Being near the train station is interesting for a cyclist on the weekend.

First off, let me say that I do NOT consider myself a "Cyclist". I ride a bike. Those are two totally different things. I just couldn't think of a better way to describe how and why I found the defuse sites that I saw on out trip to the bile path so interesting! In addition to the various bikes that were chained up (poorly) at the station there was a nice wide path for my little guy to ride his balance bike on (and off of!) and then there was this:

Last weekend I took my little Junior Mountainbiker out on his little balance bike. He had an enjoyable time until he saw… The Train! Of course that was the end of the bike as he rushed over to see he big gray and purple commuter rail locomotive. There were a lot of peddlebikes and peddlebikers on the platform for a Sunday afternoon. One stood out to me. A scruff young man with some sort of bike that looked like a mountain bike from a hundred yards or so away. There was all kind of bags and panniers lashed to it and hung from it. I wondered where he was going  and where he had come from. I wondered what he was doing.

At firs the answer seems clear, he was on a bicycle tour and while that might be true, it seemed un-likely. You see, this particular train stop is the terminus of a like about 40 miles outside of The City, which around here means Boston. And, well, it’s a train. If he were on a Bicycle tour there is really, no reason that he could not have ridden from wherever he was before he got on the train, even if he were coming out of Boston. Sure, the train would be faster and arguably safer than riding but so would a car, or an airplane. That’s not what one does when one tours on a bicycle though. I paraded my mountainbike on the back rack of the Jeep yesterday. I drove about 80 miles total. I could not have possibly have tried to claim that I mountainbike toured those 80 miles now could I have? No. No more than a guy on a train could (although there is a great deal of buzz on the interweb lately that that used to be exactly the correct way to win the Tour De France before they invented steroids).

He was clearly going some where but his motivations remained vague. Was he unable to afford a car or a ticket on…”something”. Was he trying to make up lost time on an actual bicycle tour? Was he motivated or inspired by some other set of circumstances that I can’t even imagine? I don’t know. I do know that I loitered for as long as a four year old would let me for him to gather his things and his thoughts so that he would head down the platform toward the front of the train. It seemed slightly rude and counterproductive to drag a toddler to the end of the train that he didn’t want to be at simply to accost this poor guy and start demanding answers to my curiosity while my little one either expressed his displeasure as only a four year old could or, even worse, stated picking apart the guy’s packs to see what was inside. I never got to meet the young man and never got to learn what his journey was really all about. I saw him peddling out of town over the bridge a short while later though. He had ignored the bike path that paralleled the main road and made a straighter-shot to the bridge. It seemed to me that that was an important detail at the time but I never did figure out why it might have been.