Hollydays Ride (Part 1)

The 5BBC has so many outstanding rides, you could quit your day job and still not catch them all. But the Hollydays Lights Ride is a can’t-miss, even for those who don’t cycle regularly. I have no business being here, as I'm hosting a party with 70+ guests the next day and should be home preparing. But like the other 40+ riders who gather at Grand Army Plaza...

I've put everything aside to make this ride, one of the highlights of the year.

It’s great to be riding with Bill Mastro, the leader who originated it. He knows the ride so well, you might say the ride knows him: by now several of the “exhibitors” are in touch with him to tell him whether or not they will be lighting their houses this year. He says there are a few disappointing drop-outs (for those who know the route), but as always, he has done his homework and scoped out alternative points of interest.

We start as usual skirting Prospect Park

Through more industrial and commercial areas.

And let me just say that although it's not as cold as last year, there is a biting crosswind. En route on the subway, I was sweating in my clothes. Now, I'm glad for every stitch I'm wearing, and have turned on the battery-warming gloves.

Down, down we go, into the bowels - well, technically I guess it would be more like the appendix - of Brooklyn  where we gather for the first leg of “Light-Seeing” in Bay Ridge. The houses get more and more ambitious as we ride:

Culminating in what we’ve come to call “Our Blue Period" (we NY cyclists are all well-versed in the colloquialisms of Art).

Around this time last year in my astonishment, I was told that this was nothing compared to what we were about to see. Now, I know it to be true.

Meanwhile as we are admiring this spectacle, a tour guide comes by and points out something I hadn’t noticed before: the Christmas tree in their center window is upside down.

He says this has something to do with St. Boniface and the 7th Century, the inverted tree representing the Trinity in some way. I’m not sure I buy the concept, but It’s all so lovely and well planned it’s easy to be hypnotized by it all - and miss this harbinger of things to come.

Apologies for the quality of my helmet cam. If I stop to take a photo, I'll lose the group. But if you use your imagination, you can see a dinosaur in a Santa hat. Because as I discovered last year, this ride is about a lot more than Christmas. 

​After a quick stop for snacks...

We take the pedestrian bridge over the Gawanus Expressway. 

I love this bridge because it signals to me that we’re getting into the Big Event: Dyker Heights, an explosion of light in the name of Christmas, where anything can happen...