Thanks for almost ruining my Anniversary Dinner Critical Mass!!!

For those of you who don't know what Critical Mass is, click here.

Last Friday, Hubby and I went for our 7th Anniversary Dinner. We wanted to go to the Fish House, but instead ended up going to The Cannary. While I have nothing against The Cannary, and we indeed had a very nice meal, we had a coupon to go to the Fish House, and I hadn't been to the Fish House in forever. Plus, this was our first night out ever since BabyL was born. So, yeah, I was really looking forward to the dinner.

Now that we have BabyL, it's quite difficult for us to go out whenever we want to, we have to arrange for babysitting well ahead of time. And because of last minute family obligations, we had to move the dinner to Friday night from Saturday night. Let me tell you this was headache enough as I had to do a lot of discussions and negotiations late Thursday night. It didn't help that because we moved the dinner night, we had a much narrower window to have our dinner.

During Friday morning, Hubby realized that the Critical Mass ride was that evening. To get to the Fish House, we would have to drive through downtown, and we never know where the bikers' route is. So we had to change our plans, because we didn't want to get held up in traffic and because of our narrow time window. I was really looking forward to this dinner because 1) it's our anniversary, 2) we very rarely get out, so my evenings out are more precious to me now and 3) I hadn't been to the Fish House for a very long time whereas I've been to The Cannary several times and just wanted a change.

Hubby is a road biker, and he bikes to work at least once a week. When the weather's good, he aims to get 3-5 rides in. And he's road biked around town for recreation plenty of times. So I think he should know and understand the frustrations that road bikers experience. He thinks this is the wrong approach as well.

As much as everyone would like to live in a utopia, the reality is that this city wasn't originally designed for bikes, and the city needs to spend money in other areas of the infrastructure. I would say that over the last decade, the Lower Mainland's bike paths have improved tremendously. Yes, there could be better improvements still, and perhaps things aren't laid out as well as they could be, but it's already pretty darn good from what it was 10 years ago.

Pissing people off every month doesn't get your point across. Wasting my tax money because the police need to get involved for traffic control doesn't get your point across. Having a business lose my patronage because I didn't have a large enough window to sit in traffic while I waited for a bunch of bikers block my path doesn't get your point across. You can't have everything, and frankly, I would like to see my tax money go to improvements to public transit.

So yeah, thanks for almost ruining my Anniversary, and almost ruining the first night I've had out without the kid since he was born. Thanks a lot.