London Freewheel

Hi All,

Last week I had the chance to ride around central London with a few other Brits. The city decided to stop all traffic on a 6 mile course in Central London to allow people to ride their bikes and see the sites. 38,000 (maximum allowed) people signed up to give up their cars for the day and ride. The total number of people that actually took part was estimated to be 80,000. I feel it was probably closer to 60,000 but I might have miscounted. Everybody knows (or will know soon after reading the following) that London drivers are absolutely the worst drivers in the world. To start off, they bloody drive on the wrong side of the road. This just isn't right especially for all the tourists. Tourists and all Londoners (might as well make it everybody) should not be allowed to drive in central London until they pass a driver test as well as a psychiatric test. All cell phones, food, drink, makeup etc. should be vaporized before they are allowed into the cities congested zones. People actually have to pay 8 pounds per day (16 dollars, 12 euros) to drive in these congested zones and yet they still do it. Ok maybe public transportation can't keep up with the enormous amount of people utilizing the streets of London. These buses were not going anywhere fast and probably would have lost the race to the tortoises below.

Ok, maybe the buses might have won. So getting drivers out of their cars sounds smart.
But after thinking about it for a bit I began to wonder if it was going to be a good thing after all. How would these awful drivers handle not being able to blast by my bike with their horns blaring while talking on their mobiles.
It was a beautiful day to have a bike ride, a bit chilly, but not bad. No rain (on a weekend day) for once. It was a nice orderly start as you can see below.

Wow what an impressive start. Maybe, just maybe it wasn't quite as organized as shown in the pics above and the bikes weren't quite as fancy as those above. But at least the number of riders using performance enhancing drugs and blood doping were probably less in the ride around London.
The actual start pictures were more like the ones below.
All the riders that signed up for the ride were asked to meet at designated hubs around London and then ride into the central London in an orderly fashion. Since the roads getting to central London still had cars they couldn't just let this mass of people loose on the streets. My hub was Clapham Common. As you can see from the pics below there were a lot of people on bikes. They funneled all of us under the small banner you can see in the first photo.
They forced people to wait patiently and allow 20 seconds between starts. Londoners waiting patiently was quite a sight in itself. It took almost an hour for me to get my turn to start and there was still a huge throng of people behind me. I thought it worked very well until people bunched up at the traffic lights down the road. It got a little chaotic at that point with bikes weaving through the stopped cars to get ahead at the lights. Fortunately, I only heard a few horns and saw no accidents with cars.

There were bikes of all kinds at this thing. Bikes that haven't seen the light of day for many, many years were rolled out and put to use.

Actually didn't see any of these bikes on the ride but thought I'd include them just for fun. A couple of you out there have seen these particular bikes before in another place where they drive on the wrong side of the road. For those of you that haven't seen these, they are penny farthing bikes invented by a British engineer named James Starley in 1871. How is that for trivia? Anyway Cheryl, her parents, and I saw these while traveling in New Zealand a few years ago.

The ride around the central London route was great. The pace was really slow over the 6 mile course but the sites were fantastic. I only saw a few people being inconsiderate and some going way too fast for the amount bikes on the road. Saw a few accidents but they all looked minor. Everybody was having fun. Who were these people and what had they done with the real Londoners.

Riding on London Bridge with Tower Bridge off in the distance.

Buckingham Palace Fountain

I borrowed the last 4 pics from the Hovis (sponsor) website. You should check out their website and buy their bread. They gave away 30,000 sandwiches but unfortunately not everyone got one. I was one of the lucky ones.
After finishing the route I parked my bike among the masses and went to see what else was on offer.

Hayden I thought you might like doing some of this trick riding if you ever got tired of that skateboard thing. These guys were pretty good bouncing and balancing on one tire over all those obstacles. Notice the bikes don't have seats so probably not good for any sort of distance riding.

Beware family stuff below!!! Speaking of Hayden (nephew). I thought you all might want to see him doing some of his skateboard stuff. So the following pics are of him showing off and looking pretty good while doing it. Too bad he's not doing it on a bike.

The photo credits for the Hayden pics go to Steven Byeon.
Hayden you look great.

At the end of the day it turned out that getting between 40,000 and 80,000 Londoners out of their cars and on their bikes was a very good thing. Hopefully the other 6.9 million can join in on the next ride.

