From a Wall Street Journal online article:
Patricia McNeal, a 58-year-old brain-aneurysm survivor from Panama City, Fla., is currently riding home from Seattle on her 2017 Trek Émonda SL 6 road bike. She’s improvising a route, but confessed she’d one day love to ride the Great American Rail Trail, a transcontinental route from Washington, D.C. to Washington state that’s now in piecemeal development.
A self-described “credit-card camper,” Ms. McNeal doesn’t rough it. She carries a single bag and sleeps at hotels and homestays arranged via warmshowers.org, a peer-to-peer cyclist’s site, as well as supporters who learn about her travels via the Black Girls Do Bike organization. Her necessities are padded shorts, a gel seat, chamois cream to help with chafing and some music.

Bicycle touring in America is shifting gears away from that old school derring-do on skinny tires, when cyclists scraped by 18-wheelers on highways. Instead, the sort of protected cycling paths common in urban centers are now stretching tendrils over abandoned railroad lines to link cities coast-to-coast. Meanwhile, riders are joining mass multiday fundraising rides for safety in numbers, or taking to America’s 1,357,430 miles of quieter unpaved roads. For that, they ride increasingly popular “gravel bikes,” a toughened road bike designed for speed on off-road with added mounts for gear.
To read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-right-bicycles-for-an-epic-ride-across-america-11573235337

Economists say aging baby boomers are the biggest culprits because many are staying healthier later in life and choosing not to downsize. Some look around at the lack of smaller, less expensive homes and are loath to get into bidding wars with their children’s generation to get one.

We headed west and hugged the shallow shoreline, casting at shadows of fish as the sun mixed with clouds making it more difficult to sight fish. We curled around a point of land I instantly recognized as Cambridge Beaches, where I stayed with my parents on my first visit to the island and where my sister celebrated her honeymoon.
Now 63, Mr. Peterson has progressed from bike paths to rugged mountain trails and is known for his caped helmet emblazoned with his nickname, UniGeezer. Based on his GPS and bike computer, he estimates he’s logged nearly 30,000 miles, or 24 million pedal revolutions, since he started.
Not until July 16 did Edison feel that he had a device worth patenting. The application he signed that day specified multiple timpani that “reproduced” vocal inflections and a sibilant-sensitive diaphragm. But a laboratory visitor (spying for Bell) found the instrument more powerful than clear, with the word schism sounding more like kim.
FINICKY WESTERN EATERS would still be relieved to find filet mignon on the French menu of the hotel, now known as the Nikko Kanaya, a 90-minute drive from Tokyo. The dining room itself looks much as it did when it first opened, in 1893 and eagle-eyed diners might notice that the wooden pillars are decorated with flower carvings that echo those of the nearby Toshogu shrine. The views from the guest rooms are likewise unchanged—forest-covered mountains in the background, the same fastidiously manicured gardens in the foreground that the Einsteins strolled in 1922. Other parts of the hotel feel mildly haunted, like a Japanese version of “The Shining.” The wood-paneled lobby is well worn, stairwells creak noticeably and a shadowy cocktail bar features fading black-and-white photos of forgotten ’20s parties, with men in tuxedos and women in frocks smiling at the camera.
Whereas most Wright biographies build from one structure to the next, this one caroms from one digression to the next. Mr. Hendrickson spins miniature biographies of the people who commissioned Wright to build their homes and office buildings. An array of midcentury figures appears: e.g., Glenway Wescott, the novelist and poet who rubbed shoulders with Gertrude Stein in Paris and whose sister commissioned one of Wright’s homes; and Clarence Darrow, the renowned lawyer, who waded into the murk of Wright’s personal life when a disgruntled housekeeper attempted to use the Mann Act to have Wright arrested. We also meet the little-known residents of various structures. Seth Peterson, for instance, dreamed of living in a Wright home so powerfully that he camped out in the one he commissioned as it was being built.
…a new