Ride Home 12/19: Salsa Verde

Take lights out of bag. Put lights on bike. Turn lights on. Ride out of parking garage. Realize it's still daytime. Turn lights off.

I rode over another chunk of concrete today, managing not to fall down this time. Were I sensible, I would believe, like Chicken Little, that the sky is falling and that the sky is made of concrete. How else could you explain its greyness? But I am not sensible and I continue to believe that this concrete falls from the back of dump trucks in chunks small enough to be hazardous to bicyclists who aren't looking for them. Why I continue to not look for chunks of small concrete remains a mystery.

The speed limit on Massachusetts Avenue is 30 miles per hour and the speed cameras don't typically capture/ticket vehicles unless they are travelling about 11 miles over the speed limit. That means I'd have to be riding 41 miles per hour down the hill in order to set off the camera. While this is certainly achievable on a bike, it's not something that I think I can achieve absent the assistance of Wernher von Braun. And if I have one rule about bike commuting, it's never to rely on the assistance of former Nazi rocket scientists in order to get speeding tickets that you wouldn't even want to pay in the first place. That's stuff you learn on the first day ofBike Commuting 101. On a totally unrelated note, would you watch a sitcom modeled on Welcome Back, Kotter called Welcome Bike, Kotter? Because I might or might not have a spec script that I'm shopping around.

Yield signs make me think of Inigo Montoya. I do not think that word means what you think it means. Nor does this "Left Turn Must Turn Left" at 23rd and L. Routinely ignored by so many drivers. Must be CONFUSION.

Must? Must we?

23rd to the L Street Cycle Track. It used to be that the problems I encountered happened at the eastern end of the route, but now they tend to happen more frequently at the western end. That's some Horace Greely shit right there. If it's ever blocked by a Conestoga wagon, I'm never biking again. I will officially give up.

Managed to get right on 11th with no issue (but what of the entail? Downtown Abbey references 4-ever) and then I followed a commuter bus for a few blocks before passing the commuter bus on its left and then riding into the invisible bike box on the other side of the crosswalk at F Street (it's invisible because it's also imaginary) and then got a good jump, got passed E and then made it left on red at Pennsylvania, where I followed a guy on a CaBi for half a block and then made an effort and caught a bunch of green lights and then there were no more green lights because I was riding on the drive that runs parallel to the path that borders the grass that surrounds the Capitol. At the top of the Hill, I took this picture of these cars parked in front of the Capitol to expose to America that the front of its Very Important and Very Historically Significant home of its national legislature is pretty much treated like a hum drum post office. Just park in front.

Beautiful for spacious skies and ample rows of parking.

They do the same thing in Budapest and it always struck me as deeply incongruous and somehow deeply disrespectful, to both the present and the past. But cars!

Cut off by a van on East Capitol. He rode into the bike lane in front of me to park/idle. In order to not ride into the back of the van, I had to leave the bike lane and pull into the travel lane. I glared at the driver. As I glared, the driver behind me honked. She honked! I whipped my head around and glared at her too. This is what class solidarity looks like. Give me a break

Some more sweet street loot.

The sign says FREE.

I didn't bring this home. It might still be there. Street loot is the best.