I’ve gotten into a pattern of riding to smaller cities in the out-and-back-in-a-day range. This week it was Dancheng on Thursday and Shenqiu on Sunday, both to the south-east. I have students from both of those cities. It’s interesting for me to see if I can sense a regional difference to a locale, and the route used to get there. I have a couple of indicators. What do they make their pita sandwiches with, and […]

I’ve been watching the Hellobike bike shares filter throughout Zhoukou this past week. I wish I had access to a web page that would track their gps chips because it would be interesting to see how they’ve spread out. From a few masses totaling maybe a thousand bikes in the area surrounding campus, I’ve seen them spread to the edges of the city. They’ve reached almost into the countryside east, and on the industrial ring […]

Recent changes in my daily commute have me hitting 40th and Normal every day at peak traffic time, and in my experience, this is one of the most dangerous road crossings along a trail. This is all I want to do: Simple, right? It’s pretty unremarkable. If you saw this intersection, you’d think it was decent. It has a marked crosswalk. It has a pedestrian signal that gives a ‘walk’ signal without having to be […]

I went on some rides this week that I’d been wanting to re-visit. Thursday I finally got all the way to Yuan Shikai’s historic manor, after running out of time last week. I found not only that the three km road leading to it is being resurfaced but that the manor is closed for restoration as well.                           https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Shikai It’s a good thing we saw it last February. I did notice the displays then were in […]

Imagine our surprise walking out of the west gate of campus (yes, it’s a gated campus) Sunday morning to be greeted by several hundred gleaming new blue and white dock-less bike share bikes! I took a few photos and thought I’d count them after our trip to the gym. I didn’t think that an hour later three-fourths of them would be gone, already in use. Throughout the day, everywhere I turned around campus I saw […]