Eric and Cosmo set the standard for
"doing it right!"
I don't remember the gorilla
scene...
Yup. Bike Party still stops for red
lights! I still like that.
That Sunnyvale Volleyball Champion
may not look like something out of Rocky Horror, but his sound
system was blasting the movie sound track. Very apropos!
I birded for a while, trying to get
notable sights as they zoomed by. I missed some good sights by not
being ready when I saw them.
The woman with the red wheels wasn't
part of bike party. She just wanted to cross the street. She
waited patiently with me for quite a while before the traffic
cleared enough that she could safely cross. I took her picture
after she did quite a bit of waiting.
Peter wanted to be in my pictures,
even though he didn't look Rocky Horror at all. He found a friend
that was awesomely sexy maidy and they did the time warp together.
I figure anybody that could do the time warp must be on theme.
"Let's do the time warp again!"
Coming out of the regroup there was
a ghost bike by the street. Click the picture to find out more
about that.
After that, it was mostly pedaling for the finish and talking to
people I was riding with. Not a lot of photo ops.
I was browsing the crowd at the end
when I heard a thump followed by people yelling "Call 911! Get an
ambulance!" I echoed the word down the line and started running
for El Camino. It wasn't long before cops had parked their bikes
in the road to keep cars from making the guys problems worse. They
showed up in not more than a minute.
Somebody told me that it had been a
hit and run. The rider had been crossing the road to enter the
parking lot when a car had driven right into him like the driver
hadn't even seen him. I heard "head on collision." The front wheel
of the guy's bike was bent like a taco. All I could think was
"this is bad." All the other onlookers had sick (meaning troubled
in that "it could have been me" way) looks on their faces.
It wasn't long before fire trucks
replaced the cop motorcycles blocking the road. Soon after that
the ambulance showed up. It must have been bad because the guy
took the ride in the ambulance.
Later in SJBikeParty.org's reflections on the ride MVRobb wrote "A
young male got clipped by a southbound car on El Camino Real. He
had crossed the island from the northbound lane to take a short
cut to the end point. He did not have any lights on and was not
visible to the driver. Pretty scary, I was in the parking lot and
all I heard was the loud THUMP. A friend and I ran out with
several others at the scene to stop traffic. He was shaken
up,bruised and scrapped up but will survive. The driver of the car
pulled over and cooperated with the police on scene." In another
comment somebody else mentioned that the rider had broken his
pelvis. Another said that the driver was DUI and so was the rider.
It was a while before the crowd
trickling in wasn't polluted by the memory. The red hand glowed in
the dark, but my camera just wasn't sensitive enough to capture
the effect. One problem is that there isn't a software button for
turning off the flash. Grrr...
Hmmmm... John has a cute date! I've
not seen that before...
