When I got there these guys were setting up this photo studio. I gather they were from some bicycle magazine, and they wanted lots of pictures of people with bicycles. Just for fun, I took a turn in front of the camera. Then I found out that the woman in red wanted me to sign a talent release or whatever you call the form that lets them profit from your picture.

For a while the number of bicycles in the park grew steadily. I wandered around pushing stickers, and I met a lot of like minds. Then a big crew showed up all at once, and this guy seemed like the ringleader. His bike has a built in sound system powered by the pedaling. He said he was "The Fossil Fool" and explained that as soon as they got set up they would need peddlers to power the sound system for Shake Your Peace and Antioquia. I was one of the people that volunteered.

  

These pictures were taken from the saddle as the band played. About then I realized I'd managed to set out with an almost dead battery in my camera. Once that fact came to light I tried to just get one good picture of everything, so I missed a lot of the details I usually pick up.

    

That box with the LEDs was my control panel. When the red light was lit the battery was charged, and I could lay off for a few seconds. When the green light was lit the battery was okay. When that went out it was time for some serious pedaling. I never let it get down below green, and I pedaled all the way through the whole set. They were great! It was an honor to keep their sounds going.

  

At some point a nice young woman came up and told me the bike I was pedaling was named "Squash".

The next band was Shake Your Peace. They were good to, but in a totally different sounding way.

After that band's set we rode over to Dolores Park. The ride felt a lot like a critical mass ride, but it was much more law abiding and laid back. I rode a lot of it talking to a woman from Ohio. I forget her name.

When we got there the Brass Liberation Orchestra was already making people dance. A good time was had by all.

I've seen this park wall to wall people with no room to sit down, and this crowd was nothing like that. Still there were a lot of people there with their bicycles. Somebody told me the crowd was twice what it had been a year ago. It was big enough that even finding people that I knew were there it was hard.

  

After I took these pictures my camera died. Also, that sticker on the bike behind the woman in the zebra outfit was the last one I had with me. I was having such a good time I didn't want to leave, so I stayed with the event until the end.

After the bands there was a freestyle BMX show on the tennis courts. I'm not even sure my camera can capture that kind of action. One guy was doing acrobatic stunts on a spinning bike. Another was balancing on the back wheel and twirling the front wheel. Every now and then somebody else would cross my field of vision doing some other stunt I'm never going to learn. It was really a treat to watch them ride.

By this time it was quite dark outside the tennis courts. The party went mobile, led by a woman with a piano on the back of some rider's bike. The sound system was quite sophisticated. The piano and vocals were mixed on one bike and then broadcast to speakers on about half a dozen bikes scattered through the parade by radio. I saw one of the radios, it was about the size of a bestselling book. The sound quality was great everywhere I experienced it.

I stayed with the event for too long. I found this out when I got to the train station and realized that they had closed a while previously. They I got up to the Trans Bay Terminal and found out that the last bus was also long gone. My legs were very tired. That chilly San Francisco climate was asserting itself. I ended up getting a motel room nearby. When all was said and done, it only cost $124.26 including tax. The clerk told me I was lucky, most of the previous week he'd sold out before midnight. In that kind of environment my bed would have been $200 plus.