hallo-gato

Halloween Alleycat.  I wasn’t going to ride, but caved to peer-pressure(!).  It was fun – we made a pentagon, as you can see on the map, or at this route-map (okay, so you can’t see the pentagram on the route map, but I was curious about the distance).  Here’s the material and the winners.  The clues are for a quiz that if you couldn’t answer you dropped a place, what’s the answer???? It’s super obvious, except that I always confuse him with Freddy Kreuger.

Alley Gato

So let’s see.  Me and my bike are getting a long fairly predictably.  By that I mean that since it’s a salvaged bike it works about 75% of the time.  The rest of the time it does really annoying shit – the chain falls off, it jumps gears, the wheel starts wobbling out of nowhere, or the chain breaks completely.  What all that means is that I’m looking to build a new bike.  Since I’ve yet to jump on the fixed gear bandwagon, and it’s really just getting rolling (yarf) here, timing seems good.  I want to build the thing with a flip-flop hub so I’ve got options.  To start assembling the things I need I asked on the forum the fixie kids here have about where to find a frame.  (It seems like in general second-hand stuff isn’t all that acessible in Spain, I think people just keep things. Forever.)  So, via that I met this kid, Coco, that told me about the Alley Cat on Saturday. He also gave me the opportunity to buy this frame that he ahd managed to bend on his first day riding it (which I did not take him up on, but thanks, anyway).  Also, the process of meeting up with him got me more lost that I’ve yet been in Madrid.  Pretty ridiculous. 

Long story short, I went to the race on Saturday.  I did not ride (just imagine, an alley cat in a city you barely know after dark on a bike that can’t hold it’s chain for more than 20 minutes).  But I did hang out and meet the kids and take some photos.  There are a few more here.  Supposedly I’m also helping them screenprint shirts for the up coming Hell in South event in two weeks.