I was actually pretty puny when I got home from judging Saturday night. Short sleep for one, rode to judge, rode home, that alarm was incredibly early. 25 miles on the bike plus a flight of judging, the excitement of seeing my beer friends, trouble falling to sleep when I got home, and the fact I'd need to get up early enough to ride back.
Front Street on Friday night, too, was an adventure. I've ridden that stretch a few times with no problem. Some of it is two lane and badly rutted by trucks so it's tricky to hold the shoulder even if you decide to ride there. But most of the time the few cars and trucks go way out of their way to clear you.
Then, it turns out, Friday night a bunch of assheads get drunk and race cars on that badly maintained, narrow strip of asphalt. If I'd known, I would have cut over on Chouteau to Gardner Road.
The worst was a pair of hatchbacks drag-racing. Honda Civics, I think, and their motors sounded like bee hives on crank as they came down the road side by side, a pair of headlights for each lane including the one I was riding in.
I went for the ditch but couldn't get as far out of the way as I wanted due to a safety rail. A few minutes later, a couple of morons on Japanese sport motorcycles went by me so fast and close their wake felt like a semi.
But after sleeping in, big-time, on Sunday I rode out to run a couple of errands. I needed some Home Depot/Lowe's stuff, some CVS stuff and the weather was gorgeous.
So I went the long way about it, aiming for the Home Depot in Merriam. This took me over the 42nd Street viaduct over the railyards. If I was going to get into model railroading, I'd want to build an accurate scale model of Kansas City's train years from KC Southern in the East Bottoms through BNSF in Argentine and whatever of all this stuff is Union Pacific or whoever else survived consolidation in the rail industry.
And of course I shot a bunch of tags.
I rail against the city crews who paint over really good, artistic tags, how they can't tell the good from the bad. On the flip side, here is a tag that seems almost a public service, labeling 27th Street in a way that anyone, barely sighted enough to qualify for a driver's license, can see it. And then realize that while the tag says '27th St' it's actually on 25th Street. Taggers, check a map or the freaking street sign behind your head.
After crossing the viaduct, I wound up riding along the edge of the yards in Argentine until I came to a place you can basically ride right in to the yards. I mean, it's posted railroad property, but there's nothing like a barrier there. I shot some of this from the edge there, and had actually spotted a train with a bunch of good tags when another came along on a nearer track and parked.
I wasn't hurting anything, just there to take pictures, but I know how jealous the railroads are of their property and I didn't wait around for the bulls to tell me I shouldn't wait around to get a shot at that tagged train.
It's not as if I have a shortage of train tags in my archives.
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