Ghost riders

I didn't intend to do any vacation updates this week, but I really wanted to share with you some photos from my Saturday evening. I spent the afternoon and early evening attending Modern Angie H.'s wedding in Athens, Ga., home of the University of Georgia. Because the wedding (which was lovely) ended around 6 p.m., my friends and I had the whole evening to kill.

We ate at The Grit, an awesome vegetarian restaurant located in a building owned by Michael Stipe and then decided to grab milkshakes at the Grill. But on the way to get milkshakes, we got sidetracked. And when I saw we got sidetracked, I mean we got sidetracked into becoming fans of crit bike racing.

The annual Athens Twilight Criterium race was going on, which meant a 1km square block around downtown was blocked off. Crit races involved the bikers basically doing a whole bunch of laps around the course and whomever is in the lead at the end wins. Sound boring? Somewhere in between watching these guys bike nearly on top of one another and waiting to see who's overtaken whom in the 3/4ths of a kilometer that you can't see and feeling the breeze as the racers charge by and watching the course officials on motorcycles trying to pump up the crowd it becomes very, very addictive. And this particular race is done at night, hence the name. I'm probably not doing it justice, so check out some photos.

The course without racers (sorry for the blur -- low light and nothing to steady on):


The course with racers:


What? you can't see them. That's because they're actually ghosts:


Good thing my camera has a special ghost-capturing setting.

Seriously, if you ever have a chance to watch a crit race then give it a chance and see if you can get away without being hooked. It almost -- ALMOST -- makes me understand why people enjoy Nascar, but I'm not quite ready to concede that just yet.

A video, if you're into that kind of thing: