How was my commute today? Karmic! Instead of waking up when I should have, I rolled over and tried to snooze for another 15 minutes. I reverse commute since I work nights, so I'm riding in at rush hour. Normally I leave my place about 4:45PM, and I realized today that leaving at that time usually gets me through the first industrial area I have to pass through before it becomes a race course for hundreds of asshats who get off work at 5
M.
Got on my bike, and I immediately remembered why I had thought there was some sort of maintanence I was going to do to it on my big one day off. My new (plastic) fender is slapping against the underside of my front rack when I go over bumps, making an annoying noise, and probably not good for the longevity of the fender if I don't deal with it soon...and with the roads here, my commute is pretty much a constant series of bumps. :/
Make it down the hill from our place and into the first industrial district I have to pass through and traffic is way heavier than I usually experience through here and at times I don't have a shoulder to ride on, so that's nerve wracking. Get to a stop sign and just maybe a quarter block past it the road widens into two lanes. A lady in a Jetta has to let me know that I inconvenienced her by a second or two by passing me very closely at a stupid speed the moment the road widens. I give her the finger, and the phrase that goes with it, and I can hear people in cars going the other way chuckling. Unfortunately, I think they're laughing at my impotent rage at nearly being killed by some entitled jerk who thinks that is okay because they were very briefly inconvienenced, so now I'm feeling even worse.
I had checked the forecast just before I left home and was dismayed to see that not only would I have a headwind on my way in to work, but sometime during the night the wind would be reversing direction and I'd get to enjoy not only another headwind on my way home, but also rain. Once I got out onto an exposed portion of the road I realized the forecasters were wrong and the wind was actually quite a bit stronger than they said it was going to be! Good times!
Then as I'm coming down the glorified sidewalk that is the Duwamish Bike Trail, I have to stop to cross the street. Not really a big deal, except I'm running late for work and I'm usually able to cross here without waitng for the light. Making a mental note to myself to leave earlier to avoid the rush hour traffic again.
When I make it across the street and Duwamish Bike Trail is now literally just a sidewalk, I'm greeted by a bunch of runners coming at me. Just before I get to them, I have to pass two bikes coming the other way where the sidewalk narrows too much for that. I hate this "bike trail". Then I'm baffled as all the runners ahead of me do a u-turn on the sidewalk just before I get to them, so now instead of passing them going the other way I've got half a dozen joggers in front of me. At first it didn't seem to bad as they were moving pretty fast, but then it turned out the one at the very rear was much slower than the others. That's okay, I see that they are all turning left off the sidewalk to go into a warehouse and I realize its a bunch of crossfit nuts. Of course, a few yards before we get to where she is going to get off the sidewalk another conga line of crossfitters leaps out onto the sidewalk and one of them shouts "BICYCLE" into my face as they run by, causing the slowpoke ahead of me to nearly stop, and look over her shoulder. Now she's really barely moving and I'm nearly trackstanding but we're like a dozen feet from her exit off the sidewalk and she can't decide if she wants to let me around or go for it. Finally after half-heartedly waving me around, to her left, which is the direction she needs to go, she realizes that's stupid, as now we're there and she finally goes back to bench pressing tires or whatever.
Next I climb up and over the West Seattle "low bridge" and am amazed my Monday luck hasn't caused the drawbridge (swing bridge actually) to open, but my luck hasn't really turned yet. When you get to the bottom you can cross the street in the sidewalk and then cross the street in the sidewalk again to meander through the island, another lane of traffic and finally back onto the trail, or you can follow the trail around and under the bridge. Or you can do what I like to do, and that is leap off the sidewalk into the street and then cut across the road onto the handiramp for the trail on the other side. They way I do it is dependant on a gap in traffic, and so sometimes I can't manage it, but it's much faster and a lot less annoying to do it my way. It's also a lot more fun!
Amazingly it looks like I'm going to pull it off today. I keep checking my rearview mirror every second or two, and there's no one in the lane next to me going my way as I'm bombing down the bridge and the guardrail is about to disappear. There are three cars coming the other way, but my mental math says they are just going to be past me when I want to cut across the road to make it onto the handiramp on the other side.
Just as I commit and launch into the air off the curb and make my landing, a fricken road bike appears out of nowhere a little ways behind the cars! I can tell immediately that we are both going to occupy the same space if I keep going like I am, so I have to scrub off nearly all my speed so that I can let him get past, and even so I'm going to have to cut back from a little past the ramp. I wanted to be annoyed with this guy because here he is out in traffic when there is a perfectly good bike trail alongside him that leads to the bridge, but thinking about it, HE WAS DOING THE EXACT SAME THING I WAS! :lol: Well, minus the high speed leap off the curb anyway.
Like I said, karma!
Other than nearly getting run over by some sort of ballgame traffic that was making a highly illegal u-turn in the middle of an intersection while I was waitng for the traffic light in the lane, my commute after that was pretty uneventful. Had the usual fun playing tag with a bus going up the hill on Jackson though. It's kind of tempting to start climbing up King Street instead, even though it'd mean a two block detour and it's steeper, because every day there's either or bus blocking the right lane (and railroad tracks in the left lane) or a bus playing tag with me as we make our way up the hill. They stop for passengers, I squeeze around them between them and the railroad tracks (and traffic squeezing past me...), and then just before I make it to their next bus stop, they pass me and start the game all over again. I ended up going for several blocks in the middle turn lane again, because that seemed like the best option. I can't win, there just aren't any good routes to my work from my home for good portions of my commute.
Oh, and the cycle track on Broadway that they had the grand opening for last summer is still closed, forcing me onto sidewalks for the last four blocks of my commute. It's supposed to (re-?)open next month, but nothing ever happens on schedule, so I'll believe that when I see it. I swear they closed it less than a month after they opened it, it was just a public relations stunt.
I don't know how I managed it, but I ended up not being late for work somehow, despite the headwind, and leaving a good 15 minutes late. I skipped shaving when I got there like I usually do, but still, I must have somehow made good time.