Arts

Bike Co-op builds on success of summer bike rave with spooky ride

Like to bike? Like to party? this bike rave may just be your perfect night.

The Bike Co-op run by the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa will host its first Halloween bike rave on Oct. 30, an event that promises a little bit more spook and horror than its summer rendition.

“We had seen other people doing it,” says Phil Chiasson, the program coordinator. “We can have our own fun, and since we are a biking organization we thought, ‘Let’s have a rave party,’ and that’s exactly what we did.”

For their first rave, the co-op ordered party lights and around 500 glow sticks, and equipped themselves with an 800-watt sound system hitched to a trailer. They broadcast the party on a small radio transmitter so any of the participants in the cycling group could listen to music.

This time, they’ve added a Halloween twist. Participants are encouraged to meet at the co-op facility first to decorate their bike with rave accessories and Halloween items.

“This year, the heart of it being an awesome mobile party is still there, but it is going to be a Halloween theme,” adds Chiasson. “So people can be dressed up, and decorate Halloween things like spiderwebs to decorate your bike to make it spooky.”

The course will include old and new stops, including the bike path along the Rideau Canal and this summer’s favourite, Café Nostalgica.

One highlight of the last rave was a particularly festive valve cap decoration that would light up the bike’s tire spokes as you peddle forward in motion. “When you clip them on your tire valve, it would compress the spring and it would turn on like a Tron light. It was pretty cool,” Chiasson explains.

The event is fully accessible, with wheelchair trailers available as long as they’re booked ahead of time.

The Bike Co-op itself is a community space that provides the necessary tools to repair a bike or build one from scratch. Any undergraduate student at the U of O is automatically member, or it’s open to the public for $5 a year. The co-op has a fully trained staff, as well, who give lessons and workshops every two weeks on how to do necessary bike repairs and improvements.

“They learn, and they have the means to do so,” says Chiasson, who bought a bike on Kijiji that was in rough shape and fixed it up at the co-op, then ended up building his own.

“Working on a bike is actually a very approachable thing,” he says. “You could have never seen a wrench before and you come in and a couple weeks later you are building yourself a bike from scratch like I did.”

The Halloween Bike Rave starts Oct. 30 at 6 p.m. behind the Lees complex.

Halloween Bike Rave map courtesy of the SFUO Bike Co-Op