Originally Posted by balto charlie
The problem is that Columbia does not have signs....anywhere. Trying to find a store, gas station etc... is hard. I have climbed there for 5 years and just found out about a nearby bar. They don't like ugly signs blocking up the scenery. I don't blame them. This is what makes Columbia quaint and uninviting to outsiders. My earlier post "they don't want outsiders" is a little harsh but they don't make it easy for us. I look at Columbia as a huge cul-de-sac. Charlie
Man, it bums me out that so many people find Columbia such a disagreeable place. I grew up there and used the bike paths to get pretty much everywhere when I was a kid. I rode my bike to school, the mall, my friends' houses, basically a sh*t ton of places I wouldn't have been able to get to otherwise. I don't know how much of the history of Columbia anyone knows, but it was a urban/social planning experiment of sorts by this progressive developer James Rouse. He had a lot of interesting ideas about the way people could and should live and interact with each other.
Unfortunately, after 35 years or so a lot of factors have substantially changed the place. It has begun to suffer from the same ills as pretty much every other urban environment, except on its own smaller scale. The explosion of development in the areas around what is technically Columbia has ironically contributed to suburban sprawl and its attending social and infrastructural ills. The Sun did a good series on Columbia at 30 years of age five years ago or so. There's a good overview about its history on Wikipedia
too. Sorry about the monologue, it's just that Columbia was an amazing place to grow up in, and I didn't realize that until I moved away, and I fully realize the place I spent my formative years in no longer exists.
On a totally different note, have any HoCo folks seen a lady dressed in all black riding a road rig on 175? I used to see her occassionally, she was always doing crazy bike ballet type sh*t on the shoulder of the highway in this skin-tight getup, complete w/balaclava (in the summertime). She always gave me a good laugh, she was on some total bike ninja sh*t.