I swear london hates me or something.
Last week while going to London to visit the Forest City Velodrome, the going there was fine (we were late for our own stupidity) but the going home SUCKED. Why did it suck? Well for a good stretch of the highway 401 heading East towards Toronto, they had shut down the highway to one lane. At 4-5pm in the afternoon on a Saturday. Why? Because the signs had us believe Road Painting Ahead. But in actuality, there was a big long chunk of the highway that was shut down so that there could be three people with what looked like floor-buffers in tight succession working together. And the highway was shut down for a while after that as well. Making me more than 2 hours late for my… uh… “date.”
This week going to London (why am I going to london so much anyways?) for the Santa Claus parade, they shut down the entire highway for a grand chunk of it, forcing everyone onto this backwater EDR (Emergency Detour Route) which took forever. I was over an hour and a half late this time. Seeing as how I planned for a 30 minute buffer due to traffic, I was an hour late for the parade. Thankfully we’re unicyclists, and we have no float to set up, just unicyclsts to get together.
The parade itself was okay. A lot of kids aren’t impressed with unicycles keep telling you to catwalk (a wheelie on a bike) and a lot of others keep yelling to do backflips, which I’ll never understand. The one group of kids I kind of thought were funny even though they were jerks, when they said “Do a trick!” I stopped riding and hopped for them. “Do something better!” So I hopped in a 180°… and that’s really the extent of my tricks. But it wasn’t impressive apparently. Meh, whatever. They’re the ones heckling people performing, not me. I got to high-five a lot of kids too, and tried and missed many others. High energy but very tiring and extremely hot. It was a really warm day for a parade, not like last year where it was freezing cold.
What absoloutely SUCKED was that we kept getting really squished in. We got put in behind a truck-float thingie, and a bunch of firefighters who were collecting canned goods. And they kept creeping up on us. To where we had less than I would say 20 feet of space for our 11 cyclists. While yes we can FIT into such a small space, it’s not impressive looking since we can’t DO anything. It got worse when they were even overtaking us, with their people who were collecting food in shopping carts were lined up right to the float infront of us, which doesn’t help US any since then no one can see the cyclists. Also there were a lot of the volunteers walking through us creating more obsticles than we really needed. I’m all for them collecting food. But the parade only goes so fast. After talking to the marshals who talked to the group they finally kept well away from us giving us room to show off and just be merry and ride around.
The drive home was thankfully uneventful, I cruise-controlled it most of the way home at about 130km/h, dropped off the kids I was driving back with their dad and drove home and got into bed around 12:30.
And was up before 4am to drive my mom to the Airport.
Thus, I’m skipping the Milton parade today, in an attempt to sleep in (got home at 5, slept from probably 6:30 until 10ish) and trying to organize a few things at home.
Sweet.
