Marco......Polo

Last night was a record turn-out for East Nashville Bike Polo. 12 confirmed players but a few extra spectators and me who came on bike yet didn't bring a polo-friendly bike and had to bum bikes from others.

The timing finally worked in my favor for not just making it to polo, but having the time, and great weather, to ride my bike from the house over to the east side for polo. I even had time to do a once over on the bike and switch back to my big comfy slick tires and remove my fenders on the trusty Crosscheck. (also another opportunity to use my new Garmin tech device to log my ride)

The weather was perfect, as in it was 68 when I left the house, in a t-shirt and knickers. I brought along a jacket and Walz flappy cap just in case as the forecast was for a 45 overnight low but it turned out I didn't need them. Even the ride back home at midnight was comfortable with just a t-shirt and knickers. The city was calm and the sky was clear, it was seriously a perfect night to be riding through the city.

I had to vary my usual route to get downtown to the pedestrian bridge. Some voluntary rerouting and some required due to construction. I meandered through 12 South's back streets to avoid the slow hill through the narrow part of 12th Ave South which worked great. I may have to make this reroute permanent. They are still doing major construction downtown on Demonbreun so my normal direct route down to 4th ave was shut off. I snaked through the Frist and over to Broadway for some good people watching and a glimpse of honky tonk music.

I arrived late to the game and rolled up to find a court FULL of cyclists, chasing a small ball around with ski poles and pvc. Nice! Our polo games took a small hiatus and have recently been resurrected by the east side crew into a semi regular weekly/bi weekly event. Some time recently another polo crew who used to play downtown has merged in and now we seem to rarely have the problem with finding a minimum of 6 players to have a good game. As I mentioned, we had 12 people commit to playing a few days in advance this week!

The game was the usual mix of complete unorganized mayhem mixed with some good ball passing and a few adult beverages. Everyone was enjoying themselves and the time flew by. By the time we finally called it, it was already 11:45pm! Everyone disbanded in their respective directions to either get home, exhausted, or for the youngsters in the group; head out to the next pub for late dinner and refreshments. I settled in for the 10 mile trip home and thoroughly enjoyed another calm trip through Nashville.

As Dan said this morning, "If you played, you won"