Thousands of Friends, Old Men on Street Corners

The thing which impresses me most about the Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic is the impressive showing of supporters of the event. I had a lot of time to think about this.

First of all, the body of organizers for an event for ten thousand people must be fairly large. There were an impressive number of officials and support personnel at the start in Seattle. The showing of law enforcement to close down sections of city streets in Seattle and in other places was magnificent. Then there were the volunteers manning the stops along the way; the bicycle repair shops doing minor labor free of charge; the volunteers providing first aid at all locations; the support riders with on-the-spot first aid and communication with other bodies like paramedic crews. REI hosted a pretty cool party at their headquarters in Kent. Carter Subaru fielded a large number of support vehicles, and the Honda Goldwing Touring association was out running cover for us and offering assistance right up to the finish line. Darigold kept me full of chocolate milk, and at an event like this, when a stranger walks up to you and gives you a tablet to put in your water, you take it. (It was fine). They even shut down the bridge at Longview to usher a few hundred cyclists at a time into Oregon. The detailed directions in the map booklet and the tags painted on the ground never failed when we were alone on the route early this morning, without someone with more experience to follow.

Most impressive were the people not directly affiliated with any of these. The people that stood out most were the people who came out to cheer on thousands of identical cyclists as they passed by their homes and parks. There were old men in lawn chairs sitting on street corners who clapped for probably hours as these thousands of strangers came by. A family in Centralia built a misting station for us to ride through at journey's end on Day One. Citizens in Yelm, Washington greeted and applauded riders as though they were heroes.

After an accounting of the last two days and two hundred miles on my bicycle, the phrases I uttered most this weekend were "On your left!", "Car back!", and to me the most important: "Thank you!"