PJ-Lingerie / Film Festival / Echo Park Ride

I brought a couple more tools with me on this ride, and learned a few things.

One of the things about having tools is that you CAN fix stuff.

One of the other things about having tools is that you then WILL fix stuff.

This was demonstrated to me rather vividly tonight on the PJ/Lingerie ride, where people rode around town wearing whatever they'd normally wear to bed. (I wore shorts and a T-shirt, which is usually what I wear if I have to share hotel rooms on a business trip, so close enough.)

Scott and Cesar and Vlad and I started out from Crankmob park, Vlad having gotten substantially more into the spirit of the thing than the rest of us (and providing us with the quote of the night, "These slippers were not made for bicycling!") We rode up to West Hollywood Park, and then hung out for a while. Quite a long while, as we made surprisingly good time getting there.

There was a fair number of people, and the ones I met were supercool, so that was fun. We didn't have a PA/stereo, so that made things a little tricky as everyone kind of decided to start riding. It was a fun ride for the first half mile, then this guy's chain went off the bottom cog going through an intersection. This is kind of a bummer, but it happens all the time with older/non-maintained bikes, and it's usually a quick fix, so I pulled over to help him out.

But it wasn't a quick fix. Not only had the chain come off, but so had the derailleur. The sweeper stopped by, but he, understandably, wasn't going to wait for us to engage in this dubious endeavor, so he gave me his cell phone number and went on. A quick fix turned into a 30-45 minute puzzle game of me twisting the chain and derailleur back and forth to try to get it working. Once I stopped hoping for a magical untangling and just unscrewed the bottom derailleur gear, took the chain out of it, lined everything up and reassembled everything, it was ready to ride.

Then I called the sweeper, got a sense of where they were, and started cycling down Santa Monica. Then my buddy Scott called to figure out where we were, and he said he and a bunch of folks were at the bicycle film festival at Hollywood and Vine. We rode over there, and it was a huge hang out outside the theater, with a bunch of people I knew from the Bikerowave, a bunch of folks whose comments I'd read on midnightridazz.com, and a bunch of other fun folks, including a beautiful young lingerie/pajama clad woman who was upset that her seat and handlebar heights weren't adjusted properly. Well, like I said at the beginning of this post, one of the other things about having tools is that you then WILL fix stuff, so I got her sorted out and she was very pleased indeed, and took off to catch the last train downtown.

Then, we hung out a little longer, and I met Eddie, who took a pretty big spill at last months crankmob. He's on the mend, and riding again, which is awesome, as it's never fun to hear about somebody taking multiple trips to the hospital. As we were standing there, a bearded guy, with an absolutely ENORMOUS smile on his face came up to me and said "This is the greatest night of my life. I just got the phone number of the prettiest girl in the world." Scott asked him how long he was going to wait to call her. The guy responded, "That brings up a good point. She asked me if I had a phone, and man, I sleep on the street, but what was I going to tell her, NO? So I got her number." Then we decided to head over to the film festival after party in Echo Park, and the smiling bearded gentleman began to sing.

Echo Park is pretty cool, and the Little Joy where the after party was, well, as the first reviewer on the Yelp page described "A little too much dive and not enough bar." It was a pretty cool place though, and the DJ knew what he was doing.

But then, it was time to head back home to Palms from Echo Park. It took a while, but that was probably because it's a good ways and we stopped at a couple of parks along the way. First we rode by Echo Park itself, and pedalled past the lake and the sleeping geese and then down past the Macarthur Park area. We did not stop at that park, but did see some undercover cops in the immediate aftermath of a felony stop with a group of young men spread out on the ground. Then further south, and further west, until we decided to take a break at Los Angeles High Memorial Park, which is a small park, but really beautiful.

Then, it was down La Brea to Venice, and home. Another great night.

Crankmob's tomorrow. See you there.