The folks at New Belgium Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colorado love bikes! One of their best beers is the Fat Tire Amber Ale. So they've combined bikes with this beer and do Tour de Fat's around the country.

For Tempe, Arizona, this festival comes every year around mid-October. Over the years, the event has grown immensely. Rumor has it that the event drew around 8,000 bicyclists this year!

There are a couple of fun things about this event. People dress up (not sure why or what the theme is, but it's fun anyway), ride bikes around a 3-mile parade loop, and then attend a beer festival with music and other fun things.

We went to this year's festival with a couple of friends to help us and guide us through the crowd of people. In particular, Kathi helped by leading so that Tauru could follow her line as we wove through other cyclists. As you can imagine, riding a tandem is hard enough because of balancing and maneuvering issues, but imagine doing this visually impaired? Let's just say that Tauru was glad when the parade was over!

We attended the festival and spoke to people about our upcoming ride, which is gaining momentum and interest. So we're super excited about it since it's now less than two months away! Time to ride ...16,000 miles!!!

Tauru and our friend, Kathi, dressed for the Tour. On the ride to downtown Tempe, Arizona, we meet up with other bicyclists. Tauru and Christi. This was a last minute thingy, so we just put on whatever we found laying around. Other folks at the event. Hmmm, at times, when a man dresses up as a woman (peach-colored dress), he seems to get the proportions off. Boy in a box, packaged to go. A good time by all. The line continues. Some 8,000 people/bicycles attended. This girl is early for Halloween. The cow people. The Harlem Globetrotters. Check out that hi-rise bike. We join the ride as Christi snaps some photos as Tauru tries to avoid crashing into others. We steer clear of crowds. Here we follow folks down the 3-mile parade route through Tempe (Arizona). Super Mario from Mario Bros. We thought we were at the end of the line. But at a light, Christi snaps this photo of more bicyclists behind us. Once we return to the festival, we parked our bike and walked around. A band was performing with people on stage dancing. (Closer look) People having a good time! The Yo-Yo Guiness Book of World Record holder was also there performing. He and his wife, who is also an accomplished Yo-Yoer, get a participant on stage to do some Yo-Yo tricks. Voila! The Yo-Yo Master performs. Music? Of course awesome 80's music: Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough." He was quite entertaining. Back to the festival. Check out this double-decker bike. Okay, not sure what this troupe has to do with the festival, but it was quite entertaining. A quad-bike rides around with a drummer in the back and, well, a dancer of some sort. A woman ran over to stuff dollar bills... This is the bike Christi wants! No need to balance since it's three-wheeled. And of course, there had to be a hula-hoop contest.