Coffeeneuring Ride #8: Cleveland Park Library (4340 Connecticut Ave., N.W.) and Baked by Yael (3000 Connecticut Ave., N.W.)

Sunday, Nov. 19; 3.3 miles

Hot chocolate, everything bagel, raspberry cake pop

This wasn’t supposed to be my final Coffeeneuring ride. I had planned to go to the Anacostia Branch and the DCAC Cafe, but I needed to return a purchase to Politics & Prose and they didn’t want me to take a Chevy Chase purchase back to their new Waterfront store. I decided the expedient answer was to alter my route, hop a bus up to the bookstore and then take Bikeshare back via the Cleveland Park interim branch and the construction project.

Cleveland Park was the first branch I visited after moving to D.C. We’d come down just after a blizzard, Verizon couldn’t get their act together to give us phone service, I hadn’t wanted to move and was homesick, and the clear answer was to get me out of the apartment as soon as the city was open once more by getting me a library card.

The library closed for serious renovations last fall and isn’t slated to reopen until next year.

In the meantime, this is what D.C. does for temporary spaces:

They rent street-level store fronts and turn them into libraries for the short-term.

I pedaled south on Connecticut Avenue, unsure of where I’d stop for a drink. I’d originally planned on going to my garden, but I was open to pausing elsewhere. Then, as I reached the zoo, I remembered that one of the little stores up there was a cake pop bakery and they had a sandwich board out advertising hot chocolate spoons. I didn’t know what that was, but I was intrigued. And since there’s a dock right there, it seemed fated.

Turns out, I knew what it was after all. It’s where they’ve solidified chocolate around a stick or spoon and you use that to stir hot milk to create your own cocoa. It’s a fine idea, but either they didn’t get the milk hot enough or doing it in a trashable cup cools off too fast, because mostly it was lukewarm by the time the chocolate finally dissolved off the tongue depresser.

They also make their own bagels at the shop, so I had an everything bagel as a late lunch and followed it up with a raspberry cake pop. I’d suspected I didn’t really care for cake pops and I think that’s still true. They need to be ultra-moist to work in this format and that’s not really how I like my cake. But it was a fun thing to try and I’m glad I gave it a shot. Plus, the bakery is just such a cute place!

I stayed too long reading, so didn’t make it to the garden, but I decided it was fine to just head home, having finished my final Coffeeneuring ride.

Total miles: 60.3, which is in keeping with my Coffeeneuring averages.

Theme-within-a-theme: D.C.’s branch libraries. I hit 8 libraries, half of which were new to me. I covered six of the District’s 8 wards, having been sidelined from covering those last two (5 & 8) by a bad cold during the penultimate week of Coffeeneuring. However, this has been so much fun that I’ve decided I’ll probably keep visiting branch libraries and sharing them here. Whether I bike to them all remains to be seen, but keep your eyes peeled for this weekend’s post on the reopening of the West End library.