Ride With Me – Midnight Mystery Moon-ride

Among the social bike-events in Victoria are the Midnight Mystery Rides. Since I missed the last one, I decided to stay in town long enough to experience one of these famous rides. The idea is to get together on bicycles, and follow a “guide” to cool places along exciting routes. Since there is relatively little traffic late at night, we wouldn’t be bothered by many motorists.

The meeting point was Centennial Square in downtown Victoria at 9:00 p.m. so I decided with Jordan, a fellow mechanic at Recyclistas, to ride out to Six Mile Pub for a beer and some of their allegedly healthy and delicious food, before heading back downtown to meet for the ride. At the same time I would test out my newly installed Strava app.

Besides the unusually good pub-food, we’d been recommended to see an underground anarcho skater park, under a bridge right next to the pub, so we wanted to check that out too. We didn’t have to look for too long, just followed the sounds of skateboards, and we found it. Apparently, some skaters have created their ramps and half-pipes right there under the bridge. It looked amazing to say the least, not only because of the cool looking graffiti.

Seeing that it was later than we thought, we skipped the pub, and rode towards the city center, via Esquimalt, where Jordan lives. Meeting up with his girlfriend Emily, we stopped by another Poutine place, where I tried traditional poutine (okay, with additional mushrooms, pepperoni and green pepper topping, it may have been a bit more than traditional) and another Quebecois specialty: Spruce soda. The food was delicious, as I was quite hungry as well, and the soda tasted ... like a christmas-tree. Not bad, essentially, I just didn’t like the soda-pop aspect of it.

Strava did not record this ride through Esquimalt, as I had switched it off. Instead, here is a picture of the Municipal Hall of Esquimalt, showing a mural rich in native imagery, which must have been painted quite some time ago, as it is a bit faded. You can see on the map, however, the end of the evening ride and the start of the night right had to be connected somehow: it must have been around 10 km or so.

As we got into Centennial Square, the group had already assembled, and were ready to leave. We were about a dozen bike nuts, many of whom I knew from either Recyclistas, or bike-polo, or both. Our guide was to be Neil, the director of Angels Choppers Bicycle Club I had mentioned in my post about Poutine 66. After a couple of rounds in the square, we headed out towards the waterfront.

Ironically, the ride took the same course as my solo ride the previous evening, so I found it appropriate to include a picture I took then of the view of the Olympic Peninsula across the Juan de Fuca Straight, with the container ship in the foreground. We even rode out on the famous sea-wall, and Strava did a good job recording it. (No, we did not go swimming.) From here we could see some gigantic cruise ships, which are probably small in comparison to what monstrosities are floating out there.

From what I gathered, this mystery ride must have been one of the shorter ones. We took long breaks, cracked beers, had elaborate chats, and kept waiting for stragglers. Our last proper station was the Mile Zero point of the Trans Canada Highway. From here the ride slowly disintegrated, as some folks headed home, others into other directions. And it was only midnight! So, as enjoyable as it was, the ride was neither mid-night, nor all too mysterious, and other than our lunatic leader there was not much of a moon out.

I kept Strava on until I made my way back to Ryan’s place, where I evaluated the results. All together it must have been around 25 km, including the part I didn’t record. It didn’t even feel like we rode that much! All in all, it was a fun evening, and a successful test-run of this app. I’m sure I’ll be using it on future rides.