Stan’s Obligatory Blog

This afternoon, I took Lucinda and her friend for a little adventure in Hollywood.

First, we went to West Hollywood, where we went to M+B to see the Alison Jackson: Confidential photo show. This was a fairly small exhibit, but it was very amusing. I bought the book so we can see the rest of her photos.

After that, we went to the park in West Hollywood. The girls played there for a bit before we headed back to Hollywood to visit High Voltage Tattoo. This is the shop in “L.A. Ink“, which Lucinda and I have been enjoying recently. When we were first watching it, there was a scene of a person walking out he front door, and I recognized the JONS market across the street. And I realized that the shop was right around the corner from our old condo in Hollywood. So I’d promised Lucinda that I’d take her there to visit. We gawked for a bit and I bought Lucinda a shirt. And then we went home. It was a fun little afternoon adventure.

Today’s ride was out to San Dimas to The Bagelry. It turned out to be a harrowing experience.

We met at Victory Park in Pasadena. While we were waiting to leave, a woman drove into the parking lot and told us that a bike rider had been hit by a car around the corner. So several people rode over to see what happened. It turned out to be YK (I have no idea he spells his name, but that’s what we know him as.) who had been on his way up to meet us. So a bunch of us waited around to see that the paramedics took him off to the hospital and to take care of his bike. They said that they didn’t think he had broken anything too badly, but it was still a very unsettling experience.

In the meantime, the rest of the group had headed off on the ride. So the rest of us started out with about half an intention to catch them. But then Ben got a flat. I stayed back to help him fix it while the rest went on. I was so unsettled that I completely forgot to take a picture for the Flat Tire Gallery.

When we got Ben’s bike back on the road, we were quite far behind. He got in behind me and we made a serious attempt to catch up. We averaged a bit over 20mph all the way out to San Dimas, where we caught up with Sandy and Silvio. The rest of the riders were already there. But we were only about a minute or so behind them by then, so if we’d had another five miles or so, we would have caught them. Along the way was where I saw the very worn penny embedded in the pavement.

While we were sitting there, I noticed that Sandy had a fork in his backpack. I thought this was pretty funny, since nobody carries a spare fork around normally. So I took a picture of it.

We all set out together for the trip home. Then we went down Gladstone St, which is the street with the 1% downhill grade, so we always end up going very fast. This split the group in two. At the end, we rode through the Santa Fe Dam Nature Center and back up the bike path to Duarte. From there, we just took the straight route home. Then we caught up with the other part of our group. They had fallen behind on Gladstone, but then they took a shorter route, so they’d ended up ahead of us. Then we took the quiet residential route back through Arcadia and back to the park.

Aside from the unpleasantness at the start, it actually turned out to be a fairly nice ride.

46 miles.
cycling