Today's highlight: Along de Maisonneuve, right before Concordia, noticing someone coming up fast on the bike path, slipping between pedestrians and commuters and bixi-tourists as fast as I was, and noticing the flash of orange guiding them as I saw them look at my bike, and hearing the same sound come out of our mouths at the same time: a slow, head-nodding, appreciative "Yeah."  It lasted no more than a second, but I flew through the next few blocks, an unstoppable grin on my face. Recognizing each other and, in the split-second of common slipstream, glorying in that shared instrument of purpose. 

(What a nice ride, though. spinning my way up the hill from Ville St-Pierre to NDG, along the train tracks, following the path along De Maisonneuve from the ghosts of my high school to the ghosts of Chris and Brie's old building to the ghosts of the time I sat at Vendôme and cried. Following the path, still, weaving between the commuters on full-suspension mountain bikes and the tourists on their glitchy Bixis all the way through Westmount, through the park and the smell of Porsche baking in the twenty-eight degree heat, through the shaded bustle of the Concordia buildings, along the shearing sounds of construction, up to the Place des Arts and over the sunlit white tiles and the giant-sized swings to Ontario, meeting the wide street and my own memories from years past with a sense of new tarmac and new grit. And in it all, the hard sun of a new day, the heat, the humidity, the wind you generate through movement. The joy of being happy in a place that you left and which forgot you. Montréal didn't care; but I did, and I returned, and every time I return I hold new love for this place. Riding it with that new familiarity, with the muck  Look, city! Look at me, who left and came back. Let us be familiar with one another; and if we can, let us be friends.)