Ride With DC Police Through the Nation's Capital or Suffer the Bloat - Your Choice

At Thanksgiving, Americans love to eat too much food.  Afterwards we need to exercise - a lot.  The Sunday after Thanksgiving, if you are not sitting in some terrible airport, staring at the Sbarro and Starbucks, and still recovering from the tryptophan hangover you got from eating too much bearded poultry, you could be riding your bicycle across Washington with DC Police.  MPD are hosting a cycling event.  Wow.  Good cops.  No donuts.  Be there.  The ride starts at Headquarters.  Do not be deterred by the Arno Breker-inspired exterior of the building.  It looked pretty haute in about 1948.  You may find yourself humming the Flight of the Valkyries, but make no mistake, MPD is a diverse and serious force.  Mostly anyway.  They have many bicycle officers, about 75 of whom just got rockin' new bikes.  And a hundred years ago, DC police had officers on bicycles.  Fixies, as it turns out.  And they wore silly hats, if you care to know.  Photos below.  See you on the 29th.
http://dcist.com/2015/11/mpd_to_ride_traverse_the_streets_al.php

By the way, if you have had your bicycle stolen in DC, use this link to try to identify it from a photo of MPD's recovered stolen and abandoned bikes. They post fairly regularly, so you may eventually see that awful Huffy you consider a loss.
http://mpdc.dc.gov/service/view-photos-recovered-property

Are cyclists and cycling advocates grandiose?  Momentum Magazine has a piece this month that posits that cycling can save the world.  So can nuclear fusion, effective drought farming, and an abandonment of extreme ideology and ethnic hatred.  But those things will take time.  So in the meantime, as you place your canned food in the charity boxes at Piggly Wiggly and Whole Foods, think about how cycling can play an important role in cutting transportation emissions in half by 2050, as Climate Central opines not unreasonably.  In addition to that tin can of no-salt white beans you accidentally purchased last year and are now inflicting on the needy, think about how to help the world's most desperate by driving far less and riding your bike far more.  Grandiose?  Not in the least bit.
https://momentummag.com/can-cycling-save-the-world/

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/transportation-emissions-could-be-halved-by-2050-19721

So, if I see you in the bike lane, dressed as pilgrim, or wearing a police uniform, and you are on a bike you lawfully own, let's be smug.

Elisa P.