I was honored to be a “Celebrity Judge” of the costume contest for the fall edition of the Truff Shuff. Although I asked to be referred to as “You may have hear of him” rather than “Celebrity”, but I didn’t fight it hard enough I guess. Regardless of titles the opportunity to go back to Stillwater and hang out with that fun loving, and bicycle loving, family was one that I couldn’t pass up.
We loaded up the tandem and pull behind bike and the whole family dressed up in 90’s tracksuits to participate in the kids lap, which we all had a blast doing. I really appreciate that they incorporated the kids into this event! But someone else has those pictures and I’ll have to share those later.
The Truffle Shuffle is hard to define, which is just fine by me, but if you like drinking beer, getting weird, having fun, and riding bikes, then you’ll be right at home here. This being my first time I didn’t know exactly what to expect, other than to have fun. I found myself near a group of ladies from Arkansas that had staged an unsanctioned beer hand-up station at the bottom of the hill. So turned on my camera and let the shutter button fly. I took 1,000 pictures in 1 hour and then my camera died. It’s currently being shipped back to FujiFilm and I’m hoping for a promising prognosis. There would have been a lot more photos, but you’ll just have to use your imagination. Here are some of my favorites from the shoot, a link to the full gallery with 590 images is available for download at the bottom of the article.
What I witnessed is what I believe to be the perfect hand-up strategy to date and it takes 3 people to execute perfectly. Let me break it down for you:
Step 1: Prep the beer. One person needs to be refilling continuously.
Step 2: Riders are coming, get ready!!!
Step 3: Beckie gets their attention and lure’s them in
Step 4: Lilly take it from there and presents the beer to her target
Step 5: Target comes in for hand-up
Step 6: Gentle touch
Step 7: Happy customer
Step 8: Repeat
This event is held on an open course on public roads. Although it’s pretty rural and not much traffic is expected we did interrupt some Amazon Prime deliveries. I love this photoset. Watch as the riders overtake the delivery truck, the driver pulls over, and ultimately joins in rooting on the racers, before he finally went on to deliver those packages.
None of this would have been possible without the amazingly talented Claire Paniccia who is the mastermind behind the Truffle Shuffle. I had the opportunity to record an episode for the BoD After Party that’s available to patrons.
Here is a gallery with over 500+ images from the event. Free to download and share! Please credit @bikesordeath.
