city of . . . . crowds?

We have a standing joke about going to the Taste of Chicago every summer. It's the biggest nightmare you can imagine because there are just so.many.people. One year, J and I went with some friends and the crowd was so dense that we were all physically forced apart by the mass of people and it took us about 2 hours to be able to find each other again. Now when we're bored and we look at each other and say "I don't know? What do you want to do?" the answer is almost always, "Let's go to the Taste."

Having said that, I got on my bike yesterday and ventured down to the Red Bull Flugtag at North Avenue Beach. Apparently a few other people had the same idea. The fence in the picture below runs along Lakeshore Drive from North Avenue all the way up to Fullerton. That's 12 city blocks and over 1 mile. I took this picture at the Fullerton end of the fence and the bikes were that thick on the fence ALL THE WAY TO NORTH AVE.



It was pretty obvious that I wasn't going to get anywhere close enough to see anybody drive a homemade plane off of a pier into the water. This was as close as I got. Please note the sea of humanity eventually BECOMES the horizon.



What I'd like to know is just what are all of those people standing at the back of the crowd looking at? You couldn't see anything.