Sunday I was excited to go back and spend some time in the show that happens when the deadheads get together. I spent a couple of hours or so browsing the crowd. It wasn't thick anywhere, but there were gaggles of people in many shady corners. Most were happy to spend a minute or two listening to a stranger. Around me I was constantly hearing people that hadn't seen each other for years greeting like long lost brothers. The time passed quickly.

     

Lots of people were taking pictures with these signs in the background.

  

Then the Orange Julius bike showed up with Mark at the helm. Grateful Dead music was coming out of that sound system at a respectable volume. I'd be dancing to that if I wasn't busy doing something else already.

     

Mark parked his system along the same wall the KFOG booth was already parked by. That's where I got my picture taken with Gerry Garcia. They were the main action on Shakedown Street. The hubbub I remember from the '80s was mostly gone. :-( Later Ed and Will showed up in new tie dye, so I know there must have been some vending somewhere. I didn't find it. Nobody bothered me about my sticker pushing, for whatever that's worth.

     

For the next couple of hours it was all about getting the back bike corral set up and filled with bicycles.

Then it got slow. One of the volunteers gave me this interesting article about the history of The Dead to browse while we passed the time.

  

Every time another bike or two came in we added them to the parked multitude. Business ebbed and flowed. Sometimes we had to park half a dozen bikes that showed up at the same time. Sometimes we had to wait for the next rider to come in. Most of the time we didn't have to wait long. Lots of conversation happened.

     

I browsed around looking for stickers. Only a few of the bikes even had one that was interesting. Above are pictures of those. Not long after that Alison called to let us know that the other corral was now filled with bikes, so she'd be sending the rest of those needing bike parking down to us. I said "Send them on down, we've plenty of room."

Saturday we hadn't started with a big enough bike corral. We found out after they ran out of space in the other bike parking lot. They started sending us swarms of bicyclists looking for parking. We had to do surgery on the lot, turning the barrier on the left side into another bike parking rack to create enough places to put all the bikes. We didn't have this problem again Sunday. Before we got there someone from Levis had come out and expanded our corral to a good size. When they stopped coming in maybe we had room for ten more bikes. Thank you attentive management!

By this time people were getting bikes occasionally, and it had been a while since the last time someone parked. The sounds of the Grateful Dead were wafting off the stadium. It was great until we had to turn on the generator to power the lights. After that the sound of the generator drowned out the music for me. In the end everybody got their bikes back. We set another record for number of bikes parked in this lot, 104. The previous record had been 98 bikes, set the previous day. Before that it was something like 47 bikes, at an early fall 49er game last year. So proud that the Dead Heads were the ones to set a new MUCH HIGHER record for other acts to compete with.

That doesn't count these four rickshaws or the two skateboards that we also parked inside the tent.

There's always that guy who takes much longer than everyone else to find the lot and get his bike back. Five minutes after he had taken the last bike off our hands we were done making people happy. We turned in the reports, signs, banners and tip jar to Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition. Then I went home and listened to the rest of the concert on KFOG. I tuned in about half way through the first set. I fell asleep before they got around to broadcasting the encore. I can't remember another time I got to hear the show right after it was over on the radio. Not the whole show, because they left out the rather long breaks between sets, but the rest of it was still on when I faded out, somewhere between the middle of the second set and the encore. So awesome!