The Ride With No Name, etc., etc.

My buddy Eddie e-mailed me earlier this week to see if I wanted to go on a ride Friday night, and since I've been wanting to get on my bike more, I thought it sounded like a good idea.

After briefly considering the Tattoo Ride, since it started at Crankmob Park not far from my house, and promised a beautiful spoke card (which, since Eddie didn't have any, was quite an enticement for him), we decided to hit The Ride With No Name, as Barleye, the organizer, seemed like he'd put together a good ride, and I figured I'd know more folks.

So we loaded up the bikes and drove downtown. This was the first time I'd driven to a ride, and while there is something odd about using a car to get to a bike ride, if the choice is miss the ride or drive to the ride, driving makes a fair bit of sense. Rode the mountain bike tonight, as I didn't know how many hills there would be, and there really is something convenient about having gears and a freewheel. It's good to have options, although a fixie does give you a kick-ass workout.

The starting point was in the middle of the Arts District, pretty close to the "Warehouse District". A lot of this ride was around serious urban industrial locations. Warehouses, factories, truck yards, etc., etc. At one point, we rode over a bridge and below to the right we saw what must have been a concrete recycling plant in operation, and it was one of the most surreally beautiful things I've seen. It was a GIANT open warehouse, with no front or side walls, with sodium lights hanging from the ceiling, giving the place an eerie orange glow. Inside this monster building a huge yellow excavator was picking up chunks of rubble and concrete, and dropping them into big metal box, that presumably was the crusher/recycler, judging from the huge mounds of sand piling upnet to the building. I'm sure there are Sisyphean metaphors to be made about spending one's Friday night in a huge machine making sand out of rubble, but as a visual spectacle, it was pretty impressive.

One that would surely have been more impressive for you all had I actually brought a camera.

So we road around warehouses and trucks and overpasses and whatnot, and eventually found ourselves riding across the USC Campus. At one point, we found a quad with a band playing at one end, and the 60-80 of us rode around the quad once or twice, and then rode off again. It must have been fun for the audience, as they we're just sitting there watching a show, when dozens of cyclists show up out of nowhere with lights blinking and bells ringing, and circled for a few minutes and disappeared again.

That's one of the things I love about rides like this. We're basically a bicycle parade, and people love parades. On most of these rides, people will wave and smile and cheer or honk their horns, and by far most of the honking is positive. Not only do people get to see swarms of smiling people and blinking lights, but hopefully some of them decide to get on Google and figure out how to come along.

These rides are so much fun, and they're SO accessible, regardless of your budget. You can ride high-end bikes, or you can ride in something you bought at a yard sale for $20, and have an equally good time. In a time of global economic crisis, it's nice to know you can have a full evening of fun and entertainment for very little money. (My total cost for the evening was $3.99 for pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, which was a pretty cost-effective Friday night.)

After USC, we made a couple of stops and rode around more of SE downtown and Boyle Heights, and ended up on the 6th Street Bridge and hung out for a while, looking down at the L.A. River, and West at downtown. While here, I ran into some people I'd met on previous rides, and met some more people that I had only known from the midnightridazz forum. Most of the people that go on these rides / post on the forum consistently are really cool mellow folks.

From the bridge, it was a few miles back to the starting point, making for a total distance of about 15-17 miles.

Eddie got his first spokecard too, as Barleye had whipped up a set with a picture of the principal from the Breakfast Club and the timeless phrase "You mess with the bull, you get the horns."

All in all, a pretty great night.

Tomorrow night's the Crankmob Food Fight Ride,which has the potential to be a colossal mess, but also tremendous fun, as the Crankmob rides usually are.