Cycling & bikes - Seattle-to-Portland hangers-on allowed?

On Jun 11, 5:37*pm, (David Rusin) wrote:

I'm planning my annual big ride, and it looks like it will bring me to Seattle,
Washington around July 13. If luck is with me, I could even get there around
July 11. I see from the web pages that the annual Seattle-to-Portland ride is
scheduled to take place July 11-12. Tickets are required (because 10,000 riders
is already enough) and the event is sold out. Most people take 2 days to do
the ride; about 15% do it in one day.

Well, I am the kind of idiot who might do it in one day. 'Course, I don't have
a ticket. But what happens if I just "happen" to be riding by on a bicycle?
Is there a mechanism to throw me out? Could I start on the 12th and try to
do it in one day?

Cascade Bicycle Club understandably does not like ride pirates. They
can't throw you out - the roads are all public, and legally, you can
ride anywhere that the official route leads. But even if you're not
eating the food at the rest stops, you're still taking advantage of
the police protection, the dan henrys, and all the other amenities of
the ride.

I think you have several options:
- Leave on the 10th or 13th
- Buy a ticket from someone over on the Cascade board. If you go to
http://cascade.org/Community/forum/c...s.cfm?catid=18, you'll see
some for sale right now.
- Leave on the 12th, then you're only pirating half the ride.

I'm not exactly sure why I'm asking, since I usually don't like the big
crowded rides,

It's a big crowded ride. About half the people are newbies, so you
have to deal with a lot of people who are relatively inexperienced
with big crowded rides. If you're riding a one-day, it really doesn't
thin out until past Longview. If you start on Sunday, you'll find
people on the course probably starting around Longview. An advantage
of starting on Sunday is that you'll get the escort on the Longview
bridge over the Columbia River. It's also a downside - depends on how
you feel about riding on a narrow shoulder over an enormously high
bridge with lots of motor vehicle traffic, versus doing the same in a
thick slow crowd of bikes instead.

Assuming the STP thing doesn't work out: how does a person arriving in
Seattle on a bicycle make his way to the SEA airport and check in a bicycle
on an airplane?

I can't speak to checking in the bike, but instructions on how to get
to the airport are he
http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/seatacbikemap.htm, or
http://cascade.org/Community/alternate_airport.cfm

HTH.

Regards,

Claire Petersky

Home of the meditative cyclist:
http://www.bicyclemeditations.org