Now We're Starting to Roll...

"Hey good to see ya! How ya been?"
- A line heard quite often last night

Things have finally started to get back to "normal" since moving nearly 2 months ago, if there is such a thing. Last night, Rae and I partook in the monthly Roll: Bicycles Pub Ride for the first time in quite some time - my last was in April, and hers was last Autumn. She was debating participating until the day of, but I knew in my heart I needed to go. I needed to have a group ride, I needed to see friends, and so on.

The ride always meets up at the Scioto Mile in Downtown Columbus. Our new path to get there from our house isn't necessarily the most bike-friendly, so we opted to take the bus:

This was kinda neat for a few reasons:

1. Rae had never done it before. Novelties are always enjoyable, no matter how simple.
2. We couldn't easily use this option from our old house. Getting to and from the meetup either involved an extra 16 miles of biking or throwing the bikes on the car, finding a parking spot, paying for parking, and so on. Speaking of paying...
3. Round trip total expenses were $8! A big reason why I champion public transit is affordability. I understand Uber or Lyft may be quicker, but the savings for a family on a budget are more valuable than the money itself.

The bus dropped us off less than a half mile from the meetup, near the Bicentennial Park fountain. We paused briefly to make use of the facilities (not pictured, duh) and enjoy the scenery:

We were joined at the meetup by nearly 60 riders and...A DOG!

His name is Buddy, and he will appear again throughout this post. He was easily my favorite part of this ride. My second favorite part was the absolutely gorgeous weather we had, with some cloud cover and temps in the 70's:

Nearly perfect, I would say. We headed west and reached our first stop at Sideswipe Brewing. Buddy enjoyed his ride, as you can see:

So many riders met up with us that we overfilled the bike racks. We were forced to park across the parking lot and lock our bikes to each other:

Sideswipe is a decent destination for a bike beer ride. It's close to both the Scioto and Camp Chase trails, and for me personally, it's literally a 1/4 mile away from my office. You would think I'd go there more often, but this was actually my first visit since early Spring. I should change that. Their beer is pretty great. Anyway...

We headed back east on the Scioto Trail from there. I ended up being right behind my new best friend for a little while:

The ride was mostly smooth, but there were some minor incidents. I nearly got caught up in that fence you see above due to someone abruptly stopping in front of me (I was fine), and my friend Joe was blocking car traffic and got hit from behind...by another cyclist not paying attention. He's also fine, but has some muscle irritation.

Despite these minor annoyances, we did eventually reach our second stop at Platform Brewing, which features a great rooftop view of downtown that my phone camera does no justice:

We then headed back westward through downtown and finished up at a frequent stop, BrewDog in Franklinton:

After a couple more beverages and some light munchies, we hopped on the bus and headed back home after what I can only describe as a great, fun evening. It felt great to log some miles beyond my usual day-to-day errands, but it was even better to see some people that I've unfortunately forgotten about the last couple months while we've been too busy to get out of our own little sphere of influence. We have more friends here than I realized. That's a good feeling. Special thanks to Jason, Kyle, and all the folks at Roll for everything last night and beyond.

So how have we been? Good, and now we're ready to roll again.