Just about nothing beats cycling through a golf course parking lot. Really.

Naturally, when you decide to ride pretty much every street in pretty much every part of town, you get to some neighborhoods later than others. Factors like distance from one’s own home and public transportation come into play. There are also factors like this…

That’s an 2018 aerial looking down on Cottonwood Mall and its car storage environs. Toward the top-left is seemingly the only greenery, the sportsball fields of Cibola High School. Notably, like all APS schools these days, public access to that greenery is damn hard, in many cases impossible.

So yeah, you get to riding some neighborhoods later than others. And we BB cyclists have generally only gotten around to riding the above after having cycled 40-50% of every street in town. Still, there are flecks of the Better parts of Burque here and there around Cottonwood Mall, particularly if one is open to irony and/or absurdity. Such as cycling through a golf course parking lot on a busy golfing Sunday morn.

I think we’ve actually only been reprimanded/kicked off once in many golf course cycling jaunts, that the case of circling the practice putting green one too many times at Los Altos GC. Primarily, these forays are limited to quizzical stares, impatient big-ass truck drivers whose only truck hauling is their bag of clubs, and more quizzical stares as we go about stopping to take photos of irony and absurdity.

Old timers and those who study history might remember the “good ‘ol days” of the late 1960s, when people, overwhelmingly white, fled the inner city and university areas because, well because of several reasons that are better discussed in a thousand books and a million websites from which you can learn far more than you’ll ever learn from reading Better Burque. All we do, now, is ride bikes and tell you about it.

Nevertheless, to give a bit of sociological flavor into the neighborhoods we rode yesterday, here are two real estate ads for Paradise Hills from back in 1968/69:

And like those real estate ads, riding through part of the Paradise Hills neighborhood yesterday was architecturally and generally a trip back to those White Flight days of yesteryear. Keeping with the frozen in time vibes, there was also this:

Remember this? Remember these? Remember Spencer’s Gifts, Waldenbooks, Musicland, and Orange Julius? Astride the same ridiculous number of parking spaces never needed even back in its heyday, the Mall sits like a 500,000 or so sq. ft. archaelogical site. Having been to Tikal, Zaculeu, and a few other Mayan sites down in Guatemala, I can report that gazing upon the boxy monoliths of Cottonwood Mall does not include quite the awestruck vibe or insect bites of those pre-historic locales. But there’s definitely a sense of history that has gone forever, even if there’s still a few stores open and still a few folks walking from their cars on an early Sunday morning to work at those few stores.

Here’s the geographic gist of yesterday’s ride:

And here’s where we take off the irony/absurdity hat and tell you about some real, honest to Orange Julius good low stress cycling streets to enjoy in the Paradise Hills/Cottonwood Mall area. Namely:

• Fairfax Dr. NW is a lovely little street paralleling the misnamed Paradise Blvd. for quite a stretch along the Golf Course.
• Justin Dr. NW continues the circle of much of the Course and get you into the irony/absurdity-filled Golf Course parking lot.
• Greene Ave. NW completes the main Course loop and the Bewitched-meets-Brady Bunch-era architectural tableau.
• There’s a full mini-neighborhood filled with streets named after New Mexico U.S. Senators (e.g., E. B. Catron, Sam Bratton, and Bronson Cutting). We made sure to ride Holm Bursum Dr. NW so that riding buddy could tell me all about the Bursum Bill of 1921. I admit not everybody gets a great, free Bursum story as part of their ride up this street. I also notice they misspell “Burson” in the street name found on maps, which is one of sly irony/absurd digs for which cartographers are renown.

In more current sociology, riding buddy and I had to meet away from our chosen location, Eagle Ranch Park, because its parking lot, courts, and surrounding area were filled to the pickleballing brim by some sort of Sunday morning tournament/get-together of significant stature. Yes, some attendees chose to illegally park on the bike lane on Congress NW, and yes many attendees markedly looked like characters in those real estate ads from 1968/69, having now reached pickleball age after a half-century growing up and old in the shadow of a once-mighty social gathering spot featuring risque accoutrement, vinyl records, and treacly orange-flavored drinks. Yes, that was noticeable.

I don’t know when we might be cycle back through this undeniably historic part of town. It might be quite a while. But when/if we do, we’re definitely going back to see/experience low streets streets like Fairfax Dr. NW, and ride again through this:

Next time we’ll be sure to tell impatient golfer in the big-ass gas-powered truck that his golfing is helping support the hated electric vehicle industry. He should get a kick out of that.