Yesterday was the biggest event on campus- BEER BIKE!!! Beer Bike is a tradition dating back to the 50's which is essentially a relay race with bikers and chuggers with alumni, women, and men teams. It'd take me forever to explain, but here's the handy Wikipedia article on this quirky crazy tradition.
Oh, and each college chooses an alcohol-related theme, it being BEER bike and all. Our theme was "The Kegfather: Keep your friends drunk and your enemies drunker", with the face of our master on all of our T-shirts.
A staircase door is left open fittingly with a keg.
The entire week leading up to Beer Bike is called Willy Week, and this is the only other week other than Orientation Week where jacks, or pranks on other colleges, are allowed. Everyone's favorite jacks is to run around the hallways making loud noise at wee hours of the night, so I hardly got any peaceful sleep this week.
The morning of Beer Bike, everyone wakes up early (as early as 4:30 at some colleges, but here at Jones we woke up around 6:30), to begin the festivities for the day. Everyone paints their hair, puts on war paint, dances, and gets pumped up for the big day ahead.
Before the race is a huge water balloon race with the entire campus participating. It is a chaotic, crazy, energy-filled event where colleges compete against other colleges throwing balloons they've been filling up all week. There are trashcans and trashcans filled with balloons:
Jones' trashcans filled with balloons! We even had assigned people to guard the balloons
lest other colleges try to sneak into Jones & pop the balloons! Sabotage!
The balloon fight is crazy. I signed up to pass out the balloons out of a truck, since we usually drive along the inner loop and have a water balloon fight "parade", but this year, the set-up was different so I handed out balloons from the ground outside the roped-off area.
After the fierce cheer battle between colleges, where everyone runs up to other colleges and yells their own cheers and the responding anti-cheers, the water balloon fight began.
Can I just say, chaos????? There were balloons flying through the air, yelling and screaming, constant water splashes, the ground mucking into mud... And I was only in the periphery of it all. I still got soaking wet and muddy from the race!
Still smiling after the (traumatizing) balloon fight
And of course, everyone headed to the highlight of the day- the beer bike race itself!
After Will Rice won both alumni's and women's race, the men's race began. Jones had our fingers crossed to keep WRC from sweeping (winning all three races). On our 5th biker, the race was immediately stopped after a biker crashed into some judges. It was particularly windy today, and the race proceeded about half an hour later after deliberation, as a Beer Run. Frantically, Jones gathered up running shoes and socks, and amazingly, Jones raced in first, winning the Beer Bike/run race!
View from the tracks- I was on the chug team so I could see the entire colleges
on its stands (you can see the separated colors) cheering on.
Jones ran our mandatory victory lap, cheering and celebrating & of course, we headed back to our dorm building to CELEBRATE! We celebrated with champagne, singing/dancing, tons of pizza, and a mandatory burning of Will Rice's "sweep broom" in our grassy quad. And then, of course, we all danced the night away in the lobby as champions.
I loved this quirky Rice tradition & this was my last Beer Bike as an undergraduate. I have my fingers crossed that my graduate school has as fun and weird traditions that I can look forward to with a countdown calendar!
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