Unusal L.A. Riding?
Thread started by
md2 at 08.7.09 - 10:52 am
Friday... yeah... all next week ill be on a small Island... so if your interested in helping the day pass...
Tell us about some of your most unusual experience(s) while riding you bicycle in Los Angeles.
What happened?
And why did it impress you?
I'll start:
I was commuting home across Pico Blvd a few months back. Once I reached Overland, the streets were blocked off. I rode through, and I was not only the ONLY cyclist on the street, but there were no cars.
I kept riding and I asked a few city employees taping off the area, "whats going on?", they kept saying -- "we're not allowed to say".
Anyhow I reached the Fox stuidos / Cheviot Hills golf course or whatever... and i arrived just in time to see some military helicopters approaching (actually looked pretty dope). This shit happened so quick and without notice, that people were golfing, and didnt even realize anything was happening until the helicopter landed in the baseball field.
I posted up as close I could get... and by then we knew the President had arrived. I was really impressed with the degree...the sheer magnitude of power that a position/person could possess. The streets were shut within minutes, and everything occurred like clockwork... Obama's limo and SS drove by, but what really impressed me was this:
IT WAS FUCKING AMAZING BEING ABLE TO RIDE ACROSS PICO BLVD WITHOUT ANY CARS ON THE RODE. I really really noticed how badly society missed the point by choosing to clutter the land with cars... I just thought...damn... if only people knew what COULD BE.
--okay thats nothing special... but you're equally stuck at work, lets hear yours.
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I was rolling down mulholland with a friend of mine, some loose gravel made my back wheel slip on a banked turn and i ran straight into a wall. a retired porn star pulled over to help me and drove me back home. while i was loading my bike into her car, jay leno pulled up to check that i was alright.
_iJunes08.7.09 - 10:54 am
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May I suggest spell-check for the subject box?
md208.7.09 - 10:54 am
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lmao man, leno? he must've had nothing better to do after leaving the tonight show
superblueman3 responding to a
comment by _iJunes
08.7.09 - 11:17 am
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Myself and a few friends were driving home from a show at Chain Reaction one night. Somewhere along the 401 there was an accident and chemical spill. The entire freeway was shut down. After sitting in the same spot for about 15 minuites, we popped our bikes of the rack and started riding around the freeway. We came back 10 minutes later (a couple friends stayed in my car) to see we had not moved an inch.
Naturally we decided to keep riding. We rode for about 15 minutes, through all the stopped cars. We could see the accident. We went up there to see what was up. There were cops and emergency services everywhere. News helos in the air. One of the female officers seemed to go unnaturally apeshit in an instant when she saw us. She started screaming, "Get of that bike! Get over here!". We just rode away casually. There was no way they could chase us.
On the way back cars started slowly filtering out through a single exit. Three times, stalled motorists asked us for help as we rode by. We ended up pushing three cars (one being a big-ass SUV) to the side as cars were slowly exiting (long live bikes!). By the time we got back, my car was gone. The friend I left with my car wasn't answering his phone. I wasn't worried. What happened next was the start of the cherry on top of an insanely eventful, fun day.
Two girls shouted at us from their Tahoe. This was near the exit where the cars were moving a little more. They thought it was "fuckin' kick-ass" that we were riding around on the freeway (there were three of us riding, myself on my roadie, other friend on his dirt bmxer, and another friend who caught up with us at some point on a Razor Scooter. The trunk of my car was always filled with the most random shit) and they offered us a ride and help finding my friend with my car. We ended up waiting to see my car come off the off-ramp, saw my friend, waved him down, ended up at a party that the girls were headed to. My bmxer friend and I had an especially exciting night with our two new, tatted, and utterly adorable friends. They were 24-ish, we were 16 and 17. Pooooints.
The fun continues all the way into the next night as the 4 of us ended up getting home at 7 in the morning, sleeping a couple hours, and then traveling out to Yorba Linda (I think) to help a friends band set-up for a free Eath Day show. They were on tour with Lit. Ended up completely drunk again by about 1 in the afternoon.
This story is becoming a little irrelevant. Awesome times. Freeway rides. Girls, beer, parmesan cheese. Love life
merrickx08.8.09 - 1:02 am
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oh Los Angeles, if only the stories I had with you were common knowledge.
tivu08.8.09 - 1:19 am
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I found a roll of money on Del Amo Boulevard in Carson. I looked around and grabbed it and rode off but I didn't get a hundred yards and a bunch cops blocked me in.
So I spent a few hours at the Carson sherrif station explaining that I didn't know anything about some bank robbery that just happened nearby, and I didn't even get to keep the money.
petemoss08.8.09 - 2:47 pm
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So last-last Friday, I was bored at 3am and decided to ride up to the Hollywood sign. I do things like this when I'm bored. Blame my lack of a television.
It was foggy that Friday night, you may recall, and it was getting foggier as I climbed. By the time I got up to the top, it was so thick that it was impossible to see beyond about 30 feet. After all that work, I was on top of the world with no view of the city, no view of the sign, and only a limited view of the road. So, um... bummer. Maybe I should have just been content with a successful climb, but I felt a little robbed. I felt insufficiently challenged, insufficiently rewarded. I felt like this night needed something
more. Oh-ho-ho! You need but ask, and the universe will provide.
