Just keep pedaling!

Sunday morning 7:00 am -what are we doing? We are going on the BridgePedal! Over 20,000 people turned out to ride across the vehicle bridges on the Willamette river. There are ten total but the cow and I decided to do the 8-bridge 25-mile ride. The starting point was on 1st Avenue on the Riverfront. The officials were allowing 100 riders at a time to leave every minute, yeah it was extremely tight at the beginning of the race. The route (click the 8 route and see where we went) was created to zigzag back and forth over the eight bridges. The first bridge, Hawthorne, was smooth sailing. We knew it was going to be crowded and we would need patience. I didn't realize how much patience however; the second bridge was the Ross Island bridge and as you know from traveling across bridges there is always an incline on either side of a bridge. Well, recall that there are old, young, good, and bad riders in front of us. So when the incline got too much for people they would just stop and get off of their bike, which created a huge bottleneck at the beginning of this bridge. At the top of all the bridges you got a beautiful view of the city and you kind of forget the bottleneck and realized the reason you were there. Now on the down side of the bridge was equally as interesting. You could pick up speed but you had to keep your hands on the brakes because kids were everywhere and they get a little jiggly when they go too fast. Not to mention the people who are in it to race and they have no where to go except over the top of you. It was kind of exciting at this time because we were able to descend onto the 405 freeway and just like a car could pick up speed again and merge into bike traffic (Whoa! that was fun). We knew to keep our speed up because the Marquam bridge was next; unfortunatley, the organizers decided to allow Whole foods to hand out bananas and PowerBar to hand out bite size snacks at the beginning of the bridge! You guessed it - amazing bottleneck. Did I say amazing - I meant AMAZING. I have to admit as I was watching all of the riders eating the bananas I thought what the HELL are they going to do with the peels. Low and behold there were boxes set up to throw the peels away and almost every cyclist I saw made there way to the box and threw away there garbage. Banana peels on a downward side of a bridge could be hilarious or dangerous (depends on your warped sense of humor)! After you made your way down the Marquam there was a separation from the men and the boys. It was pretty smooth sailing after this for the remainder of the ride. We also crossed the Burnside, Broadway, Fremont, a long pedal up to the St. John's (this is a beautiful bridge), and back down the east side of the river for great views of the city and the last crossing of the Steel Bridge to the finish line.
I must also say that out of the eight bridges that we rode only two of them (Marquam and Fremont) are not open to bicycle traffic normally. Which makes traversing Portland on a bike very, very easy.