Passage #319: 30 September 2015
Like a Virgin
Do you remember your first time? No, no -- not that. Your first group bike ride! Remember how that felt? The exhilaration of cruising down the streets buffered by the safety of the pack? You could relax your typically-advisable hypervigilance for hazards and focus instead on the sights, the sounds, the smells around you. Riding in a group -- especially at first, when it is new -- invokes a very particular feeling of freedom but also of connectedness.
This week we do another of our “cover versions” of a route. Specifically, we will be covering my (Sean’s) very first group ride in L.A. For a number of reasons, it will in some parts be a rather loose interpretation. First of all, though it started near our own meeting point, it makes most sense to do the first part slightly out of order. Second, we’ve ridden a couple stretches of the route very recently (and they’re not that interesting), so we’ll follow a slightly more convoluted course. And, finally, the original route was maybe a bit too flat (and too paved) for our own present predilections. That might’ve been fine for a first time but, to retain a bit of that initial thrill, at this point we need to spice it up a bit, no?
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