A month ago I enjoyed critical mass in San Francisco. There was the usual riding all over, but what made it different was I spent a lot of time riding with a nice Canadian on a green Cannondale. She was embarked on a cross country bike ride. She'd started up north and was going through San Francisco on her way. Her plan was to go to Burning Man, and then ride south to San Diego and points east.

The way she was talking about Burning Man made me want to go so bad I did. I didn't see her there, but that's not surprising. With 50,000 burners around finding someone at an unknown location is tough. It didn't bother me that much, because Burning Man is one fascinating sight after another. I just enjoyed the event for what it was. But that's another story.

I signed up as a facebook friend of hers, and it was a treat to watch her progress. That started with trading Burning Man pictures. Hers were good. After that it seemed like every couple of days there would be another fine landscape photograph and/or an anecdote of some sort from her ride. Then her plans changed. To make a long story short, she was back in San Francisco and planning to be at critical mass this month, dressed up as "the soul of visibility".

Halloween critical mass is special. LOTS of people dress up in colorful and imaginative ways. I've gone and taken pictures at it many times. The forcast called for rain, so the only thing I could dress up as that would handle the weather was a bush. I raided the bushes between my front door and the mail box for branches that were sticking out. Then I spent hours gluing them to my bike and helmet. My theory was that with green facepaint and a camo poncho I'd be invisible.

  

I managed to get my bike on the train without losing too much of the greenery. I sat across from these two fine young ladies. They enjoyed painting my face, all the while talking about boys. The one on the left was on the way to work, where she planned to give this guy a cupcake. She wanted marriage from him, an aquaintance. As a New Jersey catholic, she was ripe for that. The other one is a Stanford grad student (also from New Jersey), living in sin with some guy. They greened me up just fine.

The problem was that somebody had died on the tracks at the Belmont station. This caused service delays. The train was at least half an hour behind schedule, and was looking at being really late. When we got to San Francisco it was something like 6:45, and likely the ride had already left Justin Herman Plaza going in an unknown direction. I was lucky though, one of the other bicyclists on the train was in cell phone contact with someone in the ride, so I followed him until we caught up with the ride.

     

        

I shot a dinosaur! :-)

        

     

     

     

     

        

     

        

        

        

OMG! They unleashed a flying monkey! Eeeek!

     

That guy on the bike with the white top tube's bushyness stuck out a lot more than mine did. I wish I had a picture of me riding, but I couldn't do that.

You can tell by the shiny streets that it was raining by this point in the ride. Actually, it had been drizzling for quite a while already.

        

Carmen San Diego was on the ride, but I never found Waldo.

     

The guy with the patriotic peace flag also had a good sound system on the back of his bike.

    

That raised bike was part of a mass bike raising. Unfortunately my camera doesn't do big group shots in the dark very well, so you have to imagine all of the other ones. It looked good though.

     

     

The ride got slowly smaller as the miles passed. It was still fairly big when I found the soul of visibility, but I lost interest in taking pictures after that. I'd gotten most of the good ones at that point anyhow. We rode together and talked for 10 kilometers (her bike readout is metric) or something like that. She explained that her friend dying in a bike/car crash had been a key factor in her abandoning her coast to coast bike ride.

Critical mass got sub critical about where Mission passes the end of Valencia, maybe three hours of pedaling after we started. We turned around and headed back downtown. I parted company with her around Van Ness and headed for the train. I was wet, tired, and hungry.