Sometimes we can love something too much. Take, for example, the annual Bainbridge Island Pie Ride. This is, in my opinion, the greatest cycling event ever. Folks ride around a beautiful island and there is PIE. The Squeaky Wheels folks have been doing this for six years now as a volunteer-run event and it's wonderful. Sure, it's tricky to gauge demand and sometimes the weather can be kind of threatening but in past years they've managed to force extra slices of pies onto riders who don't protest too much. This year, the weather turns out to be perfect and even though the Squeaky Wheels predicted that they might get twice as many riders as last year, they got blind-sided.
There were at least triple the number of riders this year. Maybe quadruple. You give away pie and word gets out. It doesn't help that some idiot with a blog wrote about the Pie Ride here and here and then emailed a bunch of his friends and used that stupid Twitter thing to say:
"My favorite ride of the year is this Sunday: http://www.squeakywheels.or..."
The ride was fabulous. The Squeaky Wheels did a great job. The pies were great and disappeared quickly. A police escort was used to secure more pies. Every pie on Bainbridge Island was secured and consumed. Pies were brought in from Poulsbo. Those also vanished quickly.
Plans are already underway for next year, plans involving advance registration and incentives for folks to bake and bring pies to the ride. The bond between pedaling and pie is a strong one. The Pie Ride will go on.
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