Santa Monica Critical Mass / Long Beach / Bikes and Cars

My New Year's resolution is to "eat less and pedal more", and so far I'm off to a pretty good start.

Of course, we're only barely into the New Year, so that's not saying a great deal.

My first ride of the year on 1/1 was a solo late afternoon ride out Venice Blvd. to Venice Beach, and up the boardwalk, and back down to Marina Del Rey and back to Palms up the Ballona Creek bike path. Pretty uneventful, although I did learn that riding reasonably quickly under overpasses with your headlight set in blink mode turns your ride into a bad '80s horror flick, as you can see, but not quite well enough to understand what's coming toward you in terms of terrain, etc.

Then on Friday, I did the first Santa Monica Critical Mass of the year, which was pretty fun.











It was a pretty good ride overall, that ranged from Santa Monica, down to Windward Circle in Venice, back to Santa Monica, and ended up at the studio of this really friendly guy named Hal, where Albert (aka digablesoul) showed me some tips on using my new camera. I'm still working on it, but hopefully things will improve as time progresses. A tripod might help. I left this party fairly early, as I did this ride on my fixie, and I still had to ride home, and sometimes it requires a little extra energy, as I've got a substantial number of pounds to lose. (For what it's like, imagine riding a fixed gear while giving one of the sturdier lady ridazz a piggyback ride. While the prospect is not unappealing, it's not a situation optimal for covering long distances swiftly).

So I get back to my place, and one of my buddies in Long Beach had decided that he'd found THE place to meet girls. After a number of texts and a few loud phone calls, he tells me he's there with a group of his friends, and I should head down. Since I'm back home at this point, and have put the bike away, I decide "what the hell" and drive on down.

Let me tell you, there's a reason so many people drive cars. After a few hours on a fairly narrow bicycle saddle, even one adjusted properly to your anatomy, a car seat feels like heaven. Luckily I can have both, so I zipped on down to LB, to meet my buddy and his friends. I meet him there, and he greets me with an enormous inebriated smile, and his first words to me are "Dude, I am FUCKED UP! I'm trying to get with this girl, and she wants to get with me too, but her boyfriend's here, and I don't think he likes me very much." That last part probably set a new record for most obvious statement ever made. Not at all obvious, and a little odd, was why most of the people in this club were so short, maybe it's the horrific air quality from living near the port. That said, Long Beach is totally underrated. The more time I hang out there, the more fun it seems to be. My buddy LOVES it, although I do worry about him meeting an untimely demise at the hands of an enraged husband/boyfriend somewhere down the line.

All in all an A1 night.