Ride to Gaia Fest with Rock the Bike
Beginning July 30 from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, we will pedal northward, covering 180-miles in 4-days, arriving in style at Gaia Fest, an awesome music and camping festival at the Black Oak Ranch in Laytonville.
For the past 4 years, we have mobilized hundreds to ride 20 miles south from San Francisco to Maker Faire.
At the Bicycle Music Festival, we move our entire festival, including our 10000-watt Pedal Powered Stage and hundreds of fans, from our day venue to our night venue 5 miles away.
We have studied from the masters of self-supported music and bike touring, the Pleasant Revolution. Cello Joe, in foreground, will be biking with us. Kipchoge, in background will also be biking to Gaia, but from the North.
And now, we are ready to bring YOU safely by bicycle to Gaia Fest!
We will be carrying all the supplies we need for our tour, then setting up a Pedal Powered Stage featuring some of the best bands at the Gaia Festival, right across from the Main Stage!
Read MoreTrailer-based bike sound systems
Many people use bike trailers to bring the beat at large group rides like Critical Mass. Trailers make it easy to get started, since you can use a simple box rather than having to engineer a cabinet that surrounds your rear wheel.
But trailer-based systems put the beat much further from your ears, meaning that you have to turn up the volume much louder to feel like you are ‘in the music’. This means you’ll end up using much more powerful amps and speakers, and larger, heavier batteries. All this means that you are much less likely to use a trailer-based party bike for impromptu cruises (with 5-10 friends) and more likely to save it for larger, planned rides.
I love the bike culture touches this fabricator put on his system – the bike wheel and sprockets used as speaker grills. But there’s no escaping the fact that this system, and all trailer systems, look like a bike towing a box.
In my opinion an integrated long-wheelbase party bike, a Soul Cycle, is a much much easier way to create a cosmic ‘craft’.
This was the sound system at the mc3 performance ride
Read MoreTwo YouTube videos capture the feeling of cruising with music
It’s hard to capture on video the feeling of a good cruiser ride, but these two come pretty close. The first video, made by ultradistance rider Paul McKensie, was used on the tourbus of Clif Bar’s excellent 2-Mile Challenge. It was shot with a handful of friends and Clif folks at my place in the Mission. It’s got a beautiful shot of Mafiosa and I cruising in front of Mona Caron’s Bikeway Mural.
The second was shot by Wild Johnny, who leads the South Bay Cruiser Ride down in Redondo Beach. This one was shot at Santa Monica Critical Mass from his Xtracycle with a backwards facing web cam. Despite the grainy video, it’s got some good, spirited footage. Check out wild dance sequences, especially the first few seconds of the video.
Although the video itself is set to some groovy rock music, all the people dancing in the video were getting their beat from John’s Soul Cycle Head Unit. There are a handful of cool testimonials about the product, including one from John.
While we’re on the subject of backwards-facing video shoots, last night I helped out a local electro pop band called The Rubies make a music video “I feel electric.” The Swedish director Mattias wanted to capture some of San Francisco’s bike culture and wanted to use bikes with the Down Low Glow.
Loving Austin’s bike culture
Amanda pedals the Choprical Fish at one of the stops on last night’s sweet moonlight cruise, which began at 2AM on a local pedestrian bridge. This annual ride was up there with the best social rides I’ve experienced. More pictures to come. Thanks Austin!
Ice(Blue)Down Low Glow in Midnight Ridazz video?
Noticed a couple videos on www.midnightridazz.com of what appears to be a recumbent rider with an Ice Down Low Glow at a recent ride. It’s about 1 minute in. Check ‘ out!
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