Earth and Robin picked me up early Saturday morning.  Having no sense of Colorado geography, I figured just picking me up on their way out of Boulder to Ft. Collins would be no problem. Turns out, yeah, about the same distance there as to Denver. But they are sweet and love me.  No Problem. They even brought me a sweet sweet bike (I’m kind of in love with it and will blow a bunch of money for one like it in LA)!

I really had no idea what I was getting into with the Tour de Fat. Thousands of people in bike and in crazy costumes. My playa casual wasn’t really cutting it for me. But wow, once we were on the streets of Ft. Collins with our horde of bikers rolling along both very slow and getting a good clip, I was in heaven. I really missed the riding bikes with all my friends part of Burning Man this year. I got my fix saturday morning. We had police escorts and closed roads. We had mobile music. We had great playa bikes. My bike had streamers. Awesome. 

The beer festival itself was also fun. We statyed there for a few hours, saw some of the acts, listened to the evangelizing about the wonders of bikes. They kept saying it is a bike festival with beer at it, not the other way around.  Some woman gave the New Belgium Brewery her car in exchange for a bike. They gave away bikes. It was a damn good time. 

But I wanted to ride bikes. 

Robin and I rode around Ft Collins a bit more. The city was alive with bikes everywhere. Signs asekd drivers to share the road and slow down. There were bike lanes everywhere. It was awesome. 

We drove back to Boulder figuring that I could take the bus back to Denver, or my friend Stacey could give me a ride back into the city.

We decided to ride cruiser bikes into downtown Boulder, most of us had no lights, and our batteries were playa dead. But the locals assured us that it would be no problem.  Before dinner, I was impressed with the bike paths and lanes everywhere in Boulder. But then after dinner the decision to ride to the boulder mini decompression party was made and we went on this wild and fast ride through the amazing bike path system of Boulder. We passed steams and rivers, went through tunnels at high speed and zoomed up the hills on the way out. We had this grand adventure. It was so beautiful and cool all night!

We stayed at the Decom for a bit. I connected with some of my Boulder friends from the Burn and Astral Headwash. A real brief visit though, because we were back on bikes in a quick second. We took a slightly different route, a bit more uphill, but it was incredible. By the time we all got back to Earth and Robin’s we were pretty exhausted. 

But what an adventure.  I really missed my bike gang parties at Black Rock City this year. I think I need to hook up with an LA group that does cruiser rides. 

Tonight we begin the wrapping process for the Cedia Convention. I miss home. I am happy to start wrapping up here. We will be working through the night.

Tags: Bike, Boulder, Tour de Fat, Travel

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 2:12 am and is filed under The Life of A Spaceman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.