"Something more" arrived (first) in the form of a flat tire as I was winding my way across Griffith Park via Mulholland Highway. The flat in itself was no big surprise, since
Mulholland Highway is an unpaved fire road and I was riding a skinny-tired road bike. It
was a big surprise, however, to realize that I had no spare tube and no "real" tire patches.
A while back, as an emergency backup, I had cut some strips out of a latex dish glove and put a few of them in my patch kit, figuring that I could make them work in a worst-case scenario. Stuck in the middle of Griffith Park at 4:30am with only the sketchiest of repair supplies, it occurred to me that this, finally,
was that worst-case scenario. Brilliant planning, Nathan. Fucking brilliant.
I set to work with this running narrative in my head about the physics and chemistry of tire repair - it was like a MacGyver voiceover, but with lots of swearing. I kept adjusting the patch, applying the glue, pumping the tire, hearing the hiss. At one point, I actually said aloud "rubber, vulcanize thyself!" In vain. It was all in vain.
On my third repair attempt, as I was holding the tire up to my ear and listening to the air leaking out, I began to appreciate the strangeness of my situation. I had taken the headlamp off the bike and was holding it in my mouth as I worked. The vapor from my breath was being illuminated as little puffs in front of me, and all around, the fog was drifting slowly. I was
inside a cloud, and the cloud was moving. The world seemed to be at a tilt.
And that's when the coyotes arrived.
I'd just set down the wheel to take a break, and when I looked up, there they were: two pairs of eyes reflecting the light of my headlamp back at me through the fog, with big coyote ears outlined faintly above them. "
O Hai," said my sympathetic nervous system. I leaned down to pick that wheel back up and held it out in a way that I imagined to be menacing.
Wheel in one hand, pump in the other, standing over a wounded bicycle and breathing LED fire, I must have looked like a knight or a dragon or something. No, better: a dragon knight. That would be awesome. Unfortunately, coyotes have had very little exposure to medieval sword and sorcery stories, so they appreciated none of this rich imagery. But as long as I didn't look like I was
made of ham, this was all fine with me.
Slowly, carefully, I started working on the fourth patch attempt, looking up every 0.3 seconds to see whether my friends were moving any closer. But they kept their distance. I started to
wonder whether they found all this amusing. I was putting the bead back on the tire when a third pair of eyes wandered out of the brush.
"Something more." Jesus.
Still, they just stood there, keeping their distance. I had become quite the popular show in the Griffith Park coyote scene. Should I have done a little dance or something? Put out a hat to collect tips? I was too freaked out to think of any of this, which is too bad; I could have used those tips.
Against all expectations, patch strategy #4 (which consisted basically of slathering as much glue as possible onto both the tire and the patch) miraculously worked, and I was able to get moving. At each bend in the road, I paused to look back and shout at them. By the time I reached pavement, they seemed to be gone for good, and I made my way down the hill as quickly as one can when one is worried that one's tire may suddenly go flat.
Did I mention the park ranger that followed me silently and ominously down Western Canyon, with his lights off most of the way? Some other time, maybe? Yes, some other time.
nathansnider08.10.09 - 2:55 am
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My most memorable experience on a bicycle in Los Angeles occurred one mid day as I was leaving a friend's house up on the side wall of beechwood canyon. I left his place and dropped down the side of the canyon wall, picking up rocket speed on my brakeless fixed. It was a bright sunny day as it usually is during the summer here. Bombing the hill with the rush of wind tearing at my ears I flew past a car coming down the hill, which has a 40 mph speed limit at that point, and it also placed me at the precise point in the road where a bike lane would have been had there been one, the door zone. However, this is not a tale of being doored, instead, right inside the shadow of a tree where my eyes couldn't focus on it, particularly on a blinding sun bleached concrete road, sat a boob shaped bump about a foot and a half high, the result of the roots of the shading tree poking up into the road.
Anyway, I hit the side of the bump, having spotted it last minute and swerving some; this launched me into a barrel roll in the air, where, as my wheel left the pavement, the burst of adrenaline that hit my bloodstream upon seeing the bump took effect. As I spun I remember feeling time passing VERY slowly, calmly thinking of how to toss my bicycle so as the car I had just passed would not run it over; up and over me to the outside of the road.
Realizing this I rotated my body as I came out of my clipless pedals. Amazed at how the sound of that click came so clearly to me, and at this point I became intensely aware of how detailed everything was around me. I could hear and feel the wind pressing on me as I passed through the air, the pounding of my blood through every vein in my body drumming into my ears, watching my bicycle arc out over me, up and away into a pile of empty trash cans and the back of a parked car, of each and every leaf on each of the trees I passed under as my back was toward the ground, my bag safely under me to land on.
Wait!
My Bag!
My bag had my SLR sitting in the front left pocket of my messenger bag. Realizing this, and that I had no way of replacing my camera, I rotated as hard as I could, bringing my arms up, covering my head as I had been a dumb-ass and decided not to wear my helmet this fine summer day, and arcing myself as limply as possible and bracing for the impact. At this point I was watching the decorations in the front yard of the house I was about to meteor into the street in front of.
