Route – Page 2 – The Cambridge Placebook

August 30, 2020July 5, 2021

Hello again (+ Wellington, NZ, part 1)

It’s been a while. Perhaps a predictable while, for a blog started with good intentions, but complicated by circumstances, given that it’s a place-based blog. During the year since my last blog post, I was only in Cambridge five scattered months, split up by a month-long trip to New Zealand and a few weeks at home in the US for the holidays, and then cut short by the slapdown so many countless people have experienced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In mid-March, in about the span of a week, I went from anticipating the burgeoning spring, walks on the fen, and concerts in college chapels, to packing up my room, booking a flight home, and leaving Cambridge for the foreseeable future. Although I didn’t know how long I would need to hunker down at home, I had a feeling it would be months. Unlike many of my friends on year-long programs, however, I was fairly confident I would be back, and only had to mourn the probable loss of a season or two in Cambridge.

Now I have a return flight to Cambridge booked for September, almost exactly 6 months from the day I left. Although the future is no more certain than it was when I left, I feel the need to grasp the Cambridge time slipping inexorably by. It won’t be quite the same Cambridge—one of the reasons it didn’t feel impossible to leave in the first place—but the cultural-physical landscape of millennia is still there.

I also feel the need to keep constructing my little word-lenses for what I can still access of that landscape, as well as for what I remember of the pre-COVID Cambridge which never made it onto this blog (some of which is sitting in half-finished posts already). The urge to write that I described in my first post has never gone away–just gotten a little held up in execution. So I’ve made a goal to start posting regularly again, long or short, every two weeks, as of now on Saturdays.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d give a little taste of the places I’ve lavished my place-love on when I haven’t been in Cambridge over the last year.

Today, how about some New Zealand?

April 26, 2019July 5, 2021

Punting on the Cam

I’m not sure if I had heard of punting before Cambridge came onto my radar, but it’s become a regular part of my vocabulary since arriving. Punting—pushing a flat-bottomed boat down the shallow River Cam with a long pole—is one of the iconic Cambridge things (incidentally, Oxford does it too).

Punters and St. John’s College from the River Cam (photo credit: my dad)

Outside of midwinter, the city-center stretch of the Cam is reliably busy with the rectangular wooden boats, which are laden with tourists and students reclining on the seats, punters standing on the boat-backs and ducking under bridges, poles dipping up and down. Riverfront colleges have their own little fleets of punts docked in side-bays for use by college members (or friends with connections). There are also multiple commercial punting companies that advertise pricey guided punting tours—the hired punters recite Cambridge factoids of sometimes questionable veracity in affected guide voices—or self-hire boats. So you’ll see experienced punters gliding smoothly around the self-hired tourists spinning slow circles, and prows bump easily, but rarely do people fall in; the boats are stable and the pace is inherently relaxed.

March 24, 2019July 5, 2021

A Cycle Ride from Cherry Hinton

My first open Sunday in a month or so turned out to be a perfect, sun-touched spring day. On the 3-mile cycle ride to church in the morning I knew I would be taking my time on the way home—I’ve long been itching to properly soak up the green corners I whiz past on my bike every week, catching them only in my peripheral vision. A full schedule, bad weather, and bike-sapped energy have kept me from deviating much from that route until today.

The Cambridge meetinghouse of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is in Cherry Hinton, one of those outlying suburbs of Cambridge. Few members with cars live near me, and the bus requires an extra 20 minutes of walking, so most weeks I put on leggings and cycle to church. The route from my flat in Newnham (the neighborhood surrounding Newnham College, which is also considered a Cambridge suburb) to the church takes me through several parks and fenland, over the Cam, for a stint on a tree-lined cycle path, and finally down a long commercial road. The green space makes the ride worth it, even when I’m only glancing. Today was even better.

Here’s a tour of the ride I went on today, in church-to-home order.