Midnight Mystery Ride
There are few things I like as much as a party where the adults get to hang around talking and drinking while the kids congregate nearby amusing themselves with a minimum of parental supervision.
But one pastime that’s certainly on a par with that is taking a group bike ride at midnight in a city I’m fairly unfamiliar with and ending up drinking beer and celebrating two-wheelers under a massive freeway cloverleaf, miles from where we started riding en masse.
And last night, I got to experience both of those.
After a fancy dinner with a gang of about twenty neighbors, friends, and new friends from Seattle, I dropped Jen and Mimi off at our hotel in Portland (to which we had traveled via bicycle and train), swapped the tandem for the XO-1 (now Jen’s bike, which warms my heart), and rode across the Willamette River from downtown to the Hawthorne neighborhood, where I met up with a mass of cyclists celebrating the Filmed by Bike festival at a charming local movie theater called the Clinton, which remains essentially unchanged from when I first saw films there as a student at Reed over thirty! years ago.
About a hundred cyclists swarmed the intersection around the theater until Midnight Mystery Ride organizer, Shawn Granton, (who it turned out I knew—at least virtually—as the artist of the Patchkit Alleycat flyer and spoke card last summer) led us out onto the darkened streets, whooping up our bike love together.
His only words of direction: “Don’t pass me or you’re no longer on the ride,” were wise counsel that our own .83 rides could sometimes take to heart.
We rode along the riverfront esplanade for a couple miles until ending up in a perfect post-apocalyptic outdoor cyclefest destination among towering freeway columns.
Perhaps best of all, I liked meandering home by myself, somewhat lost much of the time, but confident that our hotel would eventually pull up, which it did.
But one pastime that’s certainly on a par with that is taking a group bike ride at midnight in a city I’m fairly unfamiliar with and ending up drinking beer and celebrating two-wheelers under a massive freeway cloverleaf, miles from where we started riding en masse.
And last night, I got to experience both of those.
After a fancy dinner with a gang of about twenty neighbors, friends, and new friends from Seattle, I dropped Jen and Mimi off at our hotel in Portland (to which we had traveled via bicycle and train), swapped the tandem for the XO-1 (now Jen’s bike, which warms my heart), and rode across the Willamette River from downtown to the Hawthorne neighborhood, where I met up with a mass of cyclists celebrating the Filmed by Bike festival at a charming local movie theater called the Clinton, which remains essentially unchanged from when I first saw films there as a student at Reed over thirty! years ago.
About a hundred cyclists swarmed the intersection around the theater until Midnight Mystery Ride organizer, Shawn Granton, (who it turned out I knew—at least virtually—as the artist of the Patchkit Alleycat flyer and spoke card last summer) led us out onto the darkened streets, whooping up our bike love together.
His only words of direction: “Don’t pass me or you’re no longer on the ride,” were wise counsel that our own .83 rides could sometimes take to heart.
We rode along the riverfront esplanade for a couple miles until ending up in a perfect post-apocalyptic outdoor cyclefest destination among towering freeway columns.
Perhaps best of all, I liked meandering home by myself, somewhat lost much of the time, but confident that our hotel would eventually pull up, which it did.
posted by Professor Dave at 5:10 PM
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