Bike Show Day One

I liked showing up at the train station and seeing people I know with their bikes and then I really liked, after languishing at the end of a long, long line, being told that cyclists had to cut to the front—not that it really mattered to final seating arrangements, but I had to love the symbolism.

And then, after some reading, beer-drinking, and napping, some strolling about and a bit more sitting, I’m in Portland, and riding a bit too carelessly across the Steel Bridge and to the Red Lion Inn, where I’m staying tonight and tomorrow for the North American Handmade Bike Show.

Bike nerds all over the place; if you had a drinking game where you did a shot whenever you saw a guy in a cycling cap—wool, with the little brim—you wouldn’t make it down the elevator and through the lobby before passing out. Nice guys, though, and slightly less pathetic than those at a radio-controlled airplane flyers convention. I hope.

I rode over to a party that felt more like an opening at Vanilla Cycles workshop that felt more like a gallery and talked to people about bikes and got to meet the unassuming Sasha White and ogle at steel frames a bit in preparation for the big bike porn gorgefest tomorrow.

Then, about the time I often call it a night, I met up with Portland’s Midnight Mystery Ride; eventually, after the requisite milling about, I’ll bet sixty of us set outthrough neighborhoods and then, a long and deserted bike path that led thrillingly close to the lights of Portland Airport’s runways and in the end to the banks of the mighty Columbia where we could see our home state of Washington just across the water.

A nightcap at McMenniman’s Kennedy School Hotel pub provided late night fortification, and I got the full escort to just blocks away from my hotel, safely back but too excited by bicycles to sleep.