Ride Home 5/19

One of those days when I just wanted to get out of work as quickly as possible. I thought that since I was planning on going fast, I might as well Strava myself to see my lightning quick time. Five minutes in, I remember that I cat cuty duty and I had to ride back through Glover Park. Thereabouts, I saw some colleagues walking on the sidewalk and they said have a nice weekend. Um, Bike to Work day by definition means work, right?

Glover Park has some nice short little ups and downs that make for interesting riding. I'm pretty sure there's a way to avoid the bigger ones and take a flatter route, but I'm not really sure. 

Secret motorcycle parking? Secret motorcycle parking. 

Shrubbery. 

The cats were fine and I was in and out pretty quickly. I reset my Strava, because that seemed like a useful thing to do, and I set about around 40th, W, Huidekoper and Manor. Local historians: is the street named after this Huidekoper? Local Dutch people: is it pronounced HEED-uh-cooper? Local Dutch-American Dutch-American historians: do you find your heritage an asset or a liability in researching the history of the Dutch in America?

When an ambulances is coming, I think that bicyclists should behave the way motorists are supposed to behave and just stop moving and pull over to the side of the road. 

I love fenders, as I've made abundantly clear any number of times. But one of the strange drawbacks of fenders is that sometimes when I try to make sharp turns at slow speeds, when I pedal forward, my foot knocks into my front fender. So awkward! I almost fell down trying to get around a bus at the intersection of Prospect and 34th. You keep me dry, but you almost made me fall. Sure, it sounds like a Taylor Swift lyric, but it's how I feel. 

Behind this guy on the bridge:

It's hard to see, because I am terrible at taking pictures, but he was an older gentleman and he wore older gentleman black sneakers. He had his trousers (because he wears trousers, not pants) tucked into his white socks and he had a crate on the back of his bike, in which was his canteen. He traveled at an older gentleman pace and did not alert pedestrians to his presence prior to passing them too closely. At one point, I tried to ding my bell so as to keep him in my foreward ding envelope, but this coincided too closely with his passing a woman and she jumped all like "WHAA?" and then I just felt dumb. He stopped mid-bridge suddenly, maybe to take a picture, maybe to cough. 

I like the pedestrian countdowns on walk signs because it makes every green light seem like a space shuttle launch. 

New turn restrictions at Oak and Wilson. 

This might or not might apply to bicyclists, but I didn't want to chance it on account of the police car right in front of me. Didn't want to tempt fate. It got me thinking about vehicular cycling and my newly minted bizarro world bicycular driving. Motorists almost always complain about cyclists breaking the law (running stop signs being the most common), so I figure why not give drivers the opportunity to adopt bicycular driving. You can Idaho Stop, but you only get a sliver of the roadway and you can never go more than 15 miles per hour.  Also, you have to read every week a new, but strangely repetitive, article in the newspaper about how your preferred mode of transportation ruins the lives of everyone else. Anyone drivers want in?