Why Use a Bike In The Big City?
OK, so Whitley Bay is hardly The Big City, but while I was out today, I had several of those moments of clarity that only come from either monetary sobriety in a drunk, or every darned day on a bike for the rest of us.
- Seeing the flowers growing right next to the road that were just so vividly violet; feeling the flow of one or two perfectly executed roundabouts
- The just-for-the-thrill-of-it leading the race from the lights (for the first ten feet)
- Choosing where to stop, and where to go, irrespective of how allegedly clogged the roads were
- Re-fuelling with a catering-sized second breakfast of a huge bacon and egg sandwich
All of this really happened, but I’m also plagiarising, and not doing it very well either. Check out more detail of this sort of thing on the Bicycle Diaries “Slow Motion Revolution” blog - based on “The Peach Wins! Why I like My Bike” that Caspar Henderson wrote.
I love beating cars through the intersection at green lights. I also love it when I’m next to a really crappy car, with little climbing power, and I can out climb the car on a hill for uhh… a couple hundred feet.
Even through I can’t make it to the top before them, I love to shoot them a look like “sure, I’ll give it to you this time, but you know you were nervous that you’re car sucks so bad that a cyclist beat you up that hill”…
Out climbing was always my thing at school - beating the school bus up the last hill before I got home. Such fun!
Hey Karl! Love the post … I commute to work via bike through the streets of Chicago — quite an adventure, especially on days when I have to avoid hitting dejected Cubs fans as they leave Wrigley!
Hawk - you’re too kind (to the Cubs fans)