Bicycle Jousting

June 15th, 2008 by: cheyenne

It turned summer on Friday and we spent half the day in our pajamas blinking squinty-eyed at the bright light and rotating through morning naps and coffee. Saturday was equally brilliant and we went to the park to check out some bicycle jousting.

We arrived early and ate lunch, played with Ronin on the swings, and then found some slackropers to harass. I haven’t slackroped since Texas (when I was a lithe 11 weeks pregnant) and basically, I suck pretty embarrassingly now. I know that after an hour of playing around, I might recover some of my former glory (which is to say, marginally less wobbly but not anything you’d shell out the big bucks to go see) but in front of an audience, I stepped up, ripped out the crotch of my [PRE-PREGNANCY!!!!!] jeans, made some vague excuses about having not done it for a while, and preoccupied myself with Ronin, who had finally decided to unleash Poop Diaper 1.0 on the day. Somehow she managed to deposit nearly every bit of leakage into Joshua’s front jeans pocket. It was pretty amusing. Joshua was sort of flummoxed that he had poop in his pocket, particularly since sitting in the bottom of the pocket was the cell phone. We hoped nobody would call us.

Bicycle jousting was highly entertaining. We watched people start to gather decked out in their SCA gear and driving tricked-out Portland bikes. One guy had a sweet chainmail hoodie and was on a seven-foot tall custom BMX bike.

They took over a set of basketball courts using eight-foot PVC pipes fitted with large conical points made of foam and duct tape. One guy served as the referee/announcer and there were various guys acting as hecklers, snatching away poles if they were dropped and forcing the jousters to chase them down to get them back. Jousting, of course, has two players ride swiftly at each other armed with their jousting poles with the objective of poking the opponent off his ride. It might be considered dangerous. At this tournament, safety gear was clearly optional. Some wore football helmets and elbow pads, others were naked.

The first few rounds were fairly benign. Two wobbly cyclists rode toward the center and batted inexpertly at one another with their long poles. One usually fell over right there and the other would recover and swerve dangerously away, the victor of the match.

Here’s a blurry cell phone shot of Daryl Hall and John Oates duking it out (it’s a crummy shot but you know how celebrity photos are). Oates: “I will kick you and your pathetic solo album’s ass!” Hall: “Get the hell away from me you mustachioed mulleted freak!” Sadly, yes it has come to this.

The Hall and Oates tournament was a bit boring actually, mostly because they couldn’t seem to either hit each other with the jousting poles or if they did, knock one or the another off and end it already. They spent long minutes riding their bikes around in circles, chasing one another with poles, the hecklers dashing around making a nuisance of themselves. Finally I think Oates won but I had lost interest because a whole herd of naked bikers invaded the park, sporting various wacky props and a very loud sound system.

We cut out early to change Joshua’s pants, rescue the cell phone, and catch a bus to another bike event (because it’s stupid to drive to a bike thing, but we don’t have a baby carrier for the bike). Unfortunately, we missed our bus and then the connecting bus was taking forever and so we gave up and just went for Indian food (Tandoor Indian Kitchen), which was awesome as usual and halfway through, Ronin released Poop Diaper 2.0 and ruined Joshua’s second pair of jeans for the day.

[flash /images/0806/joust.flv w=400 h=300 f={autostart=false}]

[Here is a pair of BMX/recumbent jousters swiftly dispatching one another.]



3 Comments on “Bicycle Jousting”

  1. Sereia says:

    Can someone please explain to me how a baby can poo in her father’s front pocket? These seems a very impressive trick to me. I might like to have at Joshua’s front pocket myself.

  2. Laszlo says:

    What’s slackroping? Hi Sereia, glad to finally see an update, was wondering how you guys were doing.

  3. cheyenne says:

    Slackroping is like tight-rope walking but instead of a static cable, you walk on a slack one. Usually 1″ webbing tied taught between trees. When you step on it, it droops way down and boings and wobbles all over the place (unless of course you are good, which we’re not). Tightropers all think slackroping is nutty and slackropers can’t handle the tightrope.

    RE: poop in the pocket… We’re not sure ourselves; all we can say is that Ronin is a child of exceptional talents. Seriously, she barely even got any on her own pants.

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Cheyenne Weil, Joshua Coxwell