karen finally came home with her friend jenny from the airport at 9:30am, despite the plane having arrived at 7:40am this morning. jenny arrived at newark last night at 2am, managed to get to the complimentary hotel around 2am to take a shower and try to sleep for an hour, before heading back to the airport for her flight to boston. there wasn't much time to rest however as we left by 9:55am for the biannual cambridge bike ride starting at the cambridge public library. i was worried we'd be late, but these events rarely leave on time and we didn't actually set off until almost 10:30am.

this year's theme was women's history. there was a decent amount of people due to the nice weather. although it was sunny, temperature was only in the upper 50's so i wore a light jacket. i also put on some sunblock before i left so i smelled like summer. i rode my trek allant bike, the bike i only ride on special occasions. karen was on the trek mountain bike and jenny was on the fuji. we were the only handful of people who didn't wear helmets, but i figured we weren't traveling very fast and with police escorts to stop car traffic, so the risk of injury was low.

i tried riding with karen and jenny, but having 3 bikes side-by-side presented too much of a road block, so i ended up riding in the front. karen rides slow anyway, so at certain points i decided to ride all the way to the front. i set up the action camera on the handlebar, but i only had an hour of battery life, so i used it sparingly. the glare on the tiny LCD screen was such that i couldn't tell if i was actually recording or not, so capturing videos was mostly hit or miss.

we stopped twice, once at the park at riverside city park (880 memorial drive), the second at north point park. it was at the first stop that jenny wanted to use the bathroom. i was trying to think of the closest possible place and couldn't come up with anywhere other than on mass avenue. we even asked another biker would clearly had even less clue, even suggested we go back to the public library. i thought trader joe down memorial avenue would definitely have a bathroom, but then i recognized where we were and realized there was a whole foods nearby. we biked down blackstone street to whole foods and i went with jenny to find the bathroom while karen was outside watching the bikes. i just so happened to need the bathroom as well so everything worked out. even better, as we were trying to figure out where to rendezvous with the convoy (i was thinking from mass ave), i saw a bike cop at the corner of river and putnam who told us the bike group was minutes away from approaching. so we managed to join them from there, everything working out in the end.