Critical mass ride for Friday, 30 November

There was a good turnout this month considering the weather, I think the count was somewhere around 35. There was a good response from almost everyone around, both pedestrians and drivers (including a police officer in a marked van!), possibly because of the theme - "light up the night", where the competition was to see who could get the brightest set of lights going (I was excluded on the grounds that I'd be the obvious winner, even though I only had about 15 lights going). The only negative response was from an SUV driver who was apparently following behind us signalling to turn right, then when she saw we were turning left decided to turn left as well and shout out her window, "I own 3 bicycles! You shouldn't be doing this! I know the law, I have 3 bicycles, you're not doing it right!" as she barged her way past on the wrong side of the road forcing oncoming traffic to stop. It was amusing to see her signal right at the stop sign ahead of her, and as we started to catch up with her and also signal right, she decided to turn left instead. For some reason the phrase "dog in the manger" came to mind.

I took some pictures without flash that ended up on a half second exposure time (!) - some of them actually turned out reasonable well, after a bit of tweaking. Steve Bedard also put up a video on Youtube which did a good job of capturing the spirit of the ride.


Distance logged: 20.112km
Time: 83:55
Average speed: 14.4km/hr
Max speed: 41.7 km/hr
Temperature: -2C to -3C
Cumulative distance: 4508.391km
Cumulative cost per km: $0.21
Monthly distance: 42.913km
Monthly cost per km: $0.5