So on Friday I rode with a good friend to Loyola from the UIC campus after my one class. I thought everything would be simple. We would pick up our other friend from Loyola and ride down to do critical mass. I thought so wrong. It was really windy, so the lakeshore path was closed. There were waves crashing onto Lake Shore Drive, so we rode the nearby streets instead. One of those streets had a water filled crater which you could use as a swimming pool. I just barely missed it, but my friend drafting behind me had to jump it. I remember hearing loud crunching metal and thinking I had just gotten him killed. Besides the comfortable feeling of hitting a massive pothole in a tucked in aero position with 25mm tires, everything was fine(ish). Once we got to Loyola I trued the back wheel and rotated the handlebars back to normal. So everything's fine now right?.....
Well we set sail for Daley Plaza around 5:30 after waiting for a brief storm to clear up. We miss the start by a long time, and while riding on wet city streets my Loyola friend gets a piece of glass in the front tire. I didn't bring a patch kit or tube, so we decide to press onward on a slowly leaking tire to try to find someone with a kit. After pumping it up, riding a mile or 2, pumping it some more, we actually catch the critical mass lunatics. Someone gives us a patch kit, and all is well in the world. Except that the glue is all dried up...
The group is long gone by the time we get the tire off and find the puncture, so my friend had to walk into a Walgreens to buy a can of Elmer's rubber cement. Ok, the tube is patched now, where do we go? We blindly ride around Wrigleyville looking for the group until my other friend's singlespeed gets a little squishy in the back. Another friggen puncture? Really? Actually the cheap tube was defective and decided to spontaneously combust at 8:30 on a rainy night. I also left the little strip of sandpaper on the side of the road downtown, and we're really tired so we just call it quits and walk back to the El stop on Addison. We never did get to ride in critical mass, and it was the second time in a row that my Loyola friend's Peugeot had a small yet serious problem on the way over. After standing over it yelling "Bad Peugie!" for several minutes I hope it learned its lesson.
A few days later the Perspective section of the Chicago Tribune featured a half page article describing critical mass as state supported domestic terrorism. I didn't read the whole thing, but it's kinda funny how worked up people can get when they gotta wait in their climate controlled cars for an extra 15 minutes.
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