A Journey To The East Is A Bit Shorter Than Expected

A brass quintet plays at the Epiphany concert.

My journey to the east was surprisingly easy, after the westward journey.

St. Pius X held an Epiphany Concert today, involving around 3 groups from St. Pius, the bell choir from MMU that I’m a part of, a Xavier High School choir, and 32 performance groups from St. Joseph in Marion.

Must be the Marion water. Those easterners can sing and play and bell up a storm.

Anyway, I usually have a bit of a challenge getting to St. Pius by bike. There is, or so I thought, no easy bike route. I end up snaking a fairly complex roundabout route to get to a sidewalk south of a middle school (don’t recall the name of the school, but I think of it as one of the two Dolly Parton middle schools in Cedar Rapids) so I can cross Noelridge Park via a convenient sidewalk.

Today, I turned from F to Royal or Regal or whatever it is and then to some other nameless residential quiet street, when I noted one of the Dolly Parton parts of the middle school off to my right beyond a dead end. So I turned down that road to nowhere, but ended up on a sidewalk that led straight to the gym cup, and thence via sidewalk to the north parking lot of the school.

Wow. Cool. It turns out that I had no reason to go all the way to Old Marion Road and snake north and then south—this new route to St. Pius was far more direct.

That’s the thing about biking. The routes are not as obvious as car routes are, because you don’t always stick to streets. Trails and sidewalks can take you in unexpected directions. On the one hand, if you guess wrong, it takes much longer to recover. But, sometimes, the journey seems to be guided by a lucky star, as it was today.

The wise men in the Bible (Epiphany celebrates the Magi paying homage to Jesus) had to travel afar. I got to travel a lot nearer than I expected.

It was dusky by the time I was going home, but the new route was nice and short. A good new route, and a reason to cycle to church now and then.