Stan’s Obligatory Blog

On Sunday afternoon, I went over to Santa Fe Dam to join some of my friends at the Renaissance Faire. They’d decided to meet there en masse today. Little did we know that Easter Sunday is the busiest day of the year at the park there.

The trip out there was easy, until we got to the corner of Irwindale and Arrow Highway. This is nowhere near the actual entrance, but the line of cars waiting to get in was all the way back there. We sat in line for about 45 minutes to get to the front. Then the police closed the entrance and put up a sign saying it was full. So we drove down to where the bike path goes over the dam. I was thinking we might be able to park there and bushwhack over the dam to the fair. But there was no place to park there. So as a last-ditch attempt we went and parked on one of the streets by the chemical plants behind the Miller brewery. I knew that there was a back entrance to the park there. I figured we could walk in from there. There was plenty of parking there, but the walk in turned out to be something like 1.5 miles. But it was a nice day, so it wasn’t too bad.

When we got there, we got our tickets and went in. The plan had been to meet at noon, and it was 1:45. But it turned out that everyone else had had a similarly epic journey to get there. So we were able to meet up with the group at a picnic table in the shade. It made for a very pleasant setting to watch the cavalcade of weirdness passing by.

At the end of the afternoon, we hitched a ride out with a couple from the group who had gotten there early and had their car into the parking lot. But even that was a epic journey. It took us something like 45 minutes to cover the 1.5 miles back to my car.

When we got to my car, I started it up and started to back out of the parking space. Then I heard it make a weird SNAP noise. And it would not go into reverse. I ended up having to push it out, which was difficult, since the front wheels were in the gutter at the side of the road. Fortunately, I was able to rock it back and forth enough to get out. Then I used my bicycle-riding-up-hills-in-stupid-high-gears muscles to push the car out far enough to be able to get out going forward. It was a very weird ending to a weird afternoon. So to celebrate the weirdness, we went to Kabuki in Pasadena for sushi. Yum.

It was both a very weird and very fun afternoon.

Sunday’s ride was another of Gene’s ‘rambling around’ rides. It was cool and clear in the morning, but it warmed up fast.

Riding down to the park to meet the group, I saw a special Easter service going on in the park. They had a big blue banner proclaiming, “He is Risen”, and for some reason, I thought that it was blue because that’s the color of a Viagra pill. I’m pretty sure that’s not what they had in mind.

The first part of the ride was pretty level. We practiced our double pace line on Huntington Drive and Monterey Road. Then we started going up hills. We rode up Fortune Way and made our way up to Colorado, and then up Patrician Way. At the top we kept going on down the other side to Linda Vista. Then we went up the Lida hill. We went over the top and part-way down the other side before taking a small street across to meet Chevy Chase, which we rode back up to the top. From there it was downhill (almost) all the way.

At the bottom we rode two laps around the Rose Bowl before heading over to the Corner Bakery on Lake Ave. I skipped the stop, since I needed to get back early. But when I got home, I had 38.2 miles, so I rode around a little bit more just to get to 40. Good fun.

40 miles.
cycling