Cooper Young Festival

Cooper-Young Festival is this Saturday. They tried to get valet bicycle parking but weren't successful as far as I know (nothing about it on their website or posters) which is upsetting. I'm sure many attendees will opt for the convenience of a bicycle versus the hassle of trying to find a parking space/paying to park in someone's yard. But maneuvering through a crowd with a bicycle isn't very fun. Last year I re-routed my commute home through the festival. While it was great to see my friends operating their booths and I looked super bad-ass with a bicycle and it was 6:00PM (an hour before the festival ends) I still had to be very careful. I can only imagine what it will be like at peak hour with 120,000 humans milling about.

So park your bike. CY has several ginkgo-shaped bicycle racks that will be situated behind the vendor booths; that's if you can get to one. The picture above is actually a bike rack as well, located before the Art Trestle, behind Toad Hall Antiques. I suspect that there will be more bikes than available bicycle racks so Tamara Cook, CYBA Director suggests locking up to the long fence right after the Art Trestle:


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That would make a pretty sweet picture, bicycles lined up for half of a block. Or some enterprising CY resident might just allocate their yard to bicycle parking instead of car parking (Doug? Ryan?). It would also be cool to get a picture of everyone with their bike and see the different frame styles, colors, tire choices, bag/basket options...

Okay, sorry for nerding up on you right there but maybe you agree: everyone loves looking at pictures of themselves (you do. You get excited when someone tags you on facebook) and everyone loves their bicycle (there's probably just one other thing that you'll get as "familiar" with as your bicycle) so combine the two. Maybe we'll do this at our upcoming alleycat(?).

So back to bags and baskets. You'll need something with which to carry all the goodies you'll score. Like this (the real reason for this post); the best thing ever purchased by anyone ever at the Cooper Young Festival. This has been with me for about 11 years:



Definitely click for larger images. It's too small for me now so Em gets to be amazing. Trust me, it was difficult for me to let her wear it but that's what you do when you love someone: you give them your favorite T-shirts.