So, the traffic solidified outside of downtown. I gave up on the streets, and rode on the sidewalk. I could hear helicopters overhead. As I came over the top of 4th Ave, I could see the red and blue blinkies of the police cruisers.
I thought, oh shit, on Black Friday, the biggest retail shopping day of the year, there’s been some sort of bomb threat to the Westlake Center, and they’ve cordoned off downtown.
Well, as I got closer, it became clear that was not the case. Instead, the area was closed to MV traffic for some big Macy’s “holiday” event. Hordes of pedestrians were standing around Westlake Center. I arrived pretty much in time for the fireworks display at 5:30. I like fireworks, so that was pretty neat.
Some of the cyclists were bitching about all the people walking around, and when I said, “pedestrians are traffic too” I got a few hostile stares. Anyway, all the people finally dispersed, and we rode around downtown.
It was just like the first few miles of STP. A huge army of bikes, several lanes wide, riding around.
After going up to Belltown, and then all the way down through Pioneer Square, down to Safeco field, we started heading back up. I decided to peel off and head back up Dearborn with my friend Dane. I stopped by his house for a bit, and warmed up my toes, and then took off for home.
Was it worth it? It was OK. It wasn’t like it was a freak show, or filled with unruly miscreants, like some would have you think. Some people drank beer beforehand, but some had hot lemonade, too.
It’d be affirming, if you’d never ridden with a lot of other bikes before. And all those blinkies ahead of me, chaotically blinking to their own rhythm, looked pretty cool. But it wasn’t a radical experience, one way or the other, that some people would have had me believe it to be.