Stitched together my pictures, they came out pretty crappy. But here it is nonetheless. When you click on this thumbnail below, try and use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move to the far right. You should be able to see this orange dome (the dome of the Exploratorium) just to the left of the Golden Gate bridge, and to the far right you can see the outline of the lights on the Bay Bridge. I believe the bright light to the far left is the lighthouse on Alcatraz. It was a beautiful night, unfortunately I am not very skilled in night time photography.
The funniest part of the ride happened in the first minute. We got everything assembled our wheels were on our bikes, GPS units had a lock, heart rate monitor was working, head and tail lights were functioning. The ride had begun down a street in the "marina." All of the sudden my front derailer seemed to be shifting my middle gear down to my lowest gear. It was pretty funny, imagine riding and then you feel your front derailer magically shift itself into a lower gear. Puzzled, I stop check my front derailer, it seemed to be functioning just fine. I thought, "Must have been some kind of weird coincidence." I continued riding, and again the magical down shifting. Of course I stopped and then thought, "I bet I have a bent chain tooth." With the help of my apartment-mate, I inspected the middle chain ring, and discovered that my hunch was correct. Then I remembered about this gift I received entitled, Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance, more specifically the chapter about emergency repair. It covered absolutely nothing (at least from what I could remember) about a bent chain ring tooth. I thought probably because you're completely screwed if you encounter something like that, plus you're not completely hosed you do have two other chain rings. Then I thought well since mountain biking is really about roughing it, and I'm going to have to replace the ring, it's time to try and fix it somehow. I then sorted through my tools that I had with me, mainly a swiss army knife and my trusty topeak mini. I found that none of the tools on my topeak would even help me bend it back, accept this can opener/screw driver head tool with a notch that seemed to fit just right to pry the aluminum tooth back to almost true. It seemed to kind of work! Then I took the butt of my swiss army knife and just started banging the living shit out of it. And after like a dozen hits, it worked!!! Well it worked well enough to use my middle gear in front with my rear middle gears, too high or too low would cause this really bad situation called, "chain suck." Which would send the rear derailer slamming into my frame. That happened a few times, but my bike survived and more importantly so did I. I wasn't completely riding without a middle chain ring either.
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