2022 mileage: 3943.6
I knew that today I'd have to squeeze in an early ride owing to my schedule, which includes Christy picking me up a little after 9:30 to go to Danny's 10:45 soccer game in Brighton, and then a matinee performance of the musical Into the Woods by the Young Peoples Theater that Michelle and I are going to. So I climbed out of bed a little after 5:00 a.m., and not long thereafter climbed onto the stationary bike.
I was a geek about the U.S. space program when I was a boy, deeply immersed in all the details of the flights, and building numerous plastic models of the different spacecraft. One of my earliest clear memories is of watching on TV, with my Mom, the first American orbital flight into space, the Mercury mission Friendship 7 by John Glenn on February 20, 1962, just less than a month before my fifth birthday.
So today I planned to watch the 1995 film Apollo 13 during my ride, and I bought it from YouTube. Something, however, went wrong, as the movie I watched was all about Apollo 11, the historic July 1969 mission that landed the first humans on the moon—a riveting memory from a time when I was 12 years old. I remember thinking, as we watched the historic walk on the lunar surface (with Neil Armstrong's historic words, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind!") on that Sunday night on the TV in our living room with the family of my Uncle Von and Aunt Barb, "This is something I'll remember for the rest of my life!"
Anyway, though I was expecting the film Apollo 13 today, I got instead this film on Apollo 11. For a long time at first, I thought the use of all the historic audio, video, and photos was a way to set the context for the later mission. But it kept unfolding, never switching over from 11 to 13, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. After I was done with the ride, I found out that what I had watched was actually a 2019 documentary (very well done!) on Apollo 11 (during which I rode 21.3 virtual miles in 1:33).
Trailer for Apollo 11 documentary
