A weekend with wheels

[violetclm]

That was a lovely weekend. The sun was shining bright throughout, leading to much water consumption (and homemade maple ice cream on returns from various excursions), and I found plenty of excuses to get out of the house. Saturday some Reed students were advertising their garage sale, and I got some more coat hangers, some kitchenware, and a couple miscellaneous items. On getting back home, I went to local Mt. Tabor (apparently an extinct volcano, but now a lake on top of a hill) to watch Portland's annual Adult Soapbox Derby for about an hour. I guess the track was pretty long, since the cars tended to drive by with pretty significant time gaps, although they'd often be in hotly contested groups of two or three, so really I don't know what was going on. One of the cars had a giant bear head on top made of smaller teddy bears sewn together, one resembled a dog with a wagging tails, one particularly large car had two of its occupants spraying the audience with hoses to help them keep cool under the sun, and of course the fastest cars were very aerodynamic and not particularly decorated. On the way back down the mountain, I smelled the familiar scent of fresh, sundrenched blackberries and eventually found several plants by the side of the road, obviously not well-tended but not too picked over, either. Bliss! After resting up at home for a little while, I set out again a few blocks down Woodstock to the Laughing Planet burrito restaurant, which was hosting "Chimpfest 2010," a fundraiser festival for chimpanzees, and I listened to some live music and drank a cold drink to guard against the possibilities of incurring another headache like I did while writing my last update over here.

I learned Sunday morning of another annual event called "Sunday Parkways," in which certain parks -- on that day, Colonel Summers, Laurelhurst, Sunnyside, and apparently Mt. Tabor again but I didn't make it out there -- were connected by several miles of residential streets blocked off from car entry and restricted to travel by pedestrians, cyclists, unicyclists, skateboarders, etc. In addition, the parks themselves were home to many organizations promoting themselves and/or various aspects of green and healthy lifestyles, plus some free prizes and many, many food vendors. (There were also various households selling lemonade, ice cream, etc. along the streets in-between.) At one of the parks I spotted the first person I knew I'd seen at any of the events all weekend, Devin the former student body president, for whom I signed a petition calling on the EPA to regulate coal ash (which at first I heard as "polash"). Despite two different booths offering free biking maps of Portland, I passed (and would have even if I'd had somewhere to carry them) -- my old one is falling apart from water damage and potentially itself a bit outdated in content, but it covers all of Portland, whereas the ones being offered only covered individual quadrants. In more detail, certainly, and with greater coverage of walking paths, but still just not as useful overall.

Still, it was a nice event overall... it took me a while to get into riding on the roads that are recommended for biking, instead of the most direct route possible (usually car-infested major streets), moved not a little by that time someone threw something at me out of their car window on 39th, but it's definitely an interesting feeling being surrounded by other bicycles on a street with no cars to worry about anywhere. The only downside was that events like Sunday Parkways bring out plenty of less regular cyclists who are even slower than I am, and it's harder to tell when a bike is going to come to a stop than when a car is, which can be a problem when you're stuck behind them because there's not quite room enough to pass just yet. I wouldn't have minded some friends somewhere in all that weekend noise, though I did run into camille_c for the first time this summer a little later on, at Safeway, where our dietary and thus purchasing preferences/restrictions are on pretty much opposite sides of the aisle, but there was a lot of biking and interesting Portland eventwerk, so I can't really complain.

Comments

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

So do you have an ice-cream maker like mine or what? What was slipping my mind on the phone the other day was that I had blended up strawberries, blackberries from the yard, a banana, and cherry juice, but as you weren't here to drink it I ran it through my ice-cream maker instead.