Alleycat

Last night was the “Steel Back the City” alleycat. This time, the race was a true-blue scavenger hunt-style alleycat, with a four page manifest of things to do and stuff to get. Some of the more unique tasks included:

* Riding a double-decker bike (homemade) at Free Ride. This was quite exciting, as you needed to scale a pile of pallets to even mount the thing.
* Delivering coffee across Oakland.
* Drinking beer at the 31st Street pub.

I rode it with a handful of local messengers, and we got stuck at one particularly annoying task — finding the glowing green light in Homewood cemetery. At one point there were 15 of us riding throughout the place, and we just couldn’t find it. It was there, however, as we talked to some other folks who did manage to find it.

All in all, it was good fun, though I didn’t stick around long enough to see who won. It was cool riding with some other fixed gear riders for most of the race as well, though they were geared a bit higher, so I was spinning pretty darn fast to even keep up. It’s also good fun to see all the bikes, especially from the folks out of town. Pittsburgh’s messengers have a unique style of bikes (that I end up emulated since my bike used to be owned by a local messenger, and other cities have their own styles as well. The bravery award goes to the guys from Columbus who were riding brakeless track bikes.