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Bicycle Fun Club: Del Rey Christmas Lights Bike Tour

First things first:

 I always like to associate my blog entries with the date they happened rather than the date I write them. As a result, sometimes I write entries that sneak in behind the one which appears on top. What I haven't realized until now is that as a result, my vast readership winds up missing these entries as they're never on top. So before you read this post, go read these two:

 Off Topic: Giving Thanks and Shenandoah Spookout

 Now, back to business:

 My biking friends organized another "Bicycle Fun Club" ride - these rides are relatively leisurely, short, fun rides, usually associated with an event or theme. My kind of riding (as opposed to, say, the Hains Point 100, where people rode a Century (100 miles) by riding thirty-some-odd laps around Hains Point). This time, we were going to join up with the Del Rey Christmas Lights Bike Tour. On the grounds that this ride promised to be "no drop" and slow and family friendly, I convinced Valerie to join me. We drove our bikes down to Del Rey, where we unloaded and decorated them with battery-operated lights - my string of LED camping lights, some EL wire we had gotten as a prize at a Chesapeake Paddler's Association holiday party, and of course, assorted bike blinkies. We then joined some friends who were meeting up at St. Elmo's Coffee. We were a little on the late side so I had just enough time to slug down a cup before our group headed out to meet the overall ride.
At St. Elmo's (a little distorted by Panorama mode)
The group took off on what turned out to be a twisty-turny route through Del Rey. It would have been nice to have had a cue sheet, but I think that the organizers scoped out the best streets for viewing lights right before the ride and so didn't have time to put one together. At first the group stayed together and, being a highly illuminated mob of cyclists, had the mass and visibility to take the right of way as we rode. Valerie hadn't been on her bike in a while and so as the ride progressed we fell to the back of the pack. "No drop" means that there'll always be someone waiting at the turns to make sure the people at the back don't miss any turns (they were reasonably good about this, though not perfect). It does not, however, mean that anyone will hang back with you and so for parts of the ride it wound up being just the two of us riding by ourselves - though we'd keep catching the group when they'd stop to look at houses.
Valerie
Now, Valerie doesn't see all that well at night and doesn't have a lot of road riding experience and so having to cross streets by ourselves in the dark freaked her out a little bit. By the end of the ride she wasn't having a good time. Fortunately, at the very end of the ride we all managed to group up again and rode as a big, blinking, traffic-clogging blob of bikes up Mt. Vernon Avenue back to the start.
Checking Out a House Along the Tour

 Since, unlike many of the participants, we hadn't ridden there, we went to put our bikes away and so got separated from our group. Fortunately, we ran into Nadine from Dominion Hills who knew where they had gone. We caught up with them, managed to squeeze two more into a small dinner table, and had a nice dinner.

 So, Valerie did the bike tour, we saw some nice lights, and we got to do something unusual, funky and fun as part of our holiday season.
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Location: Alexandria, VA, USA

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