Tuesday, November 18, 2008

A Bike Geek's Day Off


Monday is the one day of the week that Bike Works is closed, so it's the one day of the week that I'm pretty sure I won't be working. But even when I'm not working, I'm still a full-time bike geek. So I emailed some of the usual suspects and convinced Matt Newlin and Brad and Thorvald Hawkins to join me on a trip to Bainbridge Island.

The 6:10 AM ferry gets us to an island still dark and fog-shrouded, so we decide to wait for Pegasus to open at 7:00 AM. Young Thorvald has quite a way with the coffee shop ladies and after he and Brad packed away a not-too-hot hot chocolate, we were on our way.

Our route was the kind of variant of the Chilly Hilly route that you make up as you go along, kind of paying attention to a map, mostly just rolling through the fog. We found our fair share of roads that end at incredibly picturesque enclaves and repeated proved that the answer to the question "how lost can you get on an island?" is "quite."

Brad and Thorvald, who it must be noted lack the goat-like climbing ability exhibited by Mr. Newlin and myself, had to take a morning ferry back to Seattle but still got to have the thrill of riding the entire length of Toe Jam Hill Road. Matt and I managed to continue a very vague circumnavigation of the island, ending with a trip to the wonderful museum/shop that is Classic Cycle. After lunch, we hopped the ferry back to Seattle and stopped by the Bikery.

Now I'm sure that there are people who spend their days off as far as possible from any reminders of their day-to-day workday world. I guess I'm not one of those people. And I guess I'm living in a pretty good place to be a bike geek.

4 comments:

brad said...

For the non-mountain goat's perspective on this ride, feel free to visit http://bikingwithbrad.blogspot.com/

Biking in the fog was super cool.

Anonymous said...

Hmm. Way more pics of the inside of the bike shop than the bike ride itself. We can see where the love goes.

Kent Peterson said...

Hey, it's much easier to take pics inside a shop than it is on the fly from the seat of a bike. And going up and down a lot of the Bainbridge hills isn't the best time to grab the camera!

Anonymous said...

next time over try this:

http://veloroutes.org/bikemaps/?route=16530

5592 vertical

Bainbridge's
Undeniably
Tumultuous
Worst
Hills
You’ll ever
Route

hits all the highest points on Bainbridge Island, developed by Tom @ B.I.Cycles.

phun!