riding the other direction

Once a month I go to an evening meeting downtown – well, almost in downtown, at the "Union Station Metro Gateway Transit Center, all passengers please exit the train." I’ve been taking the train there, but would like to bike it sometime. It’s not very far – just about 6.5 miles – but I’m not very familiar with that area and route. I tend to ride away from downtown for obvious reasons (Brown).

Today I went on a little recon mission to check out possible routes. I took the road bike. I don’t mention that bike much. I probably ride it the least of any of my bikes. I wanted to be able to make a swift attack so I could get in and out of there quickly and keep up with traffic so that I could more easily “take the lane” – so the road bike was a good match except for the fact that, as one would expect in a major downtown area, the roads could be described as very rough.

It’s different riding through downtown. There are cars and buses and people everywhere. It was a good urban intensive refresher course. Now riding around “uptown” (not that anyone calls it that) will be like riding through white chocolate puffy clouds on a rainbow swirl lollypop bicycle.

In theory I could now bike commute to my meetings, but the ride home in the dark might be a touch sketchy. Maybe I’ll stick to the train – it’s mildly entertaining anyway – there’s something about that after nine o’clock in the evening train crowd…

After downtown I headed up Sunset through Silverlake, along Los Felis, past Griffith Park, into Hollywood, turned around near Beachwood Canyon, back around through Silverlake, Glassel Park, Highland Park, across the York “Gauntlet” Bridge over the Lower Arroyo and back home. There sure are a lot of cars out there – to their credit though, most of the drivers were pretty accommodating. It was only a 28-mile ride but it felt a lot longer.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll take a nice quiet ride along the creek trail under my mountain.