Last fall’s Dinner & Bikes tour went so well that the three of us decided to do it again this year. This spring we’ll be headed South — from Kansas to Texas to Georgia and back again, with many stops in between. We have an emerging schedule and plan on our new tour site.
Our tour is a hybrid thing — it’s sort of like if a book or movie tour was organized by a punk show promoter and put into the format of dinner theater and invited a cross section of bicycle enthusiasts, advocates, activists, and curious onlookers. For our audience, we hope it’s inspiring and motivating as well as being a fun, social evening. For us, it feels a bit like being part of a traveling circus — my dream is to have a real circus act some day.
There are a lot of good parts about tour, but the best part is discovering pockets of bike culture where you didn’t expect it. Spearfish, South Dakota, Provo, Utah, and Topeka, Kansas are some of the towns that have blown us away in the past. And it looks like this spring will contain many such revelations, people in small cities and towns spiritedly creating their own brand of bicycle communities without the national recognition that major cities often enjoy for doing less.
I’m particularly looking forward to visiting the small and very possibly bicycle-utopic town of Greeneville, South Carolina, living it up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, tapping into the exciting bike happenings in Fort Worth, Texas, and getting inspired by the emerging bike culture in Mobile, Alabama and nearby in Fairhope.
Then there’s Tulsa, Oklahoma, where last year a group turned a tumbledown downtown street into a thriving business district for a weekend for an event called Street Cred — this year they’re doing it again, and it looks like we may get to be a part of it. There’s a short and sweet movie below the jump showing the transformation:
Check out our tour details and schedule — if you live in any of the towns along our route and want to help set up an event, we’d love to hear from you.