Team Teriyaki Donut in the Crossroads Street Scramble 2005

Introduction

Team Teriyaki Donut is Elizabeth Walkup and I, Greg Barnes. We have lived in Seattle continuously since 1998, and off and on for about 10 years before that. We know very little about Bellevue.

We entered the bike division of the Crossroads Street Scramble, riding separate bikes, and stayed out for 3 hours.

Preparation

A few weeks after wrecking our King County and Seattle bicycle maps in the deluge that took place during the Northshore Scramble, I picked up replacements at the Cascade Bicycle Club office. While there, I also got copies of the Bellevue and Redmond bicycle maps. The Bellevue map was particularly useful for this street scramble --- I kept it in a map case with the answer sheet, and used it to figure out the names of the streets we needed to turn on.

The night before the Scramble, Elizabeth and I sat down with the Bellevue and Redmond bike maps to try to get the lay of the land. If you look at the Bellevue map, you can see that the streets around Crossroads are almost all red, indicating they may be dangerous. South and east of Crossroads looked okay, but we figured we'd end up making a loop of sorts, and we'd have to go west and north. In fact, we guessed we might be sent to downtown Bellevue. (This did not turn out to be the case --- there were no checkpoints west of 405, which was a good thing since, according to the bike map, there is no safe way to cross 405 on a bike. Welcome to Bellevue).

At one point I had a contract job at Microsoft, so I'd been on some of these red streets on a bike early on a weekend morning (albeit 10 years ago), and I guessed that as long as we stayed off the most horrible streets (basically, 148th Ave and Northup Way), and as long as we traversed the worst streets before people started shopping in earnest, we'd probably be okay. So our tentative plan was to head north and west first, using Bellevue-Redmond road as our route west (the King County bike map seemed to think it was the best of the bunch), and finish up with checkpoints to the east and south later in the Scramble when the shoppers would probably be out in force.

We also tried to judge where the hills were in Bellevue, mostly by looking at the arrows on the bike map that indicate steep hills. It was clear that going west from Lake Samammish would require climbing a hill, and we were almost sure there would be a checkpoint or more on Lake Sammamish (we were wrong about that). Another interesting area was around Kelsey Creek Park. We were almost sure we would be sent there (and in this we were correct), and it's clear that the road south of it (the Lake Hills Connector) was a nasty hill best avoided. But there didn't seem to be any way to avoid that road without going horribly out of the way, unless there was a trail through the park. So on Friday night, I went in search of Bellevue trail maps on the web, and found some useful ones. I printed out a few. As it turned out, we never took the Kelsey Creek Park trails, but the map through Tam O'Shanter Park we did use, and just looking at the maps gave me some knowledge of the parks, particularly the Lake Hills Greenbelt.

The Scramble itself

We visited 27 checkpoints and got 840 points. We planned a route that would pick up all the checkpoints, per my notes from the previous Scramble. I believe we could have picked up all the checkpoints, too, or at worst only missed a few of the 10 point checkpoints we left for last. But unfortunately, with about an hour left, I blew my back tire. This was about a mile from Crossroads, so there was no problem getting back, but I had a spare tube, so we knew we could do better, if only we had a bicycle pump. We asked someone who was running a garage sale whether we could borrow a bicycle pump, or, failing that, where the nearest gas station was, and were directed to a station at NE 8th St and 164th Ave NE, which was happily only about a mile away, and on a route that allowed us to pick up a few checkpoints to boot.

We got 3 checkpoints while walking roughly a mile to the gas station. I swapped in the new tube at the gas station and used their air to pump it up, and ended up spending about half an hour off the bike. We spent the last 25 minutes of the Scramble on the repaired bike, allowing us to pick up a few more high-value checkpoints before arriving back at the mall just at the 3 hour mark.

Our route as planned was north on 156th to the Overlake Transit Center, doubling back to Bellevue-Redmond Road to do the west leg as early as possible (as mentioned above), south to the Botanical Garden, then over to Kelsey Creek Park (on streets, not the trail through Wilburton Hill Park). Then back up to NE 8th and back down to the checkpoint near Sammamish High School. To get from there to Larsen Lake, I elected to use the Lake-To-Lake Trail (which the signs made clear was okay for bikes), but it was gravel at this point and it probably would have been faster to take streets instead. From Larsen Lake down to Phantom Lake, we also took the Trail, which I am sure was the best route for that leg. At Phantom Lake we dashed over to the BCC checkpoint, using the trail at 28th SE (which is on the Bellevue Bicycle Map, but not on the event map --- it runs along the south edge of Robinswood Park). We retraced our steps to Phantom Lake, picking up a couple more checkpoints before my tire blew at around Lake Hills Boulevard and 164th NE. We followed our original route up to the labyrinth (checkpoint 35). From there, our original route had us head east, picking up the checkpoints nearest Lake Samammish, heading back west on NE 24th, south roughly following 164th, and back to the mall (leaving 11, 12, 13 in the mall and 15 nearby if we had extra time).

