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Saturday, June 6, 2015

Street Memorial Installations By Tandem

Route: Alllll over: Up to the Bronx, through Manhattan, through Queens, down to Brooklyn and back home.
Mileage: 60 miles

Today was a different kind of ride.  Right Of Way, the safe streets advocacy group that Keegan organizes with, was installing street memorials across the boroughs.  These memorials are installed at the site where a pedestrian or cyclist was killed by traffic.  Families of the victims can request the memorials and it is a powerful way to help recognize the lives lost to traffic violence.  We were in the good company of Charlie and John with ROW and many other families from Families For Safe Streets that met us at each site.

However, it's not easy.  Each individual has custom stencils made for their memorial, which the giant stencil of wings that is used for each memorial.  How do these get from A to B?  By bike trailer.  We decided to take the tandem on the ride, but it was certainly the heaviest load we've carried with the trailer and about a dozen cans of spray paint and supplies.  It made it even harder for Keegan, who worked his tush off starting and stopping such a heavy load.  We even got our first tandem flat on the Queensboro Bridge :( Midway through the ride we had to make a Home Depot run and Keegan requested the one by our place because it has hot dogs--he earned them!  So two hot dogs later, we headed out for the second half of the ride.  It was a long day--60 miles in 10 hours by the time we got back.  Keegan said it was more exhausting than our previous centuries.  But we had our sights set on a century the next day, so time for rest!

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