Grateful Bread

Grateful Bread is the place to be in Wedgwood. Jerry Garcia greets me, music by Cake plays softly, and my awesome apple-pecan pastry awaits. I have bicycled here. This place is the real deal, with real bakers and folks who brew a sublime cup of oolong. The mellow atmosphere, with computers, and moms and dads and kids, and Bible readers, and Bar Mitzvah scholars, and bikers and yogis and knitters, lends itself to the reading of "The Stranger" and "The Weekly". The new outlet of the multinational corporate-entity coffee shop is thriving down the street, but I don't go there, and, thank goodness, that place didn't undermine the popularity of the Grateful Bread.

Monday, November 2 was another autumn Seattle gift--cool and sunny and inviting. So I did bike to the Grateful Bread, where I met my friend P, who helped me figure out more about the mechanics of blogging, which I'm doing to underscore my Ragbrai training.

So here I am in Seattle, yes, training for the RAGBRAI, which takes place in Iowa. A relative invited me, and it sounds fun, so I'm planning for it. It's a long bike ride (400+ miles over the course of a week), with a party the whole way. As I understand it, we'll bike anywhere between 40 and 80 miles a day, party and camp out each night. The Iowa towns through which the ride is routed turn out to cook dinners for and host all the riders--did I read 10,000? According to the website, RAGBRAI stands for Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa. I recently met a Seattle bicycle ambassador (I didn't know until I met her that we have people with such an esteemed title here in the Northwest) on a Cascade Bike Club ride. She was a buff young woman riding a workhorse of a bike. She said the STP intimidates her, because of the huge number of riders and the lack of physical space to ride in. But she also said she's heard, through her biking crones and network, that the RAGBRAI is fun. And I'm up for fun, even if it will require year-round, rainy, cold training to get ready for the week-long, dry, hot ride.

And after the Grateful Bread, I did errands by bike, total for the day, 5 miles. Puny.

And the rain has come. What now?