The Toilet Seat Incident

When you're biking, you get the chance to see a lot more of the world than you get when you're stuck in a car. 

A while ago, I was stopped at a red light about a block from Civic Center. If you aren't familiar with San Francisco, the Civic Center area is is just south of the wonderful Tenderloin neighborhood. While I was stopped at this light, I looked across the street to my right and noticed a man. 

This man was wearing an over-sized red jumpsuit, which is why I noticed him. He looked kind kind of like a raggedy pimp. Now this individual's attire was interesting enough, but as the light turned green and I began riding, I saw that this individual was in fact, carrying a a toilet seat.

San Francisco, you are a crazy city.

Day One: Stevie Wonder

After buying my bike, I practiced riding around the neighborhood 15-20 minutes at a time. San Francisco is a very hilly place, so I wanted to be sure that I would be able to ride these hills without having a heart attach. Being out of shape, these first few jaunts were tiring to say the least, but that's why I practiced instead of just getting on my bike and riding the 4 plus miles to work.

To Work:
For my first trip to work, I rode with some friends to get my bearings, and to get comfortable riding around with all of cars and other cyclists. It was about one mile to their place, but it was a pretty  flat route, so it wasn't too difficult. We went from their place to Golden Gate Park, through the park to The Wiggle, and finally to Market Street where I headed to work. All told, it was about 6.2 miles to work. As it was my first day riding to work, I was kind of just soaking it all in. From my friend's place to work was about 5 miles and I made it to work in about 35 minutes, which wasn't half bad.

From Work:
The ride home was not fun at all. As I was preparing to leave work, I looked in the direction of home and noticed a blanket of fog slowly working its way towards downtown. Fog is no fun, and when you're watching it move towards you, it means that there is also wind, which, I learned, makes your ride home pretty crappy. As I trekked down Market Street back towards The Wiggle, I tried to find people who were about as slow as me, so I could draft off of them. This was good in theory, but I quickly learned that not many people were as slow as me.

Being slow does have its benefits though. As I was at a stoplight on Market, I heard a wonderful tune. Someone was playing Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely" from a stereo. As I looked around trying to determine the source of this glorious tune, I was surprised to see that it was coming from a woman who was dancing around holding a boom-box. This woman looked like she'd seen better days, and reminds me of the quote from the woman in the "Leprechaun in the Hood" video: "Could be a crackhead..." As I watched this lady, dancing to Stevie Wonder, holding a boom-box to her ear, she began doing something peculiar. There was a fire hydrant close to her, right near the cross-walk, and she seductively approached this innocent fire hydrant and began dancing with it. This was not nice dancing though. She was grinding and twerking on the fire hydrant as the music continued to play.

As this was happening (remember, I was stopped at a stop light), a man crossed the street. He looked normal enough and was just walking along, minding his own business. When he finished crossing the street, he walked perilously close to the fire hydrant, and the dancing crack head smacked his ass.

Then the light turned green and I had to move on.

The rest of the ride was a mixture of sweat, fog, labored breathing and burning thigh muscles, but I successfully made it home.

An Introduction

Ever since I moved to San Francisco, I've said that I was going to get a bicycle and start riding to work. Not too crazy of an idea, given that thousands of people do the exact same thing every day. So after a few weeks of riding the bus to work every day, envying those cool kids with their skinny jeans and fixie bikes whizzing by as I try to ignore the sent wafting from the person next to me, I decided to pull the trigger and buy a bike.

I looked around for bikes on Craigslist (because I'm not down with paying a ton of money for anything, much less my first commuter bike). I'm pretty tall, so I needed a bike with a large frame. I also don't want to have to go to a billion different places looking at kind of expensive bikes that wouldn't necessarily fit me.

On Craigslist, I found a dealer that had used bikes called Columbus Cyclery. They also go by Go Bike It. Anyways, I read some reviews on Yelp! about the shop and it sounded pretty legit so I decided to check it out.

The guy at the shop was super helpful, and as an added bonus, he was French and from my French wife's hometown. He let me try out a few different bikes, and let me take them out for test rides. I tried a newer mountain bike, and an older commuter. I was nervous about getting a mountain bike because all the hipsters ride around on road bikes, and the ones that don't have road bikes ride around on cool commuter bikes. Anyways, when the owner of the shop told me that his commuter was a mountain bike, I was sold.

I got a Fuji mountain bike with an aluminum frame and tires with really knobby tread (for now). The bike cost $300 (the owner gave me a $50 discount) and he threw in a free small cable lock to keep my seat from getting jacked (homeless folks and crackheads love stealing seats). With my bike I also bought a helmet (safety first!), a u-lock and a cable (to protect my quick release wheels from aforementioned crackheads).

All told, less than $500 got me everything that I needed to begin commuting to work, and the buying experience at Columbus Cyclery was awesome.

I've been riding to work for a week now, and I've seen some pretty interesting stuff. I figured it might be fun to share my escapades online, hence this blog. I'll be writing about all the crazy things that I see on my daily trek to and from work, random thoughts about commuting via bicycle, and I'll post resources that have been instrumental in helping me in my commute.

I hope you enjoy!