Going for a bike ride 2010/02/06

Hi again, today I went for a bike ride up Evans Pass and then along the Summit road:


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I took the bus from Campus to the foot of Evans Pass Road, that was about 45min not including waiting for the but. Fortunatly the Christchurch bus compangy just started putting bike racks on their buses in December of 2009, and my route is one of the ones that has them.

Evans Pass was predicably steep while the actual Summit road was rolling up and down. There were a surprising (to me) number of cyclists on the road with me, most of them were spandex clad roadsters but there were also some mountain bikers who were, I assume, enrout to the numerous trails that fell off of the road. Cars were also relatively common. I think the best analogy to compare the area is Grouse Mountain. It is close to the city and clearly used by tourists and locals alike but for slightly different purposes.

The cyclists on the road were all very friendly, most would give encouragement in the form of thumbs up if they were on the down hill and I was on the up hill, a practice I took up as well. One one long but gentle up hill a roadster pulled up beside me on my undersised mountain bike (see the photo if you haven't already) and commented on how nice the weather was now, apparently the rest of the summer was quite wet, and asked me which hill was the worst in my oppinion and comented on which was his nemasis (apparently the one we were on) before leaving me to eat his carbon fiber dust. (probably a carcinogen :P)

The worst part of the trip was getting back home after the down hill of Dyers Road. For some reason Christchurch has a habit of changing the names of most of its streets. Several times as I was going home I got disoriented as street signs changed from the ones I was expecting to different ones. Twice this changes happened three times in under 10 minutes! The main problem is that these changes are not reflected on my map of the bike routes so I'm not ready for them and then get confused.