I had been thinking about a longer ride on Saturday but I had reports from people that it was raining. And the weather forecast was for rain all day. It never rained that I saw and I was up from 6 am until Sunday morning. Saturday afternoon, I got a message from LH that I should go do the LATE ride downtown. Hmmmmm...that seemed like a good idear. So I thought ok, lets see if LH wants to go as well. She was willing if the wind died down, which the weather service predicted it would.
I swung by Dick's to pick up some lights and a rear trunk. I bought the clamp on platform for the trunk. Bad idea. It didn't fit my bike. It didn't fit LH's bike. This wasn't too big a deal since I had my mt biking (aka giant trunk) camel back with. We had a few adjustments to make as we unloaded the gear, but nothing that was a big deal.
We checked in around 12am. They give you this bag full of things like magazines and coupons and tampons. Last I checked its kinda annoying biking with a bag of stuff. Kinda bad planning there. So many people were just throwing them away. I still have all my goodies! Reminds me that I should look through them. They had a pretty good band playing and various people were getting down doing their thing. There was a contest to judge the best decorated bike that included a whole 3 bikes. There were maybe 6 people in the helmet decoration contest.
We were finally able to start "riding" the 25 mile loop at about 2 am. The pace the first several miles was painfully slow with 10,000 people around us. The ride had started at 1:30. So we had a ton of people ahead of us. There were a lot of people that had bike repair issues those first few miles as well. We saw a lot of tires being changed.
Every now and then and especially as the ride went on, we were able to get around or through a pack of riders and get a decent pace going before we'd catch the next group to work around. There were a few trikes, some 2 wheel recumbents, and a couple of tandems. Some people appeared to have welded their own contraptions together as well.
We skipped the rest stop that is about halfway through the ride. Rest wasn't really necessary on a 25 mile ride going 8 mph. They may have been giving out food there...really not sure.
The drunk people on the sides of the road were entertaining. "You guys fixed global warming!!" "Thanks for curing cancer!!!" and so forth... There were a few places that people had set up chairs on the side of the road and clapped as people rode by.
The last stretch of the ride goes south along the lakefront from lincoln park back to buckingham fountain. We hit that about 5 am as the sky began to glow. We finished just before sunrise, locked the bikes up and found someplace to watch the sun pop up as we ate our free chow from McD's.
Sadly, they had no pancakes for us at the end. I had convinced myself that there would be pancakes and really had a taste for them. Its about all I could talk about for 25 miles. At 8 mph. Thats a long time. I'm lucky LH didn't kill me. I mean really...didn't expect Egg McMuffins. Pancakes seemed logical. They had a real good spread though. Bagel, cream cheese, OJ, water, cookies, more cookies, raisins, some bar things, and probably more I can't remember now. I know I didn't eat everything.
All in all, definitely something worth doing. It would be fun to get a group together to do this. The key is to get everyone in the group in the same wave. LH and I definitely would want to be in the first wave so it wouldn't be so painfully slow. We'll keep an eye out for registration.
