy who doesn’t drink, which makes a kind of sense given the likely quality of the stuff.
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Once again out in the countryside, we encountered odd reminders of a less-settled time. Evidently bureaucracies are not the only organizations that outlive their original purpose.
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This sign reminded me of some of the towns Roger and I rode through in Montana:
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Even (or especially) on a cloudy day, the lakes have an appealing calmness:
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The road not taken; bike trails outside urban areas are not suitable for road bikes, to Rachael’s relief!
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And so after another day’s delightful ride alongside corn fields and dairy farms, we came to the outskirts of Appleton where we found out where the milk trucks had been heading.
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At some 72,000 people, Appleton is the biggest city we would travel through (aside from Milwaukee of course). By the time we got there, the promise of rain had receded into the evening so we thought we would have a good bit of time to wander about. The local museum has an exhibit on Harry Houdini, who lived in Appleton for a few years. Sitting astride the Fox River (north of Lake Winnebago), the city’s early development was propelled by the paper-making industry and the use of hydroelectric power. Evidently, there are some impressive mansions and house museums, but owing to bad luck and poor timing, we saw very little of Appleton.

First off, the hotel’s computer system was down and the clerks declined to check us in manually – even though several hours later that is what they were forced to do. So we spent the afternoon in our colorful bike attire, which mightn’t have been so bad if there was somewhere to go – we were in Appleton on a Monday and the museum was closed. To make matters worse, the town’s annual music festival – the Mile of Music with dozens of venues and scores of bands – had just ended and there wasn’t to be much nightlife that evening.
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But one of the mottos of biking is that “you can’t do everything.” We ended up with some good Mexican food, finally got into our room and got cleaned up and ended the evening at a local brew pub where the manager gave us a ride home as the bar closed and the rains finally came. The next day, as it was still rainy and cool, we did manage to get to the museum before we left town around noon. While there is some interesting material on Appleton and the paper-making process, the Houdini exhibit is not worth one’s time unfortunately. Though not exactly airbrushed out of history, a once-prominently displayed bust of a certain infamous Wisconsin senator now resides in the museum basement:
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About Me

Born in Baltimore and raised in Cincinnati, I have lived on both coasts and driven back and forth across the country a number of times. I now have the "midlife opportunity" to do so on two wheels.