Seek alternate routes

I’ve come to think of routine as a tremendous aid in every day life. While you want to avoid getting into a rut, some routines just make life easier. I get up at pretty much the same time every day. I eat the same breakfast almost every day. I buy the same soaps and shampoos. There’s great efficiency in not having to work through those problems every time.

But there is one area of my life where I have never been able to abide routine: moving from Point A to Point B. From the earliest age at which I was getting myself from one place to another on my own, I was seeking out alternate routes. Although I lived a block and a half from my elementary school, I would sometimes go around the school’s block, just to see different scenery. Going to junior high, I found as many different ways to get there as possible. In high school, I’d rarely go up the same streets two days in a row. Once I was driving back and forth to college, this hyperlocal wanderlust extended to long-distance travel; I couldn’t abide always taking the Thruway between Schenectady and Syracuse, and was instead always getting onto Route 5, or 5S, or even 20 for at least part of the way to break up the terrible monotony of the highway.

This especially extends to bicycling. Some people are able to settle into a circuit or two that they do every day, and that’s a good thing. They get to build power and speed and judge themselves against a known course. But if I had to do that I’d go out of my mind, or at least get off my bike. I can’t even stand to do circuits; the second time around just bores me stiff. And the chance that I’d ride the same route twice in a week is slim indeed.

Once we get further into the season, I can stand a little repetition in my rides. For the sake of going farther and faster I have to use some common roads just to get out of my neighborhood, and I get okay with that. And there are definitely some favorite country roads around here that I enjoy riding a couple of times a month; whenever my daughters want to visit a school friend who lives out in the boonies, they’re sure to hear me say that I bike past that house all the time.

But at this time of year, I tend to stick to the cities (at least in part for the flatness), and use my hatred of geographical routine to discover parts of the Capital District that I’ve never seen despite having lived here for so many decades. Just last week I ventured into a section of Albany I’d never seen before, and found new side streets that somehow I’d never been down, and some passable alternatives to Washington and Western. I’ve been finding hidden pieces of Troy (it seems as if there are a lot of them), and trying to ride most streets in Watervliet.

The upside is that I’m never bored. The downside is that whenever we’re going somewhere by car, my family has to put up with my cries of, “But wait! There’s a better way!”