The City... finally done...

Finally done with The City Alone. Finished polishing up the last photo this afternoon. They should be up and available on my other site around the middle of this week.

Night Rider 2

After last week's test ride downtown, this week it was time to pull off the real thing. We joined the local downtown nightly art tour, to see what would happen. And it went pretty well. The city at night, all the museums you might want to look at, and some stops along the way for necessary food and drink. 3 hours of good fun downtown, not something you get to do every day here.

From what I hear, around 70 people RSVP'd online... only about 8 of us showed up. Guess that's to be expected when you take reservations via the Internet for a free event. Reminds me of that joke on Saturday Night Live: "the Department of Homeland Security would like to thank the multiple anonymous college students who made calls to our hotline reporting the names of dangerous terrorists..."

But on the flip side, seems word of the bike tour is getting around. The organizers tell me there's a lot of embassies that have people that want to join the ride next time, and one of the local TV stations wants to try a "celebrity night ride" stunt in a couple of weeks. If you make it, they will come?

Night Rider

For those who are horrified at the thought of riding downtown, after dark, and on the streets where all the seedy bars are. Yeah, I went riding downtown, after dark, near the seedy bars. So did 5 more people. Then we all rode home... at 10 PM. So get over it.

It's all organized by a group of people, who you probably couldn't call anything but visionaries (given the apparent insanity of the idea). And it's actually not a bad experience. You see the lights, the parks, and you can even learn a bit about the history of the buildings you see along the way.

They tell me this particular city tour was small, since they wanted to make it short. But the last full-scale city night tour, they tell me, had over 1.000 people, some on foot, some on buses, some on bikes.

Next city tour is Wednesday night, and this one's an all-bike tour. If anyone's curious to go, check out the Tour's web page and sign up.

Downtown

Went downtown today, hadn't been there in a while. Same old downtown, same old buildings, same streets with endless traffic jams...