finally!!!

I haven't seen chris in days but I have seen his car, so he's doing a good job of staying on two wheels. My big news is that yesterday I biked home from work for the first time (from this job)! That's over [pant] sixteen [pant] miles but it was worth it. It actually wasn't very enjoyable for a bike ride but it was more enjoyable than driving. For several hours before I left work, I tried to find a route that wouldn't take me on the roulette roads. Jeez, I'm not sure I succeeded. Mapquest crashed on me twice; google maps, yahoo maps, and some Austin bike maps I found to be a bit unwieldy. Anyway, I wrote down a rough route but never found a key backstreet and rode Metric to Rundberg to N Lamar. Metric is the quietest, traffic-wise but some fucking asshole got pissed I was on the road and revved up his engine to what sounded like 100mph and screamed past me, narrowly missing a car in the other lane. Where's a cop when you need one? On North Lamar I did something I really never advocate (aside from a few bridges over highways). I rode on the sidewalk. Bike research shows that riding on sidewalks is more dangerous than the road because drivers don't notice bikes in driveways when they are turning into businesses (in fact, I just heard about a guy that got hit in that exact situation in S Austin.) But my fear of the busy street with no bike lanes convinced me to take sidewalks until I got to this side of 183. The whole ride took an hour and a half. Notes for next time: change into shorts & tank top, ditch bag or bungee it to my rack, and if I want to do it frequently--get a road bike. Anyway, it was the longest direct ride I've done in Austin. The only bike ride that tops it was a 20 mile journey I had to take in Brazilian sands to track turtles--on an ill-fitting bike.