Because of the flat tire, we instead continued north on 164th from the labyrinth to the gas station (near checkpoint 25). Once the tire was repaired, we had 25 minutes left, and 14 and 42 were the obvious checkpoints to pick up. At 42, we decided we would risk going down the hill to 21 and 55 around Tam O'Shanter, and, as I said, we managed to visit these and get back to the mall (cutting through from Northup to NE 8th via 170th NE).

Our raw route:

23 [(golf?) course sign], 41 [Microsoft sign], 31 [utility box], 54 [office park sculpture], 43 [BMX rules], 18 [flagged sign], 52 [bird bath], 51 [botanical garden], 37 [Kelsey Creek Park], 26 [wooden staircase], 24 [sign on utility pole], 34 [mailbox], 44 [number on tree], 45 [Larsen Lake], 17 [Little League], 38 [tree in circle], 46 [Phantom Lake], 53 [BCC], 28 [staircase between schools], 39 [Evergreen Park], [flat tire], 27 [wooden bear], 35 [labyrinth], 25 [Crossroads Park], [tire fixed], 14 [Peace bus shelter], 42 [Ivanhoe Park], 21 [Tam O'Shanter Park], 55 [Tam O'Shanter trail sign]

We placed first in our division, but there were only two teams.

I believe we traveled approximately 24 miles, 1 mile walking the bikes, 23 riding the bikes. Ignoring the walking and repair time, this comes out to about 9.6 mph.

Notes

• Our pace was much faster than in any of our previous scrambles, and almost matched our speed during the Vashon portion of last year's Night and Day Challenge. This is probably because (like Vashon) there was much less 'in-city' riding (read: stoplights), and (I'm guessing) the distances between checkpoints was also greater. Also, our route seemed relatively flat. There was a hill on NE 8th east of checkpoint 24, checkpoint 44 required descending and climbing a hill, there was a mild hill south of Phantom Lake, a couple of one-block hills between 37 and 26, and two short ascents in our mad dash back from 55 to the finish. Still, given that Bellevue is not nearly as regraded as Seattle, I was surprised how little climbing there was.
• The bird bath (checkpoint 52) was bizarre and wonderful. For those who didn't get there, you're traveling along on a busy street with industrial sites on both sides, and huge power line on one side of the road, and the question sheet wants you to find a birdbath. And just beyond one of the huge power poles, there is a stone bench and birdbath. Very strange.
• There was apparently another walking event going on at roughly the same time, heading north on the Lake Hills greenbelt, as we passed a bunch of people walking with some kind of logo on an id badge.
• On our maps, I had originally mistakenly marked a route from Phantom Lake to BCC that traveled on the north side of Robinswood Park. I thought about reminding Elizabeth that we weren't following that route, but she verified that once we got into the college we would make two sloping lefts, which sounded to me like what the new route would be. As it turns out, she did think we were following the original route (entering at SE 26th instead of 28th), and 'two sloping lefts' could apply either way: from 26th, the road curves left twice (west to south). From 28th, you turn left (south) twice, and it curves back west. Needless to say, she got rather angry and confused when the road we followed didn't at all match the route she thought we were surely taking.
• We once again managed to make back our $20 entry fee (as well as the 50 cents I spent on air). Our prize was two pairs of socks (one for me, one for Elizabeth), a $10 gift card at Half Price Books (we plan on using it at the one in the University District) and a $7 gift certificate for any Crossroads restaurant. The gift certificate expired in 180 days, and we didn't know if we would get over to Crossroads again in that time (it is a pretty nice place, but we don't get over to the Eastside very often). We weren't feeling hungry, either, so spending it on food seemed like a waste. We solved our dilemma by buying a $6.95 bottle of BBQ sauce from the Jones BBQ stand. (Jones is a great place --- we visit the original restaurant fairly often considering it is rather inconveniently far from us in Columbia City.)
• According to the automatic speed display on 124th Ave NE (south of NE 8th St), we were going 17-18mph when we passed, and were the only vehicles obeying the posted 25mph speed limit.

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