Car Free Days is Clinging to a Bikey Summer

Faster, the Night is Catching Us

It feels like Summer is fading around here.

Quickly.

Maybe it’s the way it changed from tank-top weather to sweater weather in about two hours this afternoon. Or maybe it’s the way I’ve decided that lights are now a prudent addition to my evening commutes.

Whatever the reason, the Car Free Days family is feeling some serious pressure to do something, anything, fun in the last couple weeks of summer.

Luckily for us, the Seattle bike scene has stepped up to provide some pretty family friendly, bike on music action this weekend.

Bikes and Music powered by Bikes

First up is the Seattle editon of the Bicycle Music Festival. This is a bicycle-powered, touring festival headlined by the Ginger Ninjas and their pedal-powered 2000 watt sound system. The Ginger Ninjas are a project of Kipchoge Spencer, one of the original founders of Xtracycle. The band travels the country, world really, bringing mobile music to masses in the form of the Pleasant Revolution.

How can one not get excited about self-contained, self-powered, Xtracycle-riding band that writes songs like “Dick Cheney (needs more love).”

This video below starts a little slow, but if you can make it through the first minute of “whoo-ing” you get a feel for Ginger Ninjas on the road.

The festival moves about town Saturday so you’ll have plenty of opportunity to check out the entire scene:

• 10 am: Waterfront Park (right by the Seattle Aquarium on Elliot Bay)
• 3 pm: Denny Park (on Denny between Dexter and 9th Ave bike route, which happens to be the really lame bone that SDOT and soon to be ex-mayor-for-life Nichols threw toward the cycling community when poor SLUT planning ruined formerly wonderful Westlake Ave.
• 7 pm: Seattle Center Mural Amphitheater
• 10 pm: A secret location (I imagine they’ll tell you where if you show up at any of the others and shake your booty)

Bikes and Film (and music, too)

Whew! And if that isn’t enough, at 7pm you can head up to Capitol Hill for the Fourth Annual Bike-in Movie at Cal Anderson Park. The film, Jour de Fete, is expected to start around 9pm (dusk):

Celebrate the 60th anniversary of Tati’s quintessential and lanky French postman, Francoise, as he makes an intelligent slapstick comedy of French rural life while dreaming of bringing modern knowhow to traditional ways. In the process he beats the best passing Tour riders, falls into duck ponds and delivers the mail.

But wait, there’s more:

If the idea of an entire day and night of music and film just a bit too much, you can tone it back a bit and still remain in the bikey way. Detour over to Seward Park for aLIVe, a Great City event designed to illustrate, educate, and celebrate ideas for a city designed around people instead of cars. Runs from 10am-3:30pm

Anything south of I-90 is pretty much out of our “bikes and kids” cruising range, so we probably won’t make it all the way down to Seward for this one.  If any of our readers do, we’d love  a report.

Sunday

If the weather is good, we may ride the Xtracycles downtown, then take the water taxi to Alki. Or we may roll to Ballard for for the Sunday Market. Or we may just cram the whole family in the front-yard hammock and read the paper and/or eat donuts all morning. Who knows.

What have you got planned?

–Tim