Thursday, August 23, 2012

This post is in response to The Cincinnati Monocle's post, New Riverside Drive bike lanes vs. Pacific Coast Highway.
I rode that road from Oregon to Mexico in another time aeons ago. What I wanted to point out was that some of the native southern Californians are not the macho men the Monocle appears to think they are.
In this image we see 2 buckeyes, a couple louts from Wisconsin (who worked in printing) a goofball from France who was doing a promotional ride for Motobecane & a nut from LA. Temperatures were plummeting into the mid 50s at night in this campground near Santa Barbara. While everybody is in shorts & long sleeve shirts - note the fella in the down jacket. It's hard to see but he is also wearing these giant-ass mittens his grandma knitted for him. Sure, he might not have been a typical SoCallian - I met another who lived on Halloween chocolate bars & and airline bottles of Grand Marnier. But the guys from Wisconsin were chain smokers.
So while the Monocle might speak highly of the bravery and machotude of Californians, I am not so sure it's not just an issue of being assholes.
But, yeah, highway 1 is a pretty awesome ride. - especially where it's a sheer dropoff to hell with no guard rail & the pavement is failing & you're getting passed by fucking logging trucks…..
FWIW - The guy from France carried a ton of bicycle hardware with him. He had pedals, brakes, crank arms….. I think he had a spare chain. We asked him why he needed all that stuff & he explained that all that stuff breaks regularly. Sez a lot about French engineering. He rode up hills in this crazy jerking manner - the concept of keeping a steady cadence seemed silly to him. When he jammed down on his pedal around Malibu (where, seriously, I saw a Jaguar on blocks out in front of a house) & broke his pedal off and about killed himself, we all stood around & watched with awe as he performed what he described as a routine repair…..

No comments: