Results tagged “bikeride”

If you're driving a white Subaru and in a hurry, you might want to give the Critical Mass bike ride a wide berth this afternoon. The scourge of Western civilization will be meeting up at Westlake Center at 5:30 p.m., with a UW "cell" leaving Red Square at 5:00 p.m. and heading to Westlake to join the main insurgency. Goddamn fixies everywhere! The SPD will be out in force, but we echo the concerned P-I commenter who asks: "Why is the Seattle Police Department allowing urban terrorists to run amok? This is one of the most idiotic molly-coddling of criminals I've ever heard of." It's probably not too much to say that the entire city is shivering in fear right about now.

Thrilled with our ongoing summer weather, wanting to take advantage of it while we can, Seattlest hopped on the bike on Saturday and headed downtown. We haven't given nearly enough face time to Olympic Sculpture Park since it was pulled together, so that was our real destination. We had a book in our sack, and intended to just lie in the warm grass and read. Of course, once we got biking, we couldn't stop ourselves. It's so easy going down Capitol Hill to the waterfront, it just made sense to forge on.

Ahh spring. So wonderful and yet so fickle. Thankfully for us, spring was fully sprung Saturday when we took the wife up to Lopez Island to celebrate her birthday by riding in the annual Tour de Lopez.

Our bike route to work from Magnolia to Capitol Hill takes us down a short hill on 20th Ave W to the Pier 91 bike trail. That little street runs right along a ton of train tracks leading into the train yards. (It's on the back side of the Interbay Golf Center.) Generally it's filled with locomotives connected to empty cars or lines of containers waiting to be shipped one place or another. Noting terribly exciting, though if you're lucky, a train whistle will blow as you go by and scare the beejesus out of you.

It wasn't until a good friend of ours quit smoking and decided to get healthy that we ever heard of the Seattle to Portland ride. A grueling-sounding (though apparently not in reality) 204-mile bike ride between Seattle and Portland, the STP takes place this year Saturday and Sunday, July 12 and 13. (The hard-core riders apparently do it in one day; most do it in two.) Despite our until-recent ignorance of the event, apparently like 9,000 people do this every year, and Seattlest has been roped into serving as side-car, toting around coolers of water, food, Gatorade, beer...whatever these crazy people need as they cruise down I-5.

Thanksgiving doesn't allow for us Seattlesters to partake in our usual rock and roll lifestyles. Instead it's friends and family and mellow times about the house. Our drinking's liable to be more restrained and coordinated with a heavy meal of rich food. (Seattlest Geoff offered some choice beer recommendations earlier this week for those who've got a pit-stop planned on the way to grandmother's house tomorrow.) And according to the weather report, it's going to be cold but clear tomorrow, with morning to afternoon sunshine to make that drive a little more pleasant.

When we sat down to do our endorsements we reached a disturbing conclusion. We cannot, in good conscience, vote for anyone.

The weekend arrived, along with all 40 of our bike clinic clients. Everyone was giddy at the thought of a heli-drop bike ride on Sunday, and the bike clinic was going off without a hitch. Until Sunday, when we ended up again at 9,000 feet, with the sun replaced by snow. Blowing snow, to be precise. And we had a freelance journalist writing for the London Sunday Times riding with us. You know, something like the second largest paper...in the world. We were supposed to show him a fantastic time, and once the flakes started falling we knew everyone was in for an adventure, but not the kind they had signed up for. We'll let our intrepid journalist tell the rest of the story, in the meantime we'll revel in the glory of going down in print as the mountain biking guide who led him astray. And yet we will continue to insist that you're only truly lost if you don't know where you are--we knew where we were, it just wasn't where we wanted to be.

Admittedly, Seattlest is a bit late on this one, but hey, we gotta pay the bills too so please, forgive us for being a couple of days behind the news cycle on the Flexcar story.

Via our Reader Tipline, Seattlest has been alerted that some mook stole a pink Rodriguez tandem. It was last seen in Ballard on Thursday evening, July 19. Theft in Ballard! Well, there goes the neighborhood.

No, Seattlest didn't quite make it to everything on the checklist we created last Friday, but we did manage to stay out past midnight on both weekend evenings, proving we've still got it after all.

Okay, okay. So Pride is actually going to happen. Even now, on the precipice of this extraordinary weekend celebration o' gayness, all our friends have no effing clue what's going on. If they, in all their gay glory, don't have a clue, we figured maybe you don't either. But Seattlest is here for you in these tough times and that's why we're gonna break it down all easy-like and tell you what we think is worth bothering with.

Festival season is starting, and that's Seattlest's favorite time of year. Elephant ears, funnel cakes, deep fried twinkies, strawberry shortcake, and any number of more savory foods abound, and then there's whatever the festival is actually celebrating. Our neighbors to the south in Tacoma, Puyallup, Sumner, and Orting are having their annual Daffodil Festival this weekend, which looks to provide an interesting mix of activities outside of the flower-gazing.

That giant flaming ball of hot gases is back, and aside from telling ourselves to stop staring at it, Seattlest's mind is on the fence. (It's a small fence.) We haven't had enough ski season yet, but a nice dry bike ride sure would be dreamy. If the extra vitamin D from the past few days has skewed your thoughts to similar memes, or you just want to pick up a bunch of free swag and some dirt-cheap lycra, by all means please head over to Magnuson Park for the 2006 Bike Expo from Feb 18-19.

We know you wake up every morning, eager to visit Seattlest and see what exciting Outdoor news and events we might serve up for you. Hence, for the relative dearth of non-indoor recreational content hereabouts of late, we apologize. We’d like to make it up to you. And so we present the first installment of Seattlest’s Canadian Road Trip Smorgasboard.

Ahh…you know it’s summer when bicyclists in the buff make their return to Seattle. We have grown accustom to marking the summer solstice with the annual Fremont Fair and the running of the nude bicyclists. But why wait until next weekend?

Seattlest really enjoys a good hike or bike ride followed by a warm home-cooked meal, but we have been in remodeling purgatory for some time now. Our living room furniture is stacked in our kitchen dining nook, crammed into the garage, and spilling out all over the basement; we haven't donned the hiking boots or pulled the bike out of the garage all week. Suffice to say, there hasn’t been much real cooking going on at the homestead. Lots of miter sawing and trim painting and cursing at crown molding, but not much cooking.