Well first off, what a pleasant homecoming gift to arrive back from 15 hours of flights from Paris to Atlanta to L.A. to  find  my urban bicycling editorial gracing the pages of today’s L.A. Times. Much appreciation to the Times’ Robin Rauzi for tapping me for the duty and for honing the piece, and nods of appreciation to those who’ve written in congratulatory response to it. If you’re dropping by for the first time from it, welcome. The brief  and immediate backstory  is that I’m just now returning home with my wife from two weeks in Europe and there’s plenty of catching up to do on sleep, regular mail, email and all that.

When we left the jacarandas were still sleeping. How wonderful it is to return to them wide awake!

Sorry for the even more irregular postings here these last few days since docking in Monte Carlo. Apparently the internet tubes either don’t reach Paris or are exceptionally hard to find (perhaps even moreso being so distracted by everything!). I also apologize for the lack of direct response to those of you kind enough to drop me notes about the Times column, but I am as happy to be home as I am totally freakin’ exhausted and the only thing I’m going to try and do right now is get some zzzz’s  and my body clock hopefully re-synched to local time… right now it’s 6:30 a.m. in France.

I lied: before I go collapse, of the average 225 photos I took per day here’s une snap du Paris in the form of the magnificent view of Quasimodo’s castle and the Seine and the street scenery that Susan and I shared for three nights from our fifth floor corner room in the aptly named Hotel du Notre Dame (click to enlarge):

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Until tomorrow!