I'm using the word "sprint" in the title, in a geekish sense, meaning: "a concentrated spurt of effort regarding a task or challenge at hand". Running fast (sprinting) is the operative metaphor. However in geekdom a sprint might involve sitting with one's laptop and typing furiously.
I'm repurposing it to refer to something athletic that is yet not running: my Saturday bike ride, the first of this spring. I plumped up my tires and took off.
I headed out intending to circle around in Laurelhurst Park a few times, a "gear check" I told myself, remembering how the chain had slipped off that time.
However a pedestrian whom I mistook for Barbara Stross was approaching the corner of SE 38th and Harrison, and my mistaking her identity threw me off course. I continued west on Harrison.
I could have easily corrected my trajectory by turning right, but I realized I'd been of two minds from the start: the cherry blossoms were calling (if indeed they had weathered the rains) and I wanted seeing them in person to be the goal of my sprint.
I'd heard through the grapevine that they were being splendid this year, along the waterfront, near the Steel Bridge, at the Japan America Friendship Park, where we celebrate an end to nuke warfare every year.
So I cycled pell-mell down the hill towards OMSI, by way of Ladd's Addition and all that new infrastructure around SE 12th, put in with the Max Orange Line and the newly built Tilikum Crossing.
I circled up the 270 degree ramp onto the deck of the Hawthorne Bridge, then headed north along the waterfront towards the blossoms.
Saturday Market was in full swing.
The blossoms were in full bloom.
Coming back, passing OMSI again, I bicycled parallel to a long freight train heading southeast, and temporarily blocking streets, as trains in Portland are wont to do.
Then it stopped, seemingly indefinitely (I didn't wait around).
Fortunately, I remembered the pedestrian and bicycle bridge over the tracks, the Bob Stacey Crossing, with working elevators. I could take more train pix from that vantage. Another train was queued up to go the other way.
The rust patina is intentional, and thematic all along the waterfront (e.g. those trademark esplanade pylons), right up to the Oregon Convention Center, with its deliberately rusty sculptures.
