| Lansing Tweed Ride & Croquet, 2012
May 17, 2012
Last Friday was this Spring's Tweed Ride and Croquet at the Capitol.
A bunch of us had a dandy time.
I'm always amazed at how good we all look. "Tweed" only means no lycra, jeans, tee's, or plastic bikes. Vintage road and citybikes preferred -- bikes of a classic design, anyway.
It's amazing how bad bike-specific stuff looks. The new fat-tube hybrid bikes: ugly.
Sporty certainly has a "look" and it can be fine, but *civil* looks better.
The Bike Friday Tikit folder on our ride looked good, too. Bikes are traditionally diverse and innovative. "New" isn't the problem. Ugly is.
But sometimes it's OK if function rules the day.
The croquet was a fun break once we got downtown. We had tea and snacks afterward. I ran out of time to buy enough beer. Brownbagging and relaxing on the Capitol steps woulda been nice. We stopped at the nearby MBC microbrew pub soon enough.
Out front of the Downtown Smoking Club next door was a classy Triumph repro and an edgy French-style Moto Guzzi motocross-cum-roadbike ("Motard" -- that's it).
It's amazing how much better a longer croquet mallet with longer head works for Overland Croquet. I was getting 15 yd whacks with my set but when I used Lauren's longer/bigger mallet I could get 30 yds. Felt better, too. Same balls.
Our style of play is inspired by Clint Marsh's "Overland Mallet Club" of 1800's UK by way of the Bay Area. We don't use a standard wicket set-up but instead run out a big course between nice-looking trees. We look at the lay of the land and pick out the most symbolic features. At the Capitol we started at a statue on one corner, run a course of a dozen trees, then finished at another statue on the other corner of the block. Fun!
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