While I was researching the details for the Midtown Greenway ride, I noticed that they were participating in an upcoming event called the Tour de Fat. This event is sponsored by one of my favorite companies, New Belgium Brewery, and is all about bike-centric culture. It is a traveling festival that features a bike parade followed by an outdoor concert/festival with odd-ball acts on several stages. No surprise that it also focuses on beer – as New Belgium highlights their special brews, especially with Fat Tire, their trademark brand from which the festival is named.
Via their website, the Midtown Greenway Coalition was looking for about 100 volunteers to perform various duties throughout the day. Since I didn’t have any major events planned, I decided to sign-up, with hopes of getting a cool job at a cool festival. Well, signing up fairly late in the week means that I was assigned to clean-up duty – as I assumed all the "cool" jobs were already delegated. That was OK, since it was nice to help out a neat organization and I’m always up for a little manual labor.
In the spirit of the day, I thought I would ride to the festival – which took place at some of the playing fields near the Sculpture Garden in downtown Minneapolis. As I currently live in Plymouth and am generally a 20 minute ride from downtown, I thought this would be a great way to combine attending a fun event with a casual ride. Hennepin County provides a really nice set of maps that cover their entire bike trail system which gave me good confidence that I could get from my house to the site with less than one mile of road-based riding. They have just recently completed some major sets of the trail that heads west, which offered some really nice riding on smooth surfaces.
That said – trail riding is still not without its faults. Between the starts/stops and twists/turns, its hard to get a steady pace. Plus, the scenery leaves something to be desired. Much of the path into the city involved scenic views of the major powerlines that feed the city from the west. There were also wonderful views of the back-end of industrial buildings and always-beautiful train tracks.
But, it was still a nice ride. Part of the trail zips through the singletrack areas of Theodore Wirth Park – which has been a common stomping ground for me when I choose to ride off-road. It was fun to see how they brought in the tarred trail – covering areas that I didn’t even know where there from the dirt paths.
I left the house shortly after 2pm, thinking it might take me around 45 minutes to get downtown. Well, I missed the mark by about a half hour and found myself pulling into the festival at nearly 3:15pm. This was a little disappointing, as most of the activities were winding down and I was set to help with the teardown starting at 3:30pm.
I was fortunately able to see most of the last official act – which was a group called Mucca Pazza. They are an amazing group to see live and can only be described as a "punk" marching band. They had to have a good 20 people on the small stage at the same time with instruments ranging from trumpets/trombones to electric guitars and accordions. They even had cheerleaders. All this while dressed in an assortment of bargain-bin, high school marching band uniforms from the early 80′s. They were fun and loud – a real treat.
But, that was my participation in the "real" festival – for a full 15 minutes. After everything started to shut down, I was put to work with a small group of volunteers tasked with putting away most of the festival. The Tour de Fat is all about volunteering, as New Belgium takes all of the proceeds from beer/event sales and gives them back to a cycling-based organization in the local community. Thus, they have a pretty limited crew themselves and rely on cheap (free) labor.
I got to work on the "tent team" who were responsible for tearing down around 20 free-standing tent system that provided coverages for the various booths and vendors. Once that job was done, we all chipped-in to gather the various tables, chairs, and assorted banners. Our last steps were to comb the grounds for any small hint of trash – being sure to leave no trace that several thousand people were hanging around a few hours earlier.
It was a great event and I was glad to help out a really nice group of people (bike riders tend to be fairly jolly, mild-mannered folks).
On the way back, I chose to repeat the same route. In total, I covered around 30 miles on the bike. While riding the trails, I caught up to a visiting professor from the University of Idaho in town seeing relatives and out for a ride. He was a really nice guy and I enjoyed the conversation before rolling into the house.
Waking up on Sunday morning, I realized that my body is actually 37 years old. I ached from head to toe – as it rebelled from the combination of 30 miles on the bike and two hours of heavy lifting.
