First Alley Cat

This is the flyer for my first Alley Cat race.


My friend Chris and I rode our first Alley Cat race last Saturday night in Seattle. It was sponsored by Cranked Magazine, celebrating the first issue of their new mag. Check them out if you get a chance. It is a pretty cool publication.



Now, on to the details...

The race started at 6 PM and it was raining like a mofo. We got plenty soaked, but had a blast riding through the streets of Seattle to the four stops listed on our manifest. At each stop we got another clue that sent us to another location to get some information and also gave us an item to pick up along the way to the finish - The Rendevous in Bell Town.

I'm kind of dense, so did not put all this together until the day after the race. Each of the stops was at a newspaper of some type and each of the items we had to pick up were free news papers, except for the Real Change which costs a buck. So, the whole theme was based around publishing - which makes sense for an Alley Cat sponsored by a magazine celebrating their first publication!

These were the stops on the race manifest - The Seattle Weekly, The Stranger, The Seattle Times and the Seattle P.I. The start was at the Owl and Thistle in Post Alley and (like a said earlier) ended at The Rendevous in Bell Town. You could go to the four stops in any order and follow any route to get there. We chose to go in the order I listed the stops above since The Weekly is only one block away from The Owl and Thistle.

That is where the fun began. Chris and I had agreed to ride the race together and reviewed our strategy for stops and a very loosely designed route between them. At the start he fired out of the gates... And took a wrong turn! You might be asking yourself "How do you get lost going one block?!" The answer - You follow somebody that does not know where they are going. The last I saw of him he was headed toward First Avenue. By the time I got him on his phone he had made it to Pike Place Market - about 1/4 of mile North of our first stop!

To be continued...