Walking in the Rain

The Atlanta Bicycle Coalition hosted the second Atlanta Streets Alive event of the year a couple of weeks ago, on May 18.  This was the first Streets Alive event I attended without Iain, who had left for Dresden a few days earlier.  Rain was forecast; I had volunteered for the set-up shift, and told Tom that that was the only time I *had* to be there, that if it was raining hard I would come home after that.  It was also unseasonably cool, and expecting to get wet, I wore my long underwear.  This was not typical Atlanta weather.

My assigned partner and I set up water stations along the north end of the route but that was all that they needed us to do, so after we were done I got lunch at Cafe Agora.  I had ordered it to go but while I was there it started to rain pretty hard so I stayed there to eat.  While I was there the police officer assigned to the nearby intersection stopped in for coffee.  He didn't look very happy.  It didn't look like it was going to be a great afternoon.

The participation was down, for sure -- I've not seen a head count for this one -- but it was still fun.  While it did rain off an on throughout the afternoon, if you were dressed for it, you were fine.  There was the bicycle parade, heading north on Peachtree.

There wasn't much live music this time, but there was recorded music being played at several places along the route, and these two volunteers were dancing.

The wet pavement provided a good surface for chalk art, which I saw in several places.

There were lots of people taking pictures, and I took some pictures of people taking pictures.  The man with the suitcase, who I imagined was from out of town and had stumbled onto the closed street and been surprised, was taking a picture of a musician at Peachtree Center.

These young men formed an impromptu chorus line in the middle of Peachtree Street.

And these two older ladies were being photographed as another photographer captured the scene.

I'm not quite sure what this was but it would scare me to have it this on the back of my bicycle.  It was (I should add) not an actual person.

There were a couple of food trucks and other vendors in the usual place, over the interstate, and when I went by the first time business was very slow.  They were busier when I came by the second time and I was hungrier, so I got an ice cream sandwich from Atomic Ice Cream.  It was unequivocally the best ice cream sandwich I ever had.  I talked with the man selling them about the weather.  I told him that I had been astonished when I lived in Boston that people ate a lot of ice cream, all year round.  He told me that Seattle had the highest per capita consumption of ice cream sandwiches in the country.  I said, well, it's a Seattle kind of day here today, so I guess it's a good day for an ice cream sandwich.

As it happened, a couple days later I left for Seattle, and the weather was fabulous.  Clear and sunny.