Less than 24 hours until my first big Chicago bike adventure! I'm psyched, as you can tell, and am looking forward to the day soon where the weather in Chicago doesn't produce alarmed warnings from local meterologists. ("Haze and Smog Alert! It is recommended that you not breathe outside until after sunset!") I found out, by the way, that Bank One actually pays for that big bike map of Chicago I was going on and on about yesterday, and that all Bank One locations actually hand them out for free; so this morning I stopped by the one a couple of blocks from my apartment and picked one up. (Much like Starbucks, Bank One locations are fucking everywhere in this city, it seems.) So that's cool - I'll now have an actual physical map to take on my trip tomorrow, instead of the JPEGs I've been studying this week on my desktop.

If I haven't adequately explained this yet, by the way, Chicago has a much larger and more radical goal with its current bike plan than most American cities (whose plans usually revolve around the idea of yuppies biking around the park on a Saturday morning with their kids); Chicago is doing no less a thing than encouraging people to permanently get rid of their cars, and to consider their bicycle their main form of transportation for getting around the city. And hey, why not? This is the perfect city for it, after all - a total distance of 30 miles from the north tip to the south tip, with not a single goddamn hill found anywhere in between. And really, when you stop and think about it, a carless existence in Chicago is not only possible but even rather easy to accomplish: you simply bike for most of your day-to-day trips, like to work or to a bar to meet your friends; ride the trains and busses when the weather is crappy or you're especially tired; use airplanes, Amtrak or Grayhound to go to another city; and hop in a cab in every single other situation (leg injury, transporting food to a dinner party, etc).

It makes sense, then, for a city like Chicago to advocate such a radical thing like permanently getting rid of your car; to be frank, this is one of the only major American cities where such a thing is even feasible, and where such a suggestion can even be discussed without breaking into laughter. But like many others here, I've also been skeptical of the idea, and question the validity of such suggestions whenever I see the local government talking about it. So for example, this is why my first big bike trip is going to be to the Loop and then back to my apartment in Uptown; namely, because the local government has been telling people for a year now that it's entirely possible to commute to your downtown office job each day by bicycle, and I want to discover for myself just how easy or difficult it is in actuality. And that's why I'll be making the trip tomorrow during the morning rush hour as well, because I want to replicate as much as possible the actual conditions that "bike commuters" might face when making a daily trek to their downtown office job. And in the upcoming months, then, I have all kinds of other bike adventures planned, almost all of them inspired by the things our local government has been urging people to try; a ride along the full 17-mile lakefront path, a ride out to Oak Park, a ride up to Evanston, etc.

Yes, by the way, I will be documenting tomorrow's ride in real time (were you expecting anything else?), and will be sending a photo and short text message to the Jason Pettus Instant Locator™ each time I move to a new street (or in other words, about four or five times altogether). So if you're around your computer at the same time, and happen to be bored, feel free to watch my site starting around 8 a.m. tomorrow (that's 9 a.m. for New Yorkers, 6 a.m. for Californians, and 2 p.m. Greenwich Standard Time, if that helps you convert to your local timezone), and follow along with my little adventure. (Or, you know, read about me heading to the hospital after getting sideswiped by some asshole in an SUV.) And don't worry if you can't actually follow along in real time; once the trip is half-over (once I get to the Loop, that is), I'll be sitting down at a coffeehouse and typing up the entire thing for my main journal, and reprinting the JPIL photos I posted along the way. I'm really looking forward to it; I hope you'll enjoy it as well.