Trip on Transit

I went to Pleasanton yesterday — about 90 miles away — on my bike, bike on train, bike on BART. I haven’t put my bike on a train before and it was surprisingly easy. My bike trip at either end was only about three miles.

Jarrett Walker of Creature of the Shade has started a new blog, Human Transit. I feel lucky to be in a place where this kind of trip was not only possible but very easy. Of course we had to wait for the bridge to go down outside Martinez — they were letting a ship through — but I’d have had to have done that in the car anyway.

On the way to the station yesterday, I ran into a) a criterium, which made me alter my route through b) the antique Volvos show, on the way to get c) asparagus, which I threw into a tub of pre-prepared lemon juice, garlic, olive oil, and a little tarragon to throw on the grill at the Lazy, Stupid and Godless knitting/dyeing/spinning party. I learned to spin. I hung out with some awesome people. And then I turned around and did the whole thing backwards, running into the fixed gear event in Pleasanton — at first I thought it was part of the city code, that you couldn’t ride bikes with gears. But no. Just some tired guys at the end of the day, looking at the overpass with fear and loathing. I turned right to the subway station.

Oh, and on the way down on the train I conducted a birdathon in support of Yolo Audubon. 48 species, including Western gull, Clark’s grebe, and chestnut-backed chickadee, all of which are hard to find in Yolo County. You can’t do this kind of thing from a car…