Pedal Fest

My second visit to San Francisco was near the end of July where Peter and I visited Oakland for a bike festival. It was held at Jack London Square. Jack was a native San Franciscan and a mighty outdoors man. In case you're not familiar he wrote The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and numerous other rugged type books. I'm sure he would approve of a bohemian/punk rock contingent gathering in his namesake square to celebrate exercise and being one with the wilds of Oakland traffic.

Oakland was a quite hippie college city. Reminding me a lot of small towns in Texas that have large colleges that make up half the town population. It gives way to a lot of free thinking and experimentation when half your community is barely legal age to vote and just started doing their own laundry. New ideas and ways of life emerge so suddenly like tulips in spring time.

There were a number of dare devil riders. Mounting large wooden boxes and jumping on one bike wheel from one to the next. Then of course the usual BMX bikers. These are past times you will never see me indulge in. They are far too dangerous and scary to be fun for me.  But you could catch me driving one of these just about any day of the week.

This behemoth was pedal powered and would most definitely take two people to operate but Peter had to take the photo. I should also mention I had to wait in line behind 5 children to get into this seat. Why do I so often find myself in the same line as other's offspring?

I would also ride one of these but unfortunately they were just for show at the festival. These date back to somewhere around 1870 and if you can't really tell by the photos they are high wheel tricycles. They were mostly ridden by women and dignified gentlemen such as doctors or clergyman. Due to the standard bicycle design of the time, the familiar "High-Wheel", having a large front wheel and small back one causing a lot of forward falls which ladies and gentlemen would like to avoid. This action actually coined the phrase "taking a header". The other piece of interesting information about high wheel tricycles is that a lot of their mechanics were used when designing cars later on. Rack and pinion steering, the differential, and band brakes are just a few things that were originally used for tricycles. It's a wild world we live in people, that this rickety bit of metal machinery used to be someone's main mode of transportation and how far people moving technology has come.