Ride In 11/3

If this post is noticeably shorter or of lower quality than usual (and really, how would you even know?), blame it on customer service at a large big box electronics retailer, who only saw to dispatch a second customer service representative after I waited 20 minutes for the first to to wrap up what was apparently a very difficult laptop switcheroo. On the plus side, I did get to ride Capital Bikeshare to and from the store. It's quite nice out now.
I've been sort of bored lately with my morning commute (stupid boring wonderful dedicated bicycle infrastructure making it too safe and easy to get to work), so I decided to mix it up by taking other stupid wonderful dedicated bicycle infrastructure, namely the bike lanes up 6th NE to the Met Branch trail via getting stuck in car traffic on L. I don't think full-time motorists have any idea how frequently their over-consumption of road space negatively impacts my travel. At the intersection of L and 3rd (?), I waved across a father-daughter bicyclist combo probably on their way to school.
I've never been entirely clear on where the Met Branch Trail starts and stops and where bicyclists can easily enter, so I rode 2nd to M and got on the trail by the NY Ave/Galluadet/NOMA/Florida Ave/Uline Arena/Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Headquarters/Trinidad/A. Litteri's (I think that's the proposed new name) metro stop and rode along the trail for the equivalent of 5 or so blocks. A fair number of cyclists coming in the other direction and no one heading in mine. I'm getting so lonely that I might want to start subsidizing reverse/uptown bike commuters. Not really.
Unfortunately, there's no contraflow bikelane on R Street, so I scofflaw salmon-ed (Scofflaw Salmon was one of the lesser known Hanna Barbera cartoon villains) for a block against the one-way and then rode along R in the non-bikelane until the lane picked up on the other side of Florida. Crossing Florida Avenue by bicycle is a miserable experience. I thought about calling a cab. There's really just no good way to do it, especially as drivers have no compunction to keep the intersection clear. I made it across by hopscotching behind a city bus, mid-turn, and by beating a charging UPS van. Good times.
Lots of cyclists at R and Rhode Island. Many of them women.One in rather high, high-heels.Impressive. I can, at most, only ride in kitten heels.
I was overdressed and became fairly uncomfortable on the ride up Massachusetts. I also think my seat post might be lower than I want it to be. Perhaps it has slipped. Perhaps someone is lowering it ever-so-slightly each day while I'm at work.
If you get a chance and have the interwebs accessible to you, the WABA Summit is online and makes for quite good viewing, if you like bicycles and dubious sound quality. Really good stuff and I wish I could have attended. Maybe next year.