Big and Tall

via flickr

Tall bike with an xtracycle! Seriously.

Tour de Fat photo-dump

I scoured twitter for photos of the Tour de Fat. And here those photos are!

I didn't take any of these photos. They're all from random twitterers, and from this dude.


This costume was pretty typical of the ones I saw. There were a couple neat hoop skirts made from bike tires. That was neat and resourceful!












During the ride, there was a pretty blond on a street corner, holding a bottle of Bud Light, jumping on a pogo stick, and whooooo-ing at the passing cyclists. I laughed and waved made a comment akin to, "Well, there's some alternative transportation I haven't considered!"

This picture's pretty blurry, but I don't think it's the same lady.




This dude was part of the festival and I'm glad someone got a picture of him. His rig played music and blew bubbles. You can't see the detail very well, but on the front is a little mechanical monkey who also pedaled, motivated by the banana dangling in front of him.
Giant Connect 4! Why wouldn't you build a giant Connect 4?





Slow bike race. The winner got a pretty championship belt.
This is from where the ride took us through downtown. I'm sad I wasn't able to find a picture of us riding past the protesters and the demonstrators. Near here, we rode between two towers, and it echoed a lot if you shouted or rang your bell, which everybody did.
Street sweeper bike! Another one I'm glad somebody got a good shot of him.



Tall tandem! That's quite a special bike. These riders unquestionably have style, but I think were I to ride a tall bike, I'd probably have on a helmet. Maybe pads, too. That's just a long way to fall.

And a tall tandem! That's trust, folks. Cause if you don't work together, you're both going down. Way down.



That's all I got.

There are tons of other photos over on flickr, but unlike these twit pics, they're all in one place so I'm not going bother gathering any of them and posting them.

Tour de Fat

Just finished riding in the Tour de Fat. It was awesome!

I got confused initially and thought that the ride started at 9:00 AM instead of 10:00 AM so I got there at around 8:00 AM to register, and I was WAY TOO EARLY. So I turned around, went back to Einstein Bros and got a bagel for my girlfriend, who was still in bed, and went back home.

I was a bit nervous initially because it was spitting rain, and I could hear very distant thunder, but it ended up not raining. It was just cool and cloudy during the ride.




Tour de Fat highlights!

• Large group ride! Riding your bike is often such a solitary act. It's really neat to be a part of large group rides like this, or like Critical Mass, and meet and see other people on their bikes and chat 'em up.


• Tall bikes. There were a lot of tall bikes! Most of the Ride Wardens (or whatever they were called) were on tall bikes, presumably so they could both easily survey the crowd and be easily seen. There was one tall tandem bike, which was pretty wicked cool. And there was one MEGA tall bike. This was no two-frames-welded-together bike. It was a custom built job, and it was at least a fully story tall.


• Other bikes. There were tons of gnarly cruisers, and other bikes. I was ogling them all. Hard.


• Riding past the Health Care demonstration at the state capitol! People were hooting and hollering! Both in favor of reform, and against Obama. (I don't think many of them were anti-reform, as much as they were anti-Obama.) I yelled back at them as I rode by, "Health! Care! Now!" and I heard some protester comment, in a derogatory fashion, in reference to all of us on two wheels, " ... They look like Obama people."


• Stopped at a red light, some guy looked out his window and saw hundreds of bikes filling the road outside his basement window, and hollered out through the screen, "What are you doing?" I answered, "We're riding bikes."


• Costumes! Both bikes and riders were all dressed up. There plenty of girls in tights and tutus and butterfly wings. What is that costume supposed to be? A slutty butterfly ballerina? There were also a couple folks dressed up like Waldo. Each time I saw one, it was fun to point and yell out, "THERE HE IS!"