My lanky, bright-red stop-sign of a date
Finally! After twenty dates, I was finally having a date outside, to go biking in San Francisco. I guessed (to myself and all my friends) that this might be Tripper’s “first date” test. He was way into the sport of biking and it made sense that he would want to meet biking ladies,
which I wasn’t, but I didn’t mind donning spandex if I happened to be at the right poundage.
He was wearing a bright red biking top made of some fabric with special wicking designed to keep the wearer dry, plus he was sporting a bright red, streamlined, aerodynamic helmet. Truth be told, he looked like a super dork, but I was willing to learn more about him. We chatted briefly, then cycled off towards the Embarcadero and down Bay Street to Fort Mason, an old armory on the San Francisco waterfront. From there we took a bike path that traversed a nice little park that dumped us out near the Marina Green.
We soon passed the Palace of Fine Arts building, a beautiful remnant of the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915. If you’ve ever seen the Alfred Hitchcock film, Vertigo, it’s the museum where Jimmy Stewart stalks Kim Novak while she sits and stares at the painting of Carlotta Valdes.
The sun was shining brightly. I was feeling very vibrant to be riding past all this cool San Francisco history on my bike. And then the Golden Gate Bridge loomed before us. I begged like a little kid to cross over it on our bikes, and Tripper, the digital effects guy, finally acquiesced, although he didn’t see the big deal I was making over it.
“Probably because it’s only like the most significant landmark in California, besides the La Brea Tar Pits,” I said to my lanky, bright-red stop-sign of a date, which was the longest sentence uttered on this date thus far.
As we crossed the bridge, other cyclists twenty feet ahead of me were suddenly eaten by the fog while the wind was gusting so hard I was having trouble controlling my bike. I rammed into the guardrail a few times, but I didn’t care. I was grinning like a moron and loving every minute of it. I was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge on my bike.
Hey everybody! Look at me!
Once safely on the north side, Tripper was quite pleased that I was quite pleased. My smile was so contagious that a group of Asian tourists asked me to pose in a photo with them taken by a sign that read “Golden Gate Bridge.”
Riding back across the bridge, the wind off the Pacific was incredible. It whipped us around at possibly thirty miles per hour. My smile was still going strong, and it continued past all the gorgeous scenery and even into the cool bar we went to in the Sunset District.
I really liked Tripper’s city and his lifestyle. But he looked goofy in his spandex, and didn’t even bother removing his bike helmet as we enjoyed our après-bike Shiner Bock beer.
I watched him as I waited in line for the bathroom and felt sort of embarrassed to rejoin him at our table, even though I was still on my biking high. My smile disappeared, however, when he announced that we could get up in the morning and ride south to Lake Merced. I couldn’t believe he actually thought I was going to stay the night with him, and he couldn’t believe that I actually wasn’t.