Biking in the Park

Santiago, the young guy who is our doorman/utility guy at the apartment, suggested we take our ball to a bigger park (Frommer's calls it Parque J Newbery, but we locals call it Los Bosques de Palermo) a couple miles away. He assured us there would be fewer dog piles (true, though not completely absent of landmines) and that we would find the atmosphere fun for a Saturday morning. He was right. We'll have to put up a different post with the soccer/fútbol competition between Quinn and Jack, but here we are riding bikes on the street circling the lake in the middle of the park. They close the street to cars on the weekend (that's just a guess, but I think it's true) and one can rent all kinds of transportation: bicycles, tricycles, quadcycles, rollerblades, roller skates, skateboards, those hinged skateboard things they now sell at Costco, whatever. You name it, you can rent it. The locals, porteños, ride around the lake, joining joggers and walkers, and enjoy a beautiful day like we had yesterday.

At first Jack wanted to rent a rowboat or footpedal boat, but we convinced him the water was too cold to even float on - you can see it was an amazing sunny day, but the temperature was pretty cool - so he led us over to the cycles. Unfortunately, the only bikes his size all had training wheels, which he rejected immediately as "too baby," so he settled on what looked vaguely like a four-wheeled, ATV-type bike for him. Quinn grabbed a regular kid-sized cruiser, and Erin and I climbed aboard some kind of old-fashioned delivery bike that had a parking brake-ish lever that the guy showed me how to use but never seemed to work. After one lap around the lake Quinn and I switched places, I taking his bicycle and he taking my driver's seat on the two-person delivery bike.






Once we finished we walked toward home along Av. del Libertador, which looks far harmless in the sunshine than when I hiked down it last night in the dark, and headed for a café and lunch. Both boys said it was the best day yet. Hard to argue.