Yesterday was the big day…the day of the 5 Boro Bike Tour, and going into it we said off the bat if it was raining we were going to throw in the towel early and not go through with it.

But, probably against our better judgment, we participated anyways.

As we left the house roughly at 6:15 and rode to the starting point near Battery Park the rain began, and we proceeded to wait in the rain until the tour finally started at about 20 minutes after 8.  The rain wasn’t so bad, but we quickly realized that we probably should have worn proper rain gear (something that I don’t really own)…but were good sports about it.

I have to say that despite the rain I am really happy that we participated.  While we were actually riding our bikes it was a good time, but there was plenty of times where you had to get off and walk due to a wide road bottle necking into a small one.  At these points it wasn’t all fun…it was cramped, and at times you had to walk your bike almost a full half mile before you could get on and ride again.

We did four of the five boros, and the highlights were riding from the very tip of Manhattan straight up through Central Park… you got to see some very pissed off pedestrians trying to cross the street, and riding down the FDR through the enclosed tunnel.  The Queensboro Bridge was much less strenuous than I expected, and proved to be a really easy bridge (except when a person looking for the 5 people he was riding with knocked me off my bike).

Queens was really fun to ride in, but there was a planning flaw of making all participants enter Astoria Park…this was a logistics nightmare, and ended up in an almost 40 min delay in the rain. See:

We stopped off in Queensbridge Park for a snack, and decided that we needed to make a decision…while riding through Greenpoint do we head home or carry on.  As it started to rain harder, we were getting wetter, and the ride overall more miserable we decided that it was in our best interest to stop once the tour got to Greenpoint.

All in all this ended up with us riding 30 miles in the rain…and as far as I’m concerned I’m happy with my 4 Boro Bike Tour. Maybe the fact that the Tour went within 5 blocks of our house made it too tempting to skip out early, but I’m not complaining.

It took from 6:15am til about 12:15pm to ride these 30 miles…and I can only imagine what time we would have gotten home if we had completed the entire tour, and rode home.   A couple things that I think would have made the whole 5 Boro Bike Tour better are: limit the number of people who enter (30,000 is just too many, and creates unnecessary stops), and also have a rain date.  I know preparing something like this must be very stressful and hard to coordinate, but that many people riding in the rain just isn’t safe or fun (well if was fun for about the first 15 or 20 miles, but that was all I needed).

We showered, ordered lunch, and watched Planet Earth to wind down after the ride…cracked open a bottle of homebrew, and then drank a growler of St. Boisterous.  The homebrew was in it’s prime, and St. Boisterous was wonderful as well.  St. Boisterous is Victory’s Hellerbock, picked up from Brouwerji Lane, which pours a golden color and is more or less a really full bodied version of a great German pils (or a light colored version of a double bock…which ever sells you on it more)…the perfect beer, at 7.3abv, to drink after the bike tour…very refreshing and satisfying.

Overall I’m really happy with how the day went, and look forward to another big bike ride…organized or not.