Bicycle Freedom

After volleyball today I took my bike and rode into town and up to the main highway. It is all business up in that area. Everything is truck and auto repair, furniture manufacturing and a few places to eat.

It is a real challenge to get across all four of the lanes. The main highway almost always has frontage roads that parallel them. The frontage roads have about the same amount of traffic as the highway, but it moves slower. When you approach the area you think that you need to use the Frogger approach to crossing the lanes. Move forward to the median, wait, cross highway, wait, cross frontage road, score points. What you really have to do is to flow with the traffic of the frontage road and move to the median, then cross the traffic of the highway and flow right into the traffic of the frontage road. That is the main approach if the roads are real busy. That approach causes you to kind of ride in a half circle but it gets you across the traffic. The other way is to wait and launch. You find and opening and then rocket out and try to make it across without damage.

Yesterday I was talking to Larry about driving in Mexico and he had a great tip that I would have never thought about. Larry's rule of thumb is that you never yield to pedestrians or bikes, because they do not expect you to do so. When you yield, they don't know what to do and it causes all sorts of problems. In the States, you yield to walkers and everyone around you understands that you are doing so and they all make decisions accordingly. Here no one is expecting it and so if you do, then all hell breaks out. Put your civilized people friendly manners away and just drive!