Vandrea Does America: Day 73 (Saturday 9/1/12)- Fort Collins, CO

　

Fort Collins is already at the top of our favorite city list (Missoula, MT is close but as nothing surrounds it, it falls to 2nd place). Tour De Fat is just another reason to absolutely love this town. After briefly switching it up with tea, it was back to more beer.

New Belgium calls Fort Collins home and as Fat Tire is their best selling beer they host a beer festival every year, but with a twist- everyone dresses like it's Halloween and rides around on their bikes. There's another twist-the men dress sluttier than the girls. Some are even so drunk they might even be mistaken that it is Halloween. Tour de fat, is an actual touring event that stops in several cities across the nation, but when it pulls into Fort Collins it gets it's largest numbers, and I have to imagine it's craziest attendees.

If we hadn't been told by some locals what to expect I don't know how we would have reacted when we ran into over 20,000 drunk, costumed people who entered the bike race and many thousands more milling around. In the end New Belgium raised $80,000 for local bike charities and got half the town drunk doing it.

Since our van hasn't the space for bikes or costumes we didn't get to fully participate, but gawking entertained us endlessly. The festival began around 11a as the bike race started winding down (the race begins at 9a, the drinking well before that, passed out napping around 12:30) and there were several stages with bands playing throughout the afternoon.

We took as many pictures as possible of all the creative, crazy, and disgusting outfits we saw, but the costumed being in droves and surprisingly swift, were hard to capture. There were bubble wrap jellyfish, painted human cotton candy, waffles, Oscar the Grouch, a girl with appropriately placed censor bars, the modern day Village People, New Belgium beer caps made of pie pans, a girl Tobias Funke in never nude attire, smartly dressed giant eyeballs...even a painted dog. The most popular costumes by far were Mario and Luigi, though some were quite elaborate and some were half assed (actually many of them were half assed), followed by lots of Flintstones and gnomes running around. Basically it was chaos. Well, I wouldn't say complete chaos. I detected two unwritten rules as to how to make a costume for the event.

1. Ensure it be as ugly as possible.

Sub rule A: Include copious amounts of neon.

Sub rule B: Loud and conflicting patterns are to be encouraged.

2. Take your outfit and chop it in half, so that, preferably, at least a butt cheek, or boob is hanging out.

If it sounds like feeding tens of thousands of people beer and putting them on bikes is a bad idea, the town had a great and novel approach. Security was lax. Drunks weren't quarantined in a beer corral. You could wander in and out of the event. And instead of swarming with cops, they had a large number of EMT's on stand by. So few cops, it was a few hours before I saw one. I saw a man with a freezer size zip lock bag of marijuana, waving it around like it was a handbag, but no cops. I suppose it's hard to stuff a gallon of weed into 2 inch shorts.

It might surprise you then that at the end of the event it was reported that everyone had behaved themselves and there had been no fights. We were then instructed by the MC to show him our butts (as if everyone hadn't seen enough of that) by bending down and picking up trash. A surprisingly family (we saw a lot of children) and earth (the port-a-potty karaoke booth was solar paneled) friendly drunk fest.