Midnight Ridazz

Midnight Ridazz (actual name) last night was freakin’ awesome. I went with three girls from my program and their friends and girlfriends. We met up around 7:30 at an apartment in Eagle Rock for drinks and pizza, then around 9:00 we carpooled over to the parking lot of Pioneer Chicken in Echo Park. There were several hundred bicyclists there. The theme was “heavy metal,” and lots of the people had crazy outfits. One guy was dressed like a barbarian with a giant papier mache hammer. One guy had welded the frame of one bike on top of another, so that he rode like ten feet off the ground. We set off west down Sunset Boulevard. At each intersection, four or five riders would stop to halt cross traffic and let all the bicyclists past. Many people in cars going the other way rolled down their windows and cheered us or tapped on their horns, and we hollered and waved back.

We turned north onto Hillhurst, past the Scientology church, and I was like, “Hey! I know this street!” Hillhurst was the street I parked on and walked down to get to the Sunset Junction Street Fair. I was really excited that out of all the billions of streets in L.A., I’d randomly ended up riding up one I recognized, though no one else really seemed to share my excitement. We turned east onto Los Feliz, and then south onto a bike path that runs parallel to Riverside Drive. This was the coolest part of the ride. The path runs along a river, and is only sporadically lit, so we were riding in near-darkness, and ahead you could see hundreds of people’s red rear bike lights blinking. Then Fletcher to Ave 36 to Eagle Rock road. I passed an intersection where a cop car had been stopped by the riders, and the cop was saying over his PA system, “Why are you stopping traffic?” I dunno, because there’s a couple hundred of us and we can?

Finally we pulled into the parking lot of a bowling alley. Some guy came out and yelled at us that this was private property and we’d have to move, but everyone ignored him and he went away, though I had to give him credit for trying. I wouldn’t try yelling at two hundred people. The ride was supposed to continue back to where we’d started, but after an hour and a half (it was around 1:00 a.m.) no one was showing any signs of going anywhere. One of our riders had pulled a muscle, and we were only a few blocks from the apartment where I’d parked my car, so we just went back there.

Can’t wait until next month.