Burrito Party, the Party

Things started off with a confused Critical Mass crowd, trying to intermingle amongst Islamic Society tents. The good thing about this, is that the bikes went NORTH from the Art Gallery, instead of the defacto South on Howe that they always do. I messed around with James weeks on his very strange Azonic Freerig, and he showed me a fun disk brake trick.

Once I got my CM fix, I broke off from the mass, to hit up MEC for some last minute trip supplies.

Saturday morning, I was stretching at the Gazebo at 7am, when Brandon rolled up. We were off pretty quick, powering over Ontario to get to the Arthur Lang bridge. From the airport bus loop, we caught a lift to the Ferry terminal. We had JUST missed the 9am ferry passenger cutoff, so we had to wait a bit at the terminal.

Finally on board, we sat outside where it was quieter, and enjoyed our passage to the Island.



We hit the road pretty hard from the boat, and had to draft down the highway for 30km, fighting a ridiculous headwind. Once we got Into Victoria propper, we stopped into the Recyclista shop to say hi. From there we were directed to use the bike paths. We were a little shocked to find out that there was a path all the way from the ferry we could have taken.

We took the Galloping Goose converted railgrade to Esquimalt, to hit the Juan de Fuca rec centre. Wow. Who knew getting across town could be this pleasurable? There were rest stops, view points, tunnels, and stop signs for cross traffic. You can see how happy we are to be off the highway.



Once at the track, we checked out the stands and watched some qualifers from the finish line. Overheating, went went around to the forested area on the otherside of the track. The racing was intense to say the least. The Mens Elite category was probably the fastest I've ever seen a tight pack of riders go on dirt. There were some pretty spectacular crashes when people would bump into each other in mid air, or during a pass in the corners.







While we were watching, Brandon ran into his coworker's daughter (Paige Zarazun), who is now officially 6th 13y/o girl in the world of BMX racing. And speaking of girls on bikes, the Elite women's category didn't disappoint. I particularly liked the girls from France, in their race cut blue and silver jerseys. I was suprised with the amount of crashing in the girls race, they definately weren't racing conservatively. One of my favorite ladies in racing, Anne-Caroline Chausson, was taken out by a teammate in the finals.

After the worlds were won (Kyle Benett riding for Free Agent, and Shanaze Reade for Redline), we headed out, and got back on the Galloping Goose Trail to the Shop.

Triane and her coworker/roomate Milenkovitch then took Brandon and I to check out another fun path into the city. There was an awesome bike bridge over the Portage inlet near Tyee road, and we stopped to get supplies at a grocery store. Malenkovich was a bit worried about locking up, as he was rolling a $4300 demo Norco road bike, but we put him at ease with our bike pile locking skills (N-1 in this case, but still enough)

Its so amazing to be welcomed into the homes of other bikers. Triane and Milenkovitch live in a cute little brick apartment building, nestled in tightly with a bunch of other buildings of the same era. Its very euro. We helped set up, by taking all the spot/christmas lights in the house, (as well as extension cords), and stringing them up across the back yard. Of course, the back yard was just another small courtyard snug between a large brick building, and one that had been torn down with only the face remaining. We then took the tables from the Bean around the World next door, and brought them back to set up the burrito making area.

And then it was a blur of cute biker girls, broken bricks, tasty non traditional burritos, and childhood horror stories.

The next morning we slowly got up and painfully made our way over to the Bean for coffee, then went through Fan Tan Alley to hit Mole for breakfast. Triane had to get to work, so she didn't join us there.

After a brief stop at Recyclista, we made our way North, this time along Lochside trail. It started off with nice railgrade, and a cut in the ravine, then went over Blenkinsop lake before turning into farmland, and older residential neighbourhoods. The path turned to dirt on occasion, and had a lot of bad asphalt, but was really nice overall. It sort of terminates in Sydney, either that or we just lost the scent. It wasn't too hard to figure out though, and we made it to the ferry for the 2pm sailing.

Overall, it was a great trip. I think I need to get out of Vancouver more often.