Another Tag Safari

Rode round trip for work Monday, with a jaunt into JoCo to deliver a med-bag I'd forgotten when my honyocks went back to the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster's.





Johnson County actually has some of the best bike infrastructure in the metro, lots of through streets with wide, shareable lanes, lots of designated bike lanes. But try getting to an office at 95th & Nall during rush hour, and there are definitely gaps in that infrastructure.





Or there wouldn't be if there were more of us cyclists out there. Nall is four lanes, meaning a cyclist should be able to take a lane and the cars can go around in the other. This is, however, an alien concept in suburbia and you can count on about ten percent of the drivers being bewildered and about ten percent being enraged at your presence and insistence that for just a block or two, you are going to be a two-wheeled Amish horse cart whether they like it or not.





Just an FYI to any of you car-exclusive people out there, but when a cyclist is riding right down the middle of the lane on a multi-lane road with a relatively high speed limit (35 mph is extremely fast, only on a steep downhill speed when cycling) that cyclist is telling you to change lanes to pass. The law requires you to give at least three feet of clearance, but the faster you're moving the skinnier that three feet feels, so have a heart and just change lanes. You can hate us, you can think we're morons (really, it's okay, the worst you can come up with probably won't beat what we think of some of you), but it's not worth getting your car scratched up or defending a manslaughter case.





And really, I provide people with a service: I guarantee you after a jaunt like this, there are people who go home and say, "You'll never guess what I saw today..." I gave those folks a dinner-table story. You're welcome.





Anyway, this detour really put me on some unusual routes for getting home, and before too long I was bombing Mission Road down to Southwest Boulevard, an awesome piece of downhill riding. They should put a ski lift in from Southwest Boulevard to the Rosedale Arch and we can bomb, Mission, Puckett, etc without having to climb back up in our granny gears all day long.





Then, coming through the bottoms I spotted some tags I'd meant to shoot but hadn't gotten around to getting up close with. then I got stuck behind two different trains, each of which had their own whole mobile galleries going on.





I know a lot of people just see this as vandalism, but I really love these tags. Lots of times I see tags from my car that I can't really get a vantage point to shoot. I have much better luck from the bike, especially with railcar tags.





Fighting a cold and bronchitis, a 35 mile day finished off with brutal, chilly headwinds wasn't probably what the doctor ordered but I sure had fun with it at the time.