Victory Ride

Victory Ride
Originally uploaded by erasmus.

A shot Ira took from the Southeast section of Montrose Harbor at the tail end of our first joint bike ride in Chicago. On Friday afternoon, we rode our new Dahon folding bikes down the LSD bikepath to the park in Streeterville just behind Navy Pier. It was about a 10-mile ride roundtrip and was completely exhilarating. Ira had been skeptical whether our little bikes could go very fast, but we had no problem keeping up with traffic. We had to pass numerous bikers along the way. Basically, the only bikers who passed us were the Men in Spandex on racing bikes who blaze up and down LSD and high speed.

We saw the Chicago skyline from a new perspective and took in lots of interesting sights and sounds along the way. For example, we witnessed a parodic parade of processioners, maybe 30 people in all, who were bearing a banner that read "Abbie Hoffman Died for Your Sings" and chanting something that I couldn't discern as we whizzed by. One of the people was bearing, in lieu of a cross, a huge scale, the kind you find (if you've got health care) in a doctor's office.

Our bike ride was much more enjoyable than my first, on Wednesday during rush hour, when I rode my bike home from Rapid Transit Cyclery in Wicker Park. I took Damen north to Montrose. Although Damen is a designated biking street, the bike lanes are not marked the entire ride. It was pretty intense. It went well though. Only one ass in an SUV yelled at me from his vehicle.

We bought folding bikes because we don't have room to store regular-sized bikes in our apartment and we don't want to risk having our bikes stolen. I had a sweet Specialized mountain bike stolen from the basement of my 'molehole' apartment on Paulina where it was chained. Coincidentally, sometime early Saturday morning our upstairs neighbor's moutain bike was stolen from just outside our bedroom. The bike was locked to the wooden banister below our window, and the noise of the thief breaking the wood awakened Ira and me. I had a momentary thought that it could be a bike thief, but when I didn't hear any more noise I fell promptly back to sleep. In retrospect I probably should've yelled out the window or something. A bit disconcerting. At times this big, dirty city can be really tiring, but it sure looks pretty in the picture doesn't it.