Memorial Day photo bonanza extravaganza

Ah, what a weekend.


First, there was a beautiful sunset on Saturday evening.


This one is from my living room, by the way. When I say I don't want to move out of this crappy apartment because I really like the view, I'm not kidding.

The next morning... Bike the Drive! And by "the next morning," I mean about seven or eight hours later. Check-in time for volunteers was 4am, and I was so afraid of oversleeping that I decided to just stay up all night. The sunrise was kind of generic, nothing particularly awe-inspiring.


This is the 47th St. overpass at 5:50am.


And this is the 47th St. overpass at 6:22am. Note that the crowd has changed. The crowd continued to change even more, but then I had no more time for photos because that's when things got interesting. Baby trailers with flat tires, kids getting their shoelaces caught in their pedals, brand-new bikes complete with brand-new Village Cycle Center accessory packages throwing their chains when their owners tried to downshift halfway up the hill, that sort of thing.

I was able to sneak away from my post for about an hour to retrieve Avenger, which I'd left parked at the Museum of Science and Industry because I'd been told to do so and ride on the volunteer bus to 47th. (Turns out I'm the only one who did that. Next year I'll be sure to bring lots of bungee cords. There's nothing you can't carry on a carrying rack as long as you have lots of bungee cords.) Ten blocks is a long walk, especially when everyone is yelling "Hey, where's your bike?" at you, and especially when you make a detour at your apartment building to run upstairs and use your own bathroom. (Oh, but it was worth it. This place, crappy though it may be, has spoiled me rotten.)


Folks from Blackstone Bicycle Works (as seen on TV!) were at the MSI rest stop at 57th St. doing repairs. You wouldn't believe how many people needed repairs in the middle of the ride. Or maybe you would, but it was certainly a revelation for me. Every 20 minutes or so I was on the radio calling for a ride marshal to come help with some mechanical issue, many of them very minor but beyond my even more minor level of expertise. ("Yeah, there's definitely something wrong with your shifting." "What?" "Beats me; let me call for a ride marshal.") You might scoff at all the newbies until you think back to a time when you didn't know how to fix a flat tire or even shift gears properly either.

Once back on my bicycle where I belonged, I went ahead and biked the drive up to the turnaround point at Oakwood, where I proceeded to turn around in the wrong direction and thoroughly confuse everybody. (It wasn't the first or last time that morning.) Then it was back to my post at 47th. The thick crowds of, shall I say, totally not hard-core riders had made it that far south by then, and that's when things got really interesting.

After it was all over and Lake Shore Drive sadly (it's always more than a little sad to watch) reopened to motor traffic, Avenger and I (finally) caught the volunteer bus back to the postride festival in Grant Park.


Some volunteers and some XXX AthletiCo racers (well, one of them at least) who may also have been volunteers.


There was a band performing over there, but in front of the Petrillo Music Shell instead of in it for some reason. And you know what, people are right, that thing is ugly. Go ahead and tear it down, then, if that'll keep the Chicago Children's Museum away from Daley Bicentennial Plaza. (There, right on the Park District page, "Nestled in the heart of Grant Park"---so quit whining already that it's not technically in Grant Park.) By the way, what happened to the cool round bandshell that you see in all the old black & white photographs of Grant Park? I ask not rhetorically, but because I'm aware that I have some exceptionally knowledgeable readers.


I always love Grant Park's fantastic architectural backdrop.

As the postride festival was being dismantled and the screaming gulls were attacking the leftovers in force, I decided that what I really needed was to find some quite spot where I could unfold my camp chair and just sit in peace for a while. So I headed for a favorite of mine in the downtown area, a little park full of apple trees on the Main Stem of the river between Michigan Ave. and the lakefront. Except... I keep forgetting that it's not that quiet of a spot anymore. When I first discovered it five years ago it seemed as though no one else in the city knew of its existence. But gradually everyone else figured it out, and now they flock in droves to what used to be my own little sanctuary. I don't know if it even has a name, but I'd be surprised if it didn't by now.


A couple of folks in a kayak who were probably oblivious to the fact that they were making me incredibly jealous. I will finally do that this summer, really.


I just thought these clouds were interesting. Meteorology!


A late-blooming apple tree. If I had to guess (but don't take my word for it), I'd say its timing is a few weeks off because of the limited sunlight it must get so far below street level. Or maybe it was just procrastinating. Who knows why trees do anything?

Monday evening (okay, more like Monday night) I went for a ride up the Lakefront Path to Fullerton and back. (Why not.)


I'm not sure what that building is behind the Drake Hotel, but I'm pretty sure I don't remember it having an illuminated spire (or whatever the proper architectural term for that particular thing is), and I'm pretty damn sure I don't remember it having a searchlight on top. What building is that, and when/why did they do that to the top of it?


Skyline from near the Chess Pavilion. You see this shot all the time, but not often at night.


Nighttime skyline at Oakwood. Someday I'll get it right. [Does digi usually have so many bad pixels?]

I was just south of Oakwood enjoying the warm night breeze when it happened: I heard it before I saw it, a strange roaring sound like waves, or... tree leaves, in high wind. I looked up toward the sound and saw a tree near the water with its branches whipping wildly. One tree, and then another, then another, then it got to where I was and hit me---whoosh---a blast of cold, wet wind slamming out of the northeast. It smelled of rain. I looked back over my shoulder and saw... nothing.

Well, maybe I wasn't in much danger of being caught in a thunderstorm, but you know what happens when cold air suddenly meets warm air. If not then you should; it could save your life someday. Tornadoes are rare in Chicago; some say it's because we're too near the lake, some say the tall buildings break up the air currents, some say the dome of heat radiating up from the pavement protects the city, and some say there's yet some other reason. All of them have been debunked, and yet there hadn't been a single tornado in Chicago for decades, if not in living memory (I forget at this moment and this modem is slow)---until September of '05, when a funnel cloud materializing near the Loyola University campus (and the resulting emergency sirens) took everyone completely by surprise.

But the wind pushed me home without incident, except for a few near misses with scantily clad pedestrians hurrying heedlessly across the path toward shelter and warmth. I was glad for my leggings; I'd known better than to head outside on a May evening in shorts. There's a certain advantage to living most of your life near the lake.

And now that this much-anticipated weekend is officially over, it's time to get my butt into bed.