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July 13, 2008
there's always a douchebag on sunday, isn't there?
at the end of my ride, when i was fatigued, i chose to go up ralston, so i could bypass ECR on the final leg of my ride.
so there i was, huffing and puffing my way up the hill, and a BMW suv zooms by me and honks.
what? i can understand the confusion of morons on canada who don't realize that i have the right to exit the bike lane when passing, but this part of ralston had no bike lane, and i wasn't passing anyone. so i'm not sure what the moron was honking about. maybe he thought i should bring a can of paint with me on my ride so i can create a bike lane as i go?
maybe not.
i rode up woodside and was rather disappointed: it was easier than any of the other ways i've found to get to canada road.
when i got to sand hill i turned right and followed orange pants up sand hill, where i'd never been before. then she turned on to old la honda and i decided to take my chances with the unknown "straight ahead" rather than the known pain that would be OLH. turns out sand hill becomes portola and t-bones alpine. portola is plenty easy and alpine is all downhill where it intersects with... sand hill. that was a surprise. after some stoplight mistakes, i managed to get back on sand hill, then back to canada via whiskey hill, then down edgewood. my plan was to take flea street back to ralston, but sadly, i was fooled by that irritating discontinuity, and i ended up on ECR (went down "san carlos" instead of up it, sigh.).
so now i've gone from end to end of ralston, not that the part from ECR to fleas is hard.
also, right at the beginning of my ride, my water bottle flew out of the clip, jumped across the street, and rolled down an embankement. i had to climb over a rail and down a loamy hill (checking carefully first for poison oak) all in my socks, since my road bike shoes aren't good for anything besides road biking, certainly not bushwhacking.
so i recovered my water bottle, and managed to eke out 45.8 miles with plenty of hills, bringing my weekly total to 75 miles. whoopie.
Careful with the had no bike lane. While it may suck, the "sidewalk" most the the way up to Cipriani is a bike lane. From Ralston Middle School and onward, there is no bike lane.
I am still wasted from commuting by bike on Friday. Though only 25.x each way, the ride home felt much harder.
So hard, I used a little caffeine to climb that last hill.
aye, the phony bike lane sidewalk.
but i happened to be on the part of road that has no bike lane, no sidewalk, no fake bike lane, just two lanes. in which case, it's my lane, and technically he should have used the other lane to pass me -- not honked and remained in that lane.
sounds like you need a jersey that says, "If you can read this, SHARE THE ROAD!!!"
Chefjef,
On most cyclists, that jersey would exude irony. Many roadies scream "Share the road!" and "I have a right to be here too!", and follow that with behavior like running through stop signs and turning without proper signals. Not to mention the yahoos who ride three or four abreast.
Something about glass houses and stones, but I don't remember it.
sadly, i agree with 777. i try not to be an ass, and reserve the finger for people who really, really, *really* deserve it.
there are so many cyclists out there giving us all a bad image, i don't need to pile on that.
it kills me whenever i see bikes on the sidewalk, rolling through crosswalks. those arent often "roadies" but it makes people generally angry at bikers.