Picnic!

Sunday, the Intown Touring Club had a picnic at Grant Park. When I first heard about it, I was a little skeptical. First time bike rides frequently have a lot of no shows and picnics, like pot luck dinner parties, can be the same. You know, four people show up out of the thirty that said they'd be there and everyone brings potato salad. So a bike ride ending with a picnic, while sounding promising, was probably going to be a disappointment.

I was wrong.



Fifteen or so riders met at the square in Decatur to ride to the Dekalb Farmer's Market for provisions and then on to Grant Park, for the first Intown Touring Club picnic. Several others rode directly to the park and we even picked up a couple of other riders on the way. Most impressively, all the supplies - grills, coolers, water, beverages, charcoal, etc - were brought on bike. Big props go out especially to Charlie and Byron with the XtraCycle and the bike trailer and Katie with a heavily laden Atlantis touring bike. The ride was a casual, meandering social pace to the park. Kind of hard to do anything else with these loads. And the food was excellent - with the mid-ride stop at the Farmer's Market ensuring that everyone had their favorites - there was enough food that we were begging strangers to share some. Topped off with beautiful early summer weather and a wiffle ball game, the picnic was an outstanding success.



Can't wait for the next one...

Here's some pics of the picnic (and the transportation) and a link to the Intown Touring Club page:

http://intowntouring.googlepages.com/home



Hey, batter! batter!



More photos from Byron here: http://picasaweb.google.com/byronrushing/ITCPicnic

- taz