Friday, May 22, 2009

A ride in the park

My buddy Blake and I decided to do a little ride in the city the other day. Blake lives in San Francisco, in the sunset, and we decided to meet at his place on a perfectly beautiful Saturday. The idea was to bike around Golden Gate park head out to the presidio, ride over the Golden Gate Bridge and dip into Sausilito for lunch and then head back. Blake got a bike a few months ago and so we were both excited to get some biking in on this perfect day.

Blake first came to The Last Hill Project a few months ago when I was cruising up the Mexican coast. He mentioned that he wanted to get a bike and ride with me part of the way. I told him that would be cool but I was doing about 80 miles a day in some tuff terrain. Blake wasn't quite up to that pace but he told me that we would ride when I got back to SF.

So here we are...crusing through Golden Gate park.

I told my buddy that we are about 4 or 5 thousand bucks short of hitting the $15,000 goal. As we were riding we were passing around ideas on how to reach our goal. One idea was to do a one day bike ride event where the participants pay a registration fee. The money of course would go through Plan USA and then go towards building the school in Guatemala. My intial though was to do a bike ride that started at the Golden Gate bridge and rode for about 7 miles in Sausilito and back. The terrain isn't to hard BUT it might scare some people off.

So Balke and I decided to change it up a bit. We came to the conclusion that we need to make this thing a total joy ride. We want to do a 10 mile ride around Golden Gate park and then ending at one of the popular picnic areas, Speedway Meadow. That way even people who haven't been on 2 wheels in years wouldn't be scarewd to come.

So were cruising along Golden Gate park and we stumble upon a huge festival, at Speedway Meadow, geard for kids. Wew stumbled upon a couple of really choice things. One, we noticed amongst the mahem of kids running around crazy, that the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition was sponsoring a bike barn. So I rolled up to the guy and got a ton of info on the SFBC and some valuable contact info. Two, Cliff Bar was sponsoring the event and again Blake and I made an intro and got The Northern California Marketing Doirectors info. Shell also be a great contact if we decided to get some corpoprate spopnsors. And three, I was even able to reserve a spot for the picnic at San Francisco's Park and permit department which is located right indside the park. I guess you could saw were starting to make some moves for the event.

The ride with Blake was super cool. We hit up a cool cafe in Sauslitio. Grabbed a beer and talked about the usual. Blakes a super cool and chill guy. Blake and his lovely irlfriend Krystal are moving to a new apartment near the feerry building. It was great to see his eyes light up when he was talking about getting his own place with his girlfriend. We also talked about South America and travelling. He's always toying with the idea of taking his business and moving to Santiago de Chile.

Overall...it was a great day. Its great to be back!

Peace, Power and Pedal

Aaron

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