Moonlight Ramble

Last night I participated in this ride called the Moonlight Ramble. It is held every year in August on the weekend closest to the full moon. What's cool is that this year the full moon was on the same night as the ride.
The ride started at midnight and went through the streets of (I hate to reveal my general location) downtown St. Louis. After that, the route went onto the parkway for a bit until it entered Forest Park, where it went by the Art Museum and the Zoo. It then wound through some other parts of the park. I can't really remember locations very well because it was about 1:00 am and I had been up all day without any naps. I was also trying to keep up a good pace.

You have the route, so now I'll tell the story. My dad and I got to the check-in location at about 10:30 pm and got our wrist bands and event T-Shirts. We then had to wait another hour and a half until midnight, so I'll skip ahead to the start. We started (and ended) at Soldiers Memorial and got moving at about 12:20. It started out really slow because there were about 100-odd riders in our start group and we were all packed together. We started facing East toward the river and then almost immediately took a left turn. We rode North for about a mile or two and the route did a 180 to face South. The route went through the downtown area for a bit longer and it then turned onto the Forest Park Parkway (ever wondered why you park on a driveway and drive on a parkway?). By this time the pack had thinned a bit so my dad and I were able to ride a bit faster. We rode along the parkway until we got into the park, where we rode off of the parkway and into a rest area where we could either turn back for the short loop or keep going on the long loop. The rest area was mad! It was so congested because the road bottle necked and people were slowing down or stopping to go to the bathroom or turn around and all that other stuff. Once we got through that there were a bunch less riders so we were able to go nice 'n fast. We went by the history museum (I only know this because I'm looking at an event map now) and then had a stretch with not much, but then we went by the Grand Basin (they actually turn the fountains off at night) and wrapped around up this steep hill to make it up to the Art Museum. We passed the museum and went down a hill to the zoo. We took a right hander and rode next to the zoo until the route took a turn and went by the Planetarium. We then had a really nice fast stretch that went roughly north and then turned back onto the parkway. We followed the same route coming back as we did riding up, but we didn't do as much looping through the downtown area. We ended up at the Soldiers Memorial after riding 17 miles.

I forgot to mention this earlier. The night was cool enough that I could really feel the heat island effect. It was comfortable downtown, but when we got onto the parkway and rode under a bridge, the temperature must have dropped about 8 degrees because it was suddenly much cooler. When we rode back into the city, the reverse happened.