Fo Fo Fo

One of the best parts of living in the city (at least for me) is that on random occasions, you can just decide on a whim to go to a sporting event. It's even better when your friend offers a free ticket, which happened upon my existence some time Wednesday afternoon.

The ticket was for the Sixers game, a team I hadn't previously seen live in about 7 years. I went to the game basically straight from the office with a quick stop at home, so it only made sense to ride the rest of the way there. It was also fairly decent weather-wise that day, and again, any excuse to...ah, you already know the rest.

I actually mentioned in this post at the end of 2016 that I had yet to ride my bike to a Sixers game. Cross that one off the non-existent "to-do" list. Even though I've been here before, I'm still thrilled that they have bike racks outside the arena. I'm not so thrilled by the layout:

Trust me - my rear mount rack isn't touching my tire. Optical illusion.

This might not look so bad, but consider that there's a whole rack there and only two bikes attached to it, both on the ends. Also consider that there's a U-lock mysteriously floating in the middle there. This bike rack is designed to hold the front or back tire in place, which you lock to the rack, meaning anyone can simply take off the wheel and jack the rest of your bike. These racks were commonplace when bicycle theft wasn't as prevalent. Unfortunately, humans are awesome creatures that steal things and there are many more of them now, so we've had to adapt. The more modern way to lock your bike to one of these outdated racks is as follows:

Sort of.

As you can see, I've had to face this problem with this rack before, back in April 2016. The green bike in the foreground isn't really locked completely if you look closely. Ideally, the front tire would fit over the rack, enabling the lock to fit around the tire and the frame. Moving the rack even 6 inches away from the wall would solve the problem.

But enough ranting about the bike rack. There was apparently a basketball game that night, and our seats were in the club level, which was completely new to me:

I made zero jokes about being in the club. I swear.

Not a bad view, right? I've been all over this arena, but this was a first. The seats included a small sectioned off seating area, a dining area (with servers) and a private bar, which was all pretty cool, but honestly I still prefer being out with the "commoners." For one, my brief adventure "outside the box" revealed this oddity:

Who the hell makes a 19.2 oz. can?

For only $10 at a sporting event in Philly, that's unheard of, and it was much cheaper than the beers in the club box. This also happens to be one of my favorite beers. All in all it sucked that we lost, but I can't complain about a random good time with friends, including the ride to and from the game. And I'd surely go into more depth about said game or the beer if this weren't a cycling blog, but as such...