Wimbledon 2007

Hi All,

I know everyone in the states are psyched about the U.S. Open getting underway in the big city (New York). So I thought it was about time to share some of the photos from my visit to The All England Wimbledon Lawn and Tennis Club.
Ok lets talk tennis, English style. They play on grass, what were they thinking.
When I was a kid, (ahem, not that long ago) there were big names in tennis like John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, and Chris Evert to name a few. Now days those guys are long gone and have been replaced by the likes of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Andy Roddick, Justine Henin, Maria Sharapova, and Venus and Serena Williams. Needless to say I was really excited to see this new crop of tennis professionals. You get to follow along as I relive Wimbledon 2007.

Don't worry it won't be that bad. So, Wimbledon is just over a mile (after listening to the players grunt, groan, and scream while hitting the tennis ball, I am surprised I couldn't actually hear them) from where I work so it made it rather easy to walk over and join the 1000's of other people queuing to get ground admission to see the days events.
I was there just before 7 am and was 1051st in line. I had given up on trying to get center court tickets since that required an overnight stay on the sidewalk in the rain. At this point one thing that needs to be mentioned is the weather. While waiting in line on the 26th of June, one should not be cold, wet, or miserable in anyway. Come on it's June, oh yeah this is England. The temp was in the 50's and it felt so much colder with the wind blowing much too hard. It did warm up later in the day and I'm sure there was at least an hour or so that I didn't have to wear my jacket. Play was to start at noon on the outer courts so I knew I had a long wait ahead of me. The wait wasn't all bad since a few companies were giving out free samples (juice, strawberry and cream yogurt (yum), but no coffee (where is a Starbuck's when you really need one, it would have been perfect) of their products as well as a few mementos like tennis balls and really cheap binoculars. Most of those items were confiscated from you as you went through security, go figure.

After finally making it through security, which took forever, I was faced with the task of figuring out what matches to see.

So was everyone else. As you can see, I wasn't the only one trying to get a glimpse of the big yellow board you see below. Once I got there, I was a bit awed by the possibilities. First of all, not having followed Tennis much since the Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors day, who were these players. Most of the names I recognized were in courts 1, 2, and center, which I didn't have tickets for (most of these were sold out long before I thought of coming to London). Therefor I decided to just do a bit of wandering around and check out the grounds, especially since I had about an hour before play began.

I found out that the best place to see the stars was to visit the practice courts. Somehow the crowds were less here than everywhere else. I got to see a few of the players I had actually heard of and could identify). Below are a few pictures of Maria Sharapova (world number 2 at the time) warming up.

I think we should have a caption contest for this one. It looks a bit like what she had for dinner last night might not have agreed with her. Anyway back to some of the other tennis stars. This is last years winner Amelie Mauresmo of France.

And former Wimbledon Champ Martina Hingis.

At noon the tennis started. At first all the people and all the tennis courts are overwhelming. The outer courts are just a bit crammed together. How the players can concentrate on the match is beyond me. I can remember players like John McEnroe being annoyed in a loud way at fans for moving around or talking during play. I wonder if they ever played on the outer courts. There are people everywhere, moving, talking and taking photos.

Elena Baltacha (England's number 1 player)

Of course I took a bunch of pictures as well so here are a few of the actual players that I saw. One person near the end of this section should be familiar to all of you Sacramento people out there. Unfortunately, I haven't heard of most of these players so don't think I need to copyright any of these photos. Although please feel free to send me money if I happened to catch your all time soon to be favorite tennis player. Hopefully I got the right names on the right photos.

Alize Cornet

Maria Kirilenko

Ekaterina Bychkova

Sun TianTian

Ruben Ramirez-Hidalgo

Sam Warburg from Sacramento

Florian Mayer

Florian and Sam argue with the umpire over a call.

So lets talk noises. Come on people when you hit the ball maybe make a little oomph sound. But the cacophony of noises one can hear from the tennis players is bordering on the absurd. One player was so bad, none of the above, I just had to give up my hard fought seat and leave. He made some sort of donkey noise after he hit the ball. Not that I have anything against donkey noises, I just didn't want to hear it any more.
I guess thats my rant for this blog, now back to Wimbledon.
I absolutely love this big screen tv. Cheryl, what do you think about getting one like this. Ok I'd settle for a slightly smaller one.

I'm not quite sure I understand why all these people paid so much money to come here and watch tv especially when you could have seen the same thing at home.

Apparently the balcony in the picture below is the place to be to watch all the tennis. I've included a few other pics of the place just for fun.

After all was said and done. I really enjoyed my day at Wimbledon. The last couple pictures were taken at about 9 pm. So it was a very long day. Yeah I know, it was still light out which was really cool. As it turned out this was the 2nd rainiest Wimbledon of all time. Luckily this day was one of the two that didn't get rain. Oh yeah, you haven't lived until you've had the Strawberries and Cream at Wimbledon.
Cheers.