I'm so happy with my decision to rent this bike.
For me it is just the best way to see a city. Walking is pleasant, but for me my feet just get sore after a while - and you can't cover that much ground. When I walk the rate of input of the sights and sounds is far far below my saturation point. Cycling on the other hand lets you cover vast areas absorbing everything. Its a compromise between driving and walking. When you drive you can go far, but you are disconnected from the full experience, the sounds, the smells, the shape of the ground, the wind. You also can't tuck into all the nooks and corners of places - finding those out of the way gems.
With a bike you have the best of both worlds. Of course there are some costs - if you are going to bike in a city you have to be alert and very in control of your bike. I had a lot of experience with cycling in and around Boston growing up, so I'm comfortable with dodging delivery trucks, having cabs whiz by, potholes and pedestrians, but this landscape could easily be terrorizing for others.
So today I rode from the quarter down St. Charles to Tulane and the audobon park where I sit and write this now. Its amazing to me how different this area is from the quarter, beatiful houses and parks which remind me of where I grew up in the Boston area. Many of the houses strike me as being surprisingly non-southern in their architecture. I smell a lot of Sweet Olive around here, which I also smell around the St. Louis Cathedral. This is an amazingly sweet smelling tree which I have not seen since I worked in a greenhouse in college where we had several.
I spent the rest of the afternoon zig zagging around the quarter admiring all the charm. I had lunch at the Central Grocery and watched the market crash there.
Plenty of more pictures are available