I got to the start of bike party early enough to watch it develop this month. At first it's just another car or two pulling in heavily laden with bikes.

     

Then I start noticing groups of people that just appeared on their bicycles. A posse from the left. A posse from the right.

           

Then there is a loud announcement "If you don't have any lights on your bike and you want some, we are handing them out courtesy of the Awesome Foundation." I went over to see what was going on. Katie was giving them to all takers. Mostly they were young women with nothing. Not what I'd call great lights, but good enough that if they were on your bike and turned on you'd be quite a bit more visible to cars than if you had nothing. The road ahead would still be something of a mystery though.

        

By this time the people that have been unloading massive rigs from big cars are about ready to go.

  

Over beyond those party rigs is the "bird meeting". At the beginning of a ride I'm more interested in browsing the crowd, so I didn't find out what they decided. Betcha some people had their arms twisted into doing important jobs though.

        

Bike Party! The bikes started rolling organically towards the road...

  

        

Mall security kind of segregated us in one corner of the Eastridge Mall parking lot. No problem, they gave us a big enough area that we were comfortable there.

        

  

Kids had a great time playing with the bubbles coming off DrBooBle's rig.

     

     

By this time it seemed like everybody was in a good mood. That bike party magic had struck again!

        

  

        

        

There was a whole dance area that was mainly kids. Don't remember seeing that before.

     

  

I rode with the river of people until we got near downtown. Then I birded the "Left on 10th St." for a while, but it wasn't a good photo op location. After that I focussed my energy on getting home. Thank you Miles for doing the northbound leg with me. I left the road in Mountain View, but he had further to go.