Last Sunday I did the Bike the Drive ride in Chicago for the first time. They close down 30 miles of Lake Shore Drive (Route 41) to automotive traffic for this event and the road is only open to bike riders for about 5 hours.
2012 Bike the Drive on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago
According to Wikipedia this even has been going on since 2002 so I guess this was the 10th annual Bike the Drive. The main reason that I had not participated in the ride until this year was because the event is so early in the morning. It starts at about 5:30am so for me to get up, get ready and be downtown by that time (I did not want to be late and miss any of the riding time) I had to get up at 2:30am!
OK, aside from the start time, this was an excellent ride and really a lot of fun! I wish they would do this more often (and later in the day 🙂 )
As I had mentioned in one of my previous posts, I just got a new DSLR Camera and I have been chomping at the bit for a good event, like this, to get out and get some good photos. Well, I finally got my chance and I got quite a few good photos at this event. Unfortunately, it was an overcast and cloudy day, which caused some problems, but I was still able to get quite a few good shots. I am still learning how to use this camera so I messed up a lot of the photos too (even though I have uploaded many that were not technically that great).
I wanted to get my Ride Report and the Photos posted on the internet much sooner but it took some time to sort through all the photos, select the good ones that captured the feel of the ride and format and post the photos and report. Since this was such a fun event I wanted to do it right rather than just blasting out a ton of photos as quickly as possible.
Anyway, you can now see the 2012 Bike the Drive Photo Tour and Ride Report here. I also had my Garmin Edge 800 GPS bike computer on the ride (of course) and I posted the route that we rode also. If you look closely at the map you will see where we branched out off of LSD a little. This was from after the ride when we rode out to the Shedd Aquarium and the planetarium.