Oak Bay High students are being warned: “Stay away from the light! That dangly thing…it’s a trick, not a bag of Doritos.”
To explain a spike in unexcused absences among its student population this morning, administrators at Victoria’s Oak Bay High School are pointing fingers at a giant Strava art anglerfish seen lurking near the school grounds.
“It’s that fleshy growth at the end of its illicium,” says the school’s biology teacher. “Students are drawn to its luminescent glow like moths to a porch light. You’d think those enormous, terrifying teeth would be a clue that something’s amiss, but you know teenagers and their tendency to traipse obliviously into the gaping maw of peril.”
In their investigation of the truancy issue, Oak Bay Police have sought assistance from VicPD, whose police station, conveniently, is right in the belly of the beast.
As requested by one of my followers in Australia…a Strava kangaroo!
If you’ve seen my doodles on Strava.com, you’ll know that many appear upside down – my Strava giraffe, mermaid, armadillo and sea serpent, for example. (Here on my blog, I’ve flipped them over for ease of viewing.)
The reason is simple. As a Strava artist, I’m a slave to the roads and pathways that comprise my canvas. I don’t ‘create’ my Strava doodles – I discover them in the city map. Sometimes they’re right-side up; sometimes they’re upside down; sometimes they’re sideways.
Still, the upside-down-ness of many of my doodles has spawned comments and wisecracks about my tendency to cater to my followers Down Under. (“Still doing them for our Australian cousins, I see,” a fellow Strava artist recently remarked.)
It strikes me as ironic, then, that my first Strava-sketch of an Australian critter, which I purposefully designed and doodled for my friends in Australia, popped out of the map right-side up!
I wanted to buy a red giraffe to commemorate the success of my Strava giraffe. How I ended up with two is a tale of incredible sadness. BTW, that’s Garmina on the left and Geoffrey on the right.
Two weeks ago, I was broiling on a Sayulita beach when a trio of Mexican girls no older than 10 approached with armfuls of handmade stuffed animals – lions, monkeys, zebras and giraffes, all cute and brightly coloured. One of the girls inched forward to show her wares.
I elbowed my wife, who’d recently breezed through a Spanish for Travellers course. “Ask her if she has a red giraffe,” I said. (Just a week earlier, my Strava giraffe had cantered merrily across the Twittersphere, and a red giraffe seemed an apt memento of my brief flirtation with fame.)
“¿Tiene una jirafa rojo?” she asked.
The young girl dropped her bundle of stuffies in the sand. “Espera,” she said, and then she disappeared into the tangle of tourists and palapas that lined the beach.
At least half an hour had passed before her friends, who’d been lingering nearby, dashed over with a red giraffe in hand. They pointed toward another vendor to show where they got it.
I hesitated – I really wanted to buy from the girl who’d originally approached us – but our time to say bye to the beach was nigh, so I dug through my backpack for 150 pesos and took possession of one red giraffe.
I named him Geoffrey Pedro Stravinsky – GPS for short.
Twenty or so minutes later, as we were shaking sand out of our towels and packing our beach bags, who should reappear but the original girl, breathless and beaming and clutching a red giraffe!
When I held up Geoffrey to show her I’d already bought one, she crumpled. Her shoulders dropped and tears welled up in her eyes, and as she slumped slowly away her friends crowded around to console her.
It was heartbreaking.
I called her back, and in broken Spanish my wife sussed out what had happened. Determined to get me una jirafa rojo, the girl had run all the way home and asked her mother to make one. She watched and waited while her mother stuffed and sewed, and then she raced back to deliver the goods.
Her sadness was unbearable. And that is why I left the beach that day with two giraffes – Geoffrey and his hastily fashioned companion, Garmina Paprika Sayulita (also GPS for short).
Garmina Paprika Sayulita (left) and Geoffrey Pedro Stravinsky
A giant anteater slurps up a tasty snack in one of the West Coast’s oldest neighbourhoods
Perched on Victoria’s southwest corner due north across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Port Angeles, WA, James Bay is North America’s oldest West Coast neighbourhood north of San Francisco.
After sniffing out its quarry, an anteater uses its sharp front claws to tear into anthills and then feasts by flicking its tongue up to 160 times a minute.
Sometimes called an “ant bear,” the giant anteater is quite common in Los Llanos (Venezuela’s tropical grasslands).
How this one found its way to Victoria is anybody’s guess.
NB • The image here varies slightly from the actual ride as I used Photoshop to remedy two minor glitches caused by two wrong turns – one at the base of the tail, the other at the top of the rear left leg.
Near the end of every Sunday ride, my fellow Tripleshotters and I pedal straight into my giraffe’s anus.
Near the end of my usual Sunday ride with the Tripleshot gang, the group turns left off Interurban Road onto a short pathway that connects to the Galloping Goose (Greater Victoria’s regional cycling pathway).
Only after I rode the route for my Strava giraffe design two weeks ago did I clue in to the fact that this pathway is right below a section of Highway 1 that became the base of the giraffe’s tail.
In other words, every time we make that turn, we’re heading straight into the giraffe’s, er…“exit ramp.”
Although this design feature was purely unintentional, I really couldn’t have asked for my Strava giraffe’s “old dirt road” to be in a better place!
BREAKING NEWS • About 4 minutes after I posted this, Strava tweeted about my giraffe again with the faulty link all fixed up. Kudos to Strava!
When Strava tweeted a shout-out for my Strava giraffe yesterday, I was elated. Obviously.
Today, my giddiness took a bit of a tumble when I discovered the link in Strava’s tweet was missing a digit. As a result, any of Strava’s 71.1k Twitter followers who clicked through to see my giraffe on Strava.com saw the image below instead.
With all due respect to the Vancouver rider who pedalled this route, *heavy sigh*
For my Strava elephant, I managed to incorporate a feature of the landscape (Swan Lake) as part of the picture.
The big giraffe I Strava-doodled last weekend has created quite a stir. After I posted it on Reddit, my blog views jumped from 59 on Tuesday to nearly 12,000 on Wednesday. Today it showed up on Peleton Magazine’s Facebook page and, a few hours later, Strava plugged it in a Tweet and on their Facebook page as “one of the most creative pieces of Strava art we’ve seen…”
I’m hoping my follow-up Strava art effort isn’t too anticlimactic!
For today’s elephant sketch, I tried a new technique – namely, incorporating a feature of the landscape as an integral part of the picture (i.e., Swan Lake as the elephant’s eye).
Don’t be chicken. Hopping over the farmyard fence and exploring new terrain is a great way to take your Strava art to new heights!
Strava art from January 22, 2015
Compared to my handful of previous Strava art efforts, “Chicken” was rather liberating, as it was the first time I really broke free from Victoria’s pockets of grid-pattern streets and framed a picture in long, sweeping pedal strokes.
It was, in other words, the first time I really spread my wings and almost flew.
Making “Chicken” was fun and comparatively fast, and it exposed me to some roads and routes in a part of the city I was previously unfamiliar with.
Well, that’s what it’s like on the streets of Victoria, BC today, as I spent my morning surprising the city with about 100 kilometres worth of Strava giraffe.
In a straight line from head to front hoof, she measures about 11 kilometres.
I had to use the “Strava OFF/Strava ON” trick for a few sections of the legs as the inventory of roads (especially straight ones) is rather meagre in that area. With the extra dashing about between OFF and ON points, this work of Strava art called for around 115 km of cycling.
As for the question on my Strava profile post – “What do giraffes have that no other animal has?”
