Bikes at Northwest Folklife Festival

This Memorial Day the kids and I ventured to the Seattle Center to see our favorite kindiependent band, Caspar Babypants, play at the Northwest Folklife Festival. There weren’t many pedestrians out so we took the Broad Street underpass sidewalk to get past Aurora. Not the best route, but some days I don’t like biking so far out of the way to get around. Today we ended up following a dad pulling a trailer so it seemed like the route of choice. And this put us at the Harrison Street entrance so the boys got their first look at the parking squid:

Caspar Babypants is awesome, but I wanted to see The Hoot Hoots since Geoff is simply awesome: he built his own bamboo bike, he’s friends with Tom of Seattle Bike Blog, and when I asked him a few weeks ago if they ever play during the day so I can see them he said, “We play the Ballard Farmers Market, but might leave before the end this Sunday because it gets pretty hot in my bunny suit.” Bunny suit!? Does it get any better? Here they are setting up, with upside down bike as kick drum stand (and Geoff out of the shot off to the side–sorry, Geoff).

And here they are in action:

I bought two CDs to help finance their June West Coast tour, but we couldn’t watch for too long because while it was hot in the sun, their shady busking spot was quite cold (good for the bunny) and the kids were too shivery to hang out.

We saw one other performer with a bike–Christopher of the Wolves with a Bikes At Work trailer. It looked like he had more gear than the trailer could hold, but he confirmed it brought it all on his bike…but from the parking garage, not Port Townsend.

I rode home with my friend’s family–she on her new Big Dummy and her husband on his commuter bike. We left the Seattle Center via Mercer and almost gave the Mercer underpass a try, but I figured that even if it’s no worse than Broad, I wouldn’t want to take a friend along it. My routes aren’t feeling as family-friendly when I escort a trusting friend along them. I’m not sure what to do about that since there aren’t a lot of options. We took the Denny sidewalk to Dexter and enjoyed the separated bike lane back to North Seattle. It’s more hill than Westlake, but she and her Big Dummy scaled it, no problem. Granted we were both much slower than her husband who even had time to squeeze in a quick grocery trip while waiting for us halfway to the Fremont Bridge.