Went on a nice biketide with (e:james) and (e:terry) on Sunday. This is where I thought the drawbridge would come in handy, although this time we cut across the railroad tracks which shortened the trip a bit.

Tortoise B is a much better digger than Basra. I guess Basra was good when he was younger. Maybe once your shell is big enough you font care anymore.

I am so tired of having to go all the freaking way around to around Dug's dive to get to the outer harbor. Sure, if you are in a car, the way over the skyway is convenient and quick, but for pedestrians and bicyclists, the path all the way around is long, industrial at best, and grueling. Especially for pedestrians.

It so annoying when you finally arrive at the outer harbor and you can see the inner harbor and downtown buffalo are about 200 ft away but about an hours walk back. I understand that building a chicago street auto bridge would be expensive but why not a tiny pedestrian draw bridge.

After extensive searching I found a place with a similar project in Duisberg, Germany and they did build a pedestrian draw bridge

The sign starts out saying, "When you want to open up a once industrial harbor for the people, you need to build a bridge..." I think that sums up exactly what we need here in the Buffalo harbor. I wonder what it would take to get such a project started.

The sign continues on to say that bridge was the idea of Stuttgart Professor Jörg Schlaich and that he worked with the Duisburger Firm Stahlbau Raulf.

Missing Image ;(

Here are some more pictures from the wikipedia article.





I am also willing to settle for an even less expensive zip line, lol.

(E:mike)'s phone broke last march or somewhere thereabouts right after he got it. The screen was totally shattered and he has used it with a piece of tape across it ever since, making it so difficult to read. For his birthday in August I ordered a new screen from China with the hopes of repairing it.

It was super smashed up.


Finally, tonight we had some time together and I repaired it.




The only real tricky part was removing the old glass which was glued down really well. Many of the videos I saw online involved lots of cracking and scraping but one guy mentioned heating the screen up with a hairdryer to soften the adhesive and it totally worked. It got super hot and just melted right out. It also left the adhesive in a sticky reusable state. The phone which costs $500 to replace according to verizon ended up only costing $20 for the new glass and $400 in shipping and my labor, saving (e:Mike) a full $80.



There is one tiny little spec of black I left under the screen but mike didn't want me to take more time, so he left it that way.

As we arrived there cops and news crews were in there way out because someone had died. Its a kind of ominous start to a climbing trip. The person had a heart attack kayaking.

The day was nice and warm. Next time we need to start earlier though. We did end up making it up to the top if the section we were trying to get to but once we were up three we didn't gave much tine yo hike around.