The song 'Bicycle Race' by Queen has been going through my head on and off for some time now. Though I think I overdid the sentiment and underdid the preparation for my bike tour in New York City yesterday. 55 miles, 7 hours, 4 bridges and countless traffic lights -  it was pretty gruelling. I can't decide if running over those flyovers at the Mumbai marathon was tougher or the biking over the bridges. I wish I could remember all the places we rode through, but it is sort of a blur. It was fun biking through Times Square, thrilling to cross the Brooklyn bridge and good to see the Verrazano bridge (and even better to admire it respectfully from a distance without having to bike over it). I also think I rode over almost every pothole in the city. All on roughly 4 hours of sleep. The timeline sort of went like this:

3:30 am - Stagger out of bed and get ready to take the train.
4:40 am - Take train in to New York.
7.00 am - Start biking.

(Don't remember too many details. The bridges , yes. Three rest-stops with some very strange tasting energy drinks. Coney Island...and some other places:P )

2:00 pm - Finish the tour.
5:00 pm - Back home, bone-weary and rather smelly, sweaty and gritty with my free T-shirt, water bottle and some random goodies stuffed into my bike helmet.

We did reward ourselves by getting some really delicious seafood at a restaurant in a nearby town. Some of the best clam chowder I've ever had. And wonderful stuffed rainbow trout. I was pretty much falling asleep in my plate though. I do wish I had three stomachs :-)

Note to self and a word of advice in general: A pair of sunglasses is a good thing to have on a bike ride. The number of bugs I had to fish out of my eyes was not amusing.

I also recently read 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' by Mohsin Hamid. Very riveting. Evocative in places. And a stunning ending. I'm still coming to terms with it. It's been shortlisted for the Booker. I looked up the entire shortlist and discovered that the public library here has some of the other shortlisted books also. (Yes, the amount of time I spend digging up non-academic pieces of information on the web has shot up alarmingly over the summer:P) Now my next target is to read all of those, maybe before the award is announced.

So much to do...