This past Saturday was, well, packed. Between the events I attended and the proximity to Halloween, the downtown area was teeming with costumed people looking to have a little spooky fun. I, while not costumed, hit up a couple of awesome events.

First, I met up at the NC State Bell Tower with about 40 other bikers for the annual Halloween Alley Cat bike race, called the “Hell on Wheels Alleycat”. For those unfamiliar with the event, it is a bike race almost always in urban areas where each racer must achieve a set number of signatures that are given at various checkpoints all over town. The concept was originally formed by bike messengers as a way of testing who could route themselves the best around their cities. Often, there are secret or surprise checkpoints not directly listed on the manifesto, or list of objectives. Sadly, because of the fact that it was a race, there was very little grouping of cyclists. But, I did realize very early on that I had NO chance of winning, so I took my time and had some fun. I also got a great shot from one of the checkpoints (top of a parking deck on the corner of Wilmington street and Cabbarus street) as seen in the image above.

After 2 hours of hard biking and finishing mid-pack, we all stuck around the Riviera for some drinks and cooldown

Later that evening, the College of Design Halloween Bash continued it’s tradition of bands, dancing and costume competitions in the Pit, over on State’s campus. A long tradition, that was one of the last events to allow alcohol on campus. It’s been a dry event for a few years now, and the crowds have diminished some, but really not all that much.
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Every month on the first Friday, most, if not all, of the galleries in the downtown area open up their new exhibits with really enjoyable receptions. Many people drive downtown and walk to as many of the galleries as they can with the night usually culminating in a few drinks at a local bar. For me, it’s probably one of my favorite times of any given month because it’s a great opportunity to see many of my friends as well as check out the artwork. Also happening every first Friday of the month is a downtown bike ride often hijacking at least one lane of traffic. Most are college aged or young professionals, although anyone and everyone is welcome. Usually we have a good distribution of ages. Typically we’re following our noses to the places with the free beer or wine as well as the places where our friends or colleagues have shows. The advantages are that A) you can visit many more galleries over a much broader area than you could by foot, and B) that there is no problem finding a parking place right in front of the galleries. This month was no exception, and due to the beautifully fall-tacular weather, we had a huge turnout! We had 35 riders when I took the picture above at RebusWorks.

The route we followed was from RebusWorks which had a neat political exhibit titled Pro/Con. RebusWorks is down by AntFarm right past the Boylan Bridge. They usually feature what they describe as compelling and innovative work and to their credit, it always is both compelling and innovative!

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