Teriyaki Donut is my son, Omar Barnes, and me, Greg Barnes. Omar turned 6 the day of the 2006 Crossroads Street Scramble. I ride a mountain bike with Omar in a Trail-a-Bike behind, and we compete in the 3-hour family bike division.
On the morning of the Scramble, it was raining steadily in Seattle, but by the time we got to the freeway exit for Crossroads, the rain had diminished to a drizzle at best. My wife, Elizabeth Walkup, and her friend Lauren Bricker, who ride road bikes, decided due to the rain and their distrust of Bellevue drivers to compete on foot (as the team We're Not Sisters). I decided to stick it out on the mountain bike, and the weather mostly cooperated; at worst, we rode in a little drizzle at the start.
As in last year's Crossroads Scramble, many of the streets surrounding the mall are hazardous for bicycles, particularly those to the north and west. I particularly didn't want to take any chances with Omar in the back and the still-wet roads, so I followed the same strategy of last year: visiting the checkpoints to the north and west first, finishing up in the more sedate south and east.
We visited 20 checkpoints and got 660 points: 22 [church parking lot], 57 [bus shelter], 33 [school mural], 44 [paddle sculpture], 31 ['water' post], 56 [cannon], 54 [right field distance], 47 [railroad bridge], 25 [polka dot mailbox], 43 [porch swing], 53 [circular table], 52 [four yellow posts], 23 ['B' sculpture], 36 [wooden fence], 35 [baseball backstop graffiti], 42 [swingset near tennis courts], 32 [trail marker near elementary school], 24 [Masonic windows], 13 [picnic tables], 12 [tennis court sign].
You can view our route on Gmaps Pedometer.
I made a whopping three navigational errors, which cost us at least one hundred points. (Since we were the only 3-hour family bike team, we still got first place.) The first was after the railroad bridge. It's much slower climbing hills on the Trail-A-Bike, so I chose to skip checkpoint 51 altogether. I was also frightened of the Lake Hills Connector hill, from checkpoint 46 to the north and east, so I chose to visit 25 and then 35. Elizabeth and I had taken the route from 25 to 35 last year (by going up to NE 8th St.), and although I would have had to walk the bikes up the hill at 25, we could probably have made it pretty easily. Instead of taking either of these routes, I chose to trust the King County Bike Map, which says there is a more direct soft-surface bike trail from Kelsey Creek Park directly to the east. I figured it would be steep, but we could walk the bikes, and it would still save some time.
There may be such a trail, but we didn't find it. Instead, after walking the bike some distance, we were faced with a series of steep staircases. I'm the one who has to walk the bikes (Omar can't really help), and if it were just regular bikes, I would have just put them over my shoulder and carried them one by one up the stairs. But a Trail-A-Bike is an unwieldy beast, and I basically had to drag it and the bike together.
The first flight or two of steps had a narrow dirt path next to the stairs I could use, but after that I had to drag them up the steps themselves. To make things worse, I had a delicate knee from a recently corrected poor bike fit. Riding itself wasn't a problem, but hauling heavy objects up stairs caused me some very painful moments. At the top of the hill, both Omar and I shed some layers, and I took some Ibuprofen. After spending at least 15 minutes on this hill, we gave up on checkpoint 35 and headed to Larsen Lake.
At the next checkpoint (43, the porch swing near Larsen Lake), I made another error. I knew we wanted to take a flat soft-surface trail to the east, so we took a bark trail directly east of the building with the porch. This soon ended at a farm of some sort, but I thought we could just take a wide farm path to the trail I knew was further east. Unfortunately, the farm was enclosed by a fence, with no openings. So we ended up a few feet from the trail, but unable to reach it. The ground was wet and boggy, so I didn't even want to get off and turn around. We ended up making a circle around the rows of crops and went back to the porch swing, having wasted another ten minutes.
After that, things went somewhat smoothly until we left checkpoint 36 (the wooden fence at a street corner SE of Crossroads). There were roughly 50 minutes left, and I had hopes of reaching some of the 40 and 50 point checkpoints to the north, but we took NE 1st St. too far. We should have taken the first right, but instead I followed 1st all the way to its T at 156th Ave NE, then started looking for the left turn onto 4th. I should have known there was a problem when I couldn't find 4th (particularly since I already noticed something strange at the bend on 1st). But instead I blithely turned left on 6th, and started looking for Hillaire Park. There was definitely an undeveloped area at the bottom of the hill, but no obvious park. We then started looking for the access point marked on the Scramble map. We found a rocky path that I didn't want to take the bike on, and which we fortunately didn't follow. We still ended up going back and forth on 6th a couple of times, and taking a side street. I finally decided we would turn left on the next avenue (148th), and look for 4th from the west.
It was only when we couldn't find 4th from the other side that I realized my error. This was another 10-15 minutes lost, but, looking at the map, I realized we were close to the previously skipped checkpoint 35. To boost our morale, we headed for that and got it easily. We then headed back to find 42, passing by Crossroads with about 20 minutes left. We hit 42 and 32, at which point there were only 12 or so minutes to go. Rather than adding to our woes by going for 34 and risk being late, we decided to pick up the easy three checkpoints remaining near Crossroads and call it a day.
For our prize, Omar spent a lot of time picking a kaleidescope from the huge box of toys donated by Kids Club. Like last year, we also got a Crossroads Food gift certificate, but unfortunately Jones BBQ didn't have any bottles of barbecue sauce for sale this year. Elizabeth and Lauren bought some bubble tea and squid balls with it instead, and gave me their prize, a $20 Silver Platters gift certificate. (They took first in the women's 3-hour foot division quite handily.)
I asked Omar afterwards if there was anything we could do to make the Scrambles more enjoyable for him, and he said, "Visit more checkpoints." Ouch.
With the competition classes set up as they are, we've fallen behind Enger Management in the Series Championship, and it's unlikely we'll be able to pass him, since I have to miss the Ballard Street Scramble.