Yesterday was the first annual Tour de Bob. The modestly-named tour is a bicycle ride through Marine Park and Rockaway, and points in between. Sunday afternoon and Laura, and and Shana showed up at my house wearing “Tour de Bob” tee-shirts that they’d designed and had printed for the occasion. To say I was floored would be an understatement. I pulled on my tee-shirt and off we went on a three-hour, twenty-mile tour. All photography by the incomparable Laura Chavoen, except for the group shots in front of Battery Harris East, which were snapped by a kind stranger.

Tee-shirt front: the Tour de Bob logo, designed by . The tee-shirt was produced by with text by Laura and Shana.

Tee-shirt back.

The Route (in yellow).

The Marine Park Nature Center, on the Gerritsen Inlet. Left to right: , , Shana, and .

Inside a ruined building at Fort Tilden, Rockaway.

The Tour in front of Battery Harris East, a decommissioned 16-inch gun emplacement at Fort Tilden. Left to right: Shana, , , Laura, and .

A wider view of us in front of Battery Harris East.

Exploring the inside of a ruined 16-inch ammunition magazine at Fort Tilden. A small railway connected the magazines with the two gun batteries (Harris East and West); each projectile weighed approximately 2,000 pounds, and could be fired 30 miles out to sea from the big guns.

Laura saw these three kids doing forward flips off a manmade dune at Jacob Riis Park, a public beach in Rockaway just east of Fort Tilden. She coaxed them into repeating the trick for her camera.

The Tour in my kitchen after dinner. Left to right: , , Shana, and Laura.

Shana tries to extract something from . Could be love, could be food—we were there and none of us is sure.

A birthday gift from : a copy of the first contemporary SF novel I read as a teenager, Emil Petaja’s The Nets of Space. To say that this weird melange of Don Quixote and giant, spacegoing crabs is lurid would be a vast understatement.

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