San Francisco meet Sunday Streets

For those of you complaining that there isn’t enough open space to ride or enough car-free turf to explore, I would like to introduce you to Sunday Streets–an organization that opens urban roads for play time.

This Sunday, August 31st, San Francisco joins the ranks of other great cities like New York and Portland by holding a Sunday Streets play session. The route follows the waterfront from Bayview to Chinatown, areas of the city that sorely lack open space.

So grab your bike, hula hoop, rollerblades, sneakers or any number of car-alternatives and enjoy the roads. There’s plenty of activities planned and best of all, it’s free. The city play session happens from 9:00am to 1:00pm.

Oakland A’s Bike Rally: August 30th

For the record, the bike rally will be on August 30th, 2008.  It will start at Lois the Pie Queen at 10am sharp.  It’s going to be a big day, so I recommend you order the Reggie Jackson Special.  Be careful, it’s a big meal.  We’re making room for playing pranks with various media sources during the coordination of this event, so listen up: 8/30/08 is the correct date.

My buddy and I are organizing an Oakland A’s Fan Rally that will highlight the history of the Oakland Athletics in their hometown.  It’s going to be big, fun, and family friendly.  We’re making costumes, games, noisemakers, and bikes with grills on the back for tailgating.  Ooh yes, there will be tailgating.

The plan is to meet at different places that people can get to easily from BART that highlight A’s culture.  We’ll be biking from place to place with boom boxes, A’s flags, and baskets of goodies for both spectators and participants.

Tentatively, here’s our schedule, (I’d love to hear  any other places along the way to the Coliseum that would be a great place to meet up).
August 30, 2008:
10am Lois the Pie Queen
12pm Macarthur bart parking lot
2pm Ogawa park (in front of city hall on 14th and Broadway)
4pm Fruitvale shopping center (next to bart)
6pm Coliseum parking lot

One idea that we’re working on is to have pictures of the Oakland A’s World Series Parades through downtown Oakland printed on projection sheets that we put into special viewer for people to match up the images of the A’s parading with today’s downtown in the background.   This way, we can have little lookout points through out the city with stories about the A’s.

Anyone have any good pictures to share?  Stories to tell?  Ideas for a parade route?

My friend’s going to have some new designs for the ads we’ll be putting up by Sunday.   Official announcements and maps in the weeks to come.

For now, remember August 30, 2008: Lois the Pie Queen: 10am: bring your bike: wear green and gold.

Hanebrink did it first!

Don’t believe the hype, Hanebrink designed a ridiculously wide-wheeled bike long before Batman showed up with his little batpod thing. The other night Nicole suggested we go to a late showing of Batman, even though we both had work really early in the morning. Despite our sleepiness, I almost jumped up when the batman motorcycle appeared on screen. I wanted to shout “it looks like a Hanebrink bike!” The Hanebrink bike was for slow slogs over ice, snow and sand. I believe Dan Hanebrink tried (and may have succeeded) to sell some bikes to the military. Here is visual evidence that Hanebrink had the jump on batboy.

vs.

Copy Your Key Number

Last week I lost my keys at the beach. Actually, my friend lost them. Not a big deal, except that my only bike lock key was on it. And my bike was locked! Luckily it was in a place where I could keep an eye on it: in front of my house. But it got me thinking about how important it is to write that Kryptonite key number down somewhere.

My suggestion: email it to yourself. Each Kryptonite key comes with its own serial number. All you have to do is go on https://www.kryptonitelock.com/CustomerService/OrderKeys.aspx to order a new one. But if you don’t have that serial number, then you have to find some big tough person with serious bolt cutters to come and stomp on it–not the best for that pretty little frame and likely to break the bolt cutters.

So, back it up! And to be extra safe, order that spare key BEFORE you lose your keys at a tequila-drenched bbq.

I can’t ride my bike

It’s true, it’s tragic, and I don’t know what to do about it but wait. I got sick and one or some of my intestines are injured, and the only place I’ve ridden to in the past week was the doctor, maybe 10 blocks away, and it hurt. Not only can I not ride my bike, but I also can’t ride my friend’s bike which is visiting at my house while she’s away.
I walked, today, although now that I think of it I followed bike routes along Valencia, 18th, and over Market to Duboce Park. Usually when I walk places I go the wrong way on one-way streets just because I can… but I was too distracted even for that. I miss the giddy back-and-forth of the wiggle, I miss zipping past all the cars waiting – I mean, driving – on Market Street, and I even miss climbing that last hill on the way home.
This is a plea for advice, really: What do you do when you can’t bike? How can I replace any of the bicycle-things that make me happy, much less all of them? Are there any documented ways to induce dreaming of biking? Seriously. If you’ve got an idea, I would love to hear it.

My bike in its closet, where it's spending too much time these days.

Wiggle Your Way to Mojo Cafe

Mojo Café is the best place to simultaneously get your coffee fix and fix that pesky squeak in your bottom bracket. Just off the infamous wiggle, on Divisadero Street, sits this community-minded shop with a bright orange façade.

The guys at Mojo are more knowledgeable of bikes than coffee, but if you’re willing to wait a few minutes to get a latte, it’s still the best coffee Nopa has to offer. Mojo has happy hour draft beer, an outdoor patio and free wireless. if that’s not enough, there are also weekly movies (often bike centered) and music on weekends. If there were outlets, it’d be easy to lose an entire day here. Mojo Café: 639 Divisadero St.

A Bicycle Miracle

I know this is a San Francisco site. I do. It’s just that the (elementary) school year ended only a couple weeks ago and that’s prime travel time for me – and an amazing, a remarkable, an unprecedented bike thing happened in Boulder Colorado this weekend. My mom hopped her little self onto a bicycle for the first time in 14 years, and we set off on a 4 hour bike ride to beat all. Now I love bicycles. My little brother works in a bike shop. My father is pretty much down for whatever mode of transportation seems best. How, then, did my mom stay off two wheels for a decade and a half? Why? Is she just fond of fossil fuels? No, although she does like the smell at gas stations. My mom loves saving the world, eats organic local produce from a CSA, volunteers at a wildlife sanctuary. She just has a tumultuous history with bicycles.

History : When I was nine, we lived in a rural Pennsylvania neighborhood experiencing slow erosion; now it’s drowned in a sea of suburbia, with all the surrounding farms built into housing developments. So the road that my parents’ house sits on is paved now, but in the early 1990s it was much more dangerous and interesting: trucks would come by now and again to pour tar, then pour gravel over the tar, leaving us with a surface of tiny, jagged, mostly-secure rocks. During the summer, when the heat would melt the tar a little, I could (and did) sit on the curb and pull up bits of gravel to throw at the middle of the road, but otherwise I’d just do my best not to fall. So when I was nine, my brother and I went on a bike ride with my mom up this street while my dad was at work.