the possibly accurate nowMon, 22 Aug 2005
[01:20] Zooming 'round the streets of London
Date: 8/22/05 at 9:20AM
Well, I made it. London very nicely turned on the rain for my first ride in - a fact I didn't notice until AFTER I'd gotten dressed so I had to go and get changed into my boardies and a t-shirt and waterproof my bag. Luckily my bag always has it's little waterproof jacket inside it or it would probably be back at home (Australia) where my waterproof pants are.
I managed to get as far as the bottom of the lift before I nearly stacked :) Luckily I recovered and from then I kept a sharp eye out for the many little slippery pitfalls that pepper the roads of London:
- Steel Manhole Covers
- Rows of VERY well polished bricks randomly embedded across roads
- The stuff they use to write on the road with. Back home it's paint - over here it's a plasticy substance that is significantly raised from the surrounding road surface (a good 5-10mm) and is slick as hell
- Motorcycles - one of 'em nearly got me this morning
- My Bike! Yes, that's right. I broke the bastard on my first real ride in. Somehow the (plastic) chainguard managed to break off and, in a desperate bid for freedom, it attempted to leave the bicycle and take it's close friend the chain with it. This sucked for a number of reasons. Chief among them the fact that I was in the middle of an intersection with no method for providing forward propulsion and a large garbage truck bearing down upon me. I did the first thing that came to mind which was the "Secret Signal" I learned whilst watching Team America: World Police. Surprisingly this didn't work. I rapidly shifted to Plan B and shuffled the hell off the road. I shall be talking to my fine friends at Decathlon later today about that. I don't THINK it's actually a functional piece of the bike. I think it's just meant to keep trousers from being eaten by the chain but it was displaying a remarkable penchant for flinging the chain off whilst in 1st gear - I stuck to second for the rest of the ride in.
The other interesting thing was riding ON the three lane highway. Coming from cycle happy Canberra I'm used to having actual defined bike paths. Here in London bicycles are classed as vehicles and are expected to drive on the road with everything else. This is a little freaky at first but for the most part London drivers seem to be prepared to give way to bicycles where appropriate. It was fun zooming down the middle of the three lanes - past all the stationary traffic - this morning with all the other cyclists. I think I'm going to enjoy this.
So, all in all, I'm going to call that a success. It's HEAPS faster than the Tube and I enjoyed it a lot more. Assuming the ratio of "parts falling off bike:number of trips taken" doesn't keep rising on a 1:1 basis then I should be OK.
Challenge the second: Let's see if my bike and I can make it home in (mostly) one piece.
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