At this point I slammed into a near twin of the bump that I had hit to start all of this, tearing skin off my arm, and my face, and driving the buckle of my bag into my rib, fracturing it. There's photos in the "horray for crashes" photo thread.
As I hit the ground time seemed to slam back into it's normal flow with the sensation of pain entering my body, and had a sort of reverse bullet time feeling, jolting me out of my slowed sense and into a hyper alert one, I rolled over three times (I was still traveling over 45 miles an hour when I hit the bump) and came to a stop in a Spiderman like pose on one hand and my feet.
I casually stood up and walked back to my bike, holding my ribs, bleeding and thinking to myself, "There were two sides to that billboard and they both hurt equally" (I had seen '40 year old virgin' a night or two before).
I picked up my bike and began to inspect it when I suddenly had maybe seven of eight people who seemed to materialize out of thin air in my face asking if I was all right, telling me to go to a hospital, etc., I politely told them I was fine (probably not the truth, and I certainly didn't look like it, my face was streaked with blood, my arm was gushing pretty well, and I could barely breathe with my rib the way it was, but I could tell my rib wasn't badly broken, just cracked and that the rest was just minor scrapes and cuts.
My bike had hit the bump so hard that the tire had pulled itself out of the bead on the rim and was still inflated with the tube sitting outside the tire. I deflated, reset, and reinflated the tire, at thispoint ignoring the lookie loos who had shown up, hoisted my bag up onto my shoulder (luckily it's a Bailey Works so I could switch shoulders before doing this) and rode off down the hill.
Reaching the bottom of Beechwood I turned right on Franklin into the gas station at the top of Argyle where I persuaded the bewildered, barely English speaking attendant to let me use the bathroom to wash up (luckily I had just re-filled my old first aid kit in my bag). After washing up I took the Red Line over to MacArthur park where I was visiting another friend. Not feeling like riding much up the hill to where I had to go, I decided to walk.
The thick crowd on the sidewalk on Alvarado parted like the red sea as I passed. The pedestrians looking furtively at me out of the corner of their eyes as I walked passed, all of them giving me a plenty wide berth. I must have looked like a crazy person, bloodied, sweating in pain and shock, my grimace long since turned into a scowl. I must have looked terrifying to most of those I passed, in my camo pants and a torn black wife beater and a green felt commando cap marching up the sidewalk pushing my bike.
The whole crash took less 3 seconds, from seeing the bump to impacting the ground, yet to me it seemed to take minutes. It's quite the testimony to the power of the human brain, that we can leap to such feats to provide ourselves with the ability to protect ourselves in even the most extreme circumstances. The experience was so vivid, I'll probably never forget it. It's not every day you get to feel like you've done something out of the ordinary.
FuzzBeast08.10.09 - 6:44 am
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Whoa...
That is possibly the most terrifying AND reassuring story ever. Although, you are quite tall and masculine... so I wonder if the same thing happened to
me, if I would be so lucky.
Glad it all worked out!
canadienne responding to a
comment by nathansnider
08.10.09 - 10:27 am
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This thread is soooo good. Bump.
larsenf08.10.09 - 3:52 pm
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You're making me blush. Seriously though, you're still way bigger than they are, so I doubt that they would have treated you any differently.
I think what probably attracted them to me in the first place was the sound of my pump, which is old and squeaky and makes noises like a small wounded animal (seriously). Maybe they saw me from the wrong angle and thought I was beating up a puppy. Once they came out into the road, they were just sort of curious. The situation was still freaky after that, but not dangerous.
nathansnider responding to a
comment by canadienne
08.10.09 - 5:36 pm
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candienne, post your coyote story!
steph responding to a
comment by nathansnider
08.10.09 - 10:39 pm
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But Monsieur Snider has thought of everything, and posted a link to my story in his
made of ham reference ;)
canadienne responding to a
comment by steph
08.10.09 - 10:47 pm
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Man, I never get anything this interesting, and I see coyotes up here in Victimville all the time.
I've seen packs, I've seen singles, but they're all little bitches that just run away when I try and go after them
And this is why I find the concept of coyotes as fearsome animals a funny thing.
If anything, I'll tug the tail of the wrong mountain lion for shits and giggles, then you'll hear about it all over the press the next day.
For some odd reason, wild animal attacks seem to hype everyone up just as easily as the stories of a predator lurking the streets.
Anywho, the only thing I got as far as interesting stories of riding in LA by myself are here...
eat a biscuit
bentstrider08.10.09 - 10:49 pm
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i remember when you told me this story on the mosey... second time around it still sounds so amazing!
coldcut responding to a
comment by FuzzBeast
08.10.09 - 10:51 pm
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Reminds me of shit very similar that still affects me to this day.
bentstrider responding to a
comment by FuzzBeast
08.10.09 - 10:58 pm
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Man, how can you not love that guy?
steph responding to a
comment by canadienne
08.10.09 - 10:58 pm
reply
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