Another treat from Flying Pigeon last Saturday, as Gina and I rolled along on the monthly Brewery Ride, one of several that the Pigeon puts on for the sake of velocipedal conviviality. The last one (that we went on) was a short jaunt to the Eagle Rock Brewery–which, of course, is not quite in Eagle Rock.
The endpoint for this month’s ride was the more appropriately-monikered Angel City Brewery–well, appropriate now that they’ve actually moved into the City of Los Angeles. Right downtown in Little Tokyo, in fact, in a righteously industrial-looking building, complete with a corkscrew slide leading down from the third floor, for the quick delivery of whatever it was that used to be made in the building ages ago (and which they wouldn’t let Gina play on, much to her dismay).
So we gathered at the Pigeon in the clean afternoon sunlight, while Josef and crew put the final touches on the beach cruisers he’d assembled as rental bikes–for the deprived but deserving netizens who had followed a trail of Tweets to Figueroa, on the promise of bikes for the bikeless and a secret route to sweet craft beer.
A secret route it was, involving quiet side streets, a dizzyingly-graffiti’d footbridge over the Pasadena freeway, some bumpety-bumping over railroad tracks both active and abandoned to the river’s edge, and a crawl through Chinatown to the center city and thence to Little Tokyo and the building you see pictured in Gina‘s photo above.
You also see what a motley crew we were–Gina rode her randonneuse, Vivian, I was astride Trevor Wong, my bizarro fixed-gear path racer wannabe, whose brilliant orange paint was dimmed only by the vinyl panniers on Josef’s Bakfiets.
The rest of the crew that wasn’t on borrowed beach bikes rode any old thing from MTBs to road bikes to Dutch cruisers. All ambled happily along, chatting and laughing, through shattered alleys and bumbling traffic in search of good local beer–though the cruiser contingent wandered about the road so much (even before the brew) that Gina took it on herself to ride sweep and keep some modicum of order in the ride. And avoid leaving anyone behind.
Beer imbibed, Italian treats from the food truck of the day scarfed down, and we began our homeward roll. Gina and I peeled off at Union Station to catch a Red Line back to Mid-Wilshire, but we didn’t leave the happy feelings behind.
Thank you, Flying Pigeon, for another happy Saturday! Can’t wait for next month….