Last night, I was biking along the Burke-Gilman trail. Yes, I’m writing about it again, but this time, I went the other way. The cloud cover hung low and grey, the day far more quiet than those boisterous clear-skied days we’ve been living. When the grey returns, I always think of the time I lived in London. The British like to joke that an English summer lasts one day. We’ve had far more than that, but it’s fall, soon.

From Gasworks Park, I pedalled west, under Aurora (now there’s a little-seen view of the city; idyllic), under the Fremont Bridge, and along the canal. When I’m kayaking along there, I always think of Amsterdam. But biking along it slowly brought that back into my mind even more viscerally.

A few blocks later, along an industrial street in Ballard, I suddenly hurtled back to being on rollerblades near Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. The first few streets of that urban path look just like those tucked-back streets in Ballard. And then I remembered the first time I bladed along the Hudson, stopping in startled state, because the slap of the water against the concrete bank made me think I was at Coleman Dock in Seattle.

Isn’t it funny how many cities are stuffed into this one? How we can be in so many places at once?

Are there any spots in this city that remind you