Shadow of Pink Chocolate

A long day for us — we volunteered as radio hams for a new bicycling event along the American River Parkway called the Princess Promenade. This event was designed to encourage women and girls to ride confidently along the 32-mile long bike trail which runs from Old Sacramento to Folsom Lake. There were three options to the ride — a little five-mile jaunt, a thirty-mile round trip, and finally a sixty-mile round trip doing almost the entire length of the trail.

Pica’s role was as a shadow for the event organizer Janaé — she kept Janaé in communication with the radio base station at the start/finish point. My job was to patrol one section of the route as a bicycle mobile ham. I started off with the little jaunt to the east and then made three trips from the start/finish down to the Nimbus Fish Hatchery, covering about 30 miles total. The last such run was to shepherd the tail-end rider home, who turned out to be a celebrity, the reigning Mrs. California. The story was she’d hadn’t been on a bike since age 15 or so but heard of the event some weeks back and decided to do the 60-mile option. She had no trouble completing it either.

Pink was definitely the color theme of the event. Pica was dressed in the pink t-shirt given out for the ride, a pink child’s tiara she picked up yesterday, plus her radio headset. Along the way she got ‘blinged’ with a sprinking of glitter. At the start/finish there was also the most decadent thing I’ve ever seen, a chocolate fountain. Many baskets of strawberries were consumed as dipping material. Those things must be the devil to clean, though.