Thursday, December 9, 2010

An afternoon ride

I'm fresh off the heels of a terrible bout of the stomach flu but I won't disgust you with the details of that episode.

Last Saturday Shea and I scouted a bike trail for a trip that LAT42's going to guide with a company called Sacred Rides out of Canada. Going in to this, i knew I was signing up for 12 to 13 miles of biking. I also knew that mountain biking would probably be more difficult than road biking so, I set my brain to challenging mode, all the while comforting myself in knowing that, though the path may be a bit rocky, it was relatively flat and skirted a pretty river. Right.

Anyhoo, as an illustrative point, I present you with some pictures of Shea riding bikes:





And then let's remember what happens to me and my accessories when I engage in downhill sports:



So, keeping all this in mind, I'll now tell you that the first half of the ride was beautiful and very nearly flat featuring waterfalls, wide meandering rivers, horses running free and the occasional families of sheep and cows.

The first time I fell I got up like a champ: laughed it off and patted myself on the back for attempting to follow Shea who had bunny-jumped over a log in the middle of the trail.

About a half-hour after later the trail started to get hilly. Then I fell into a pile of shit/mud and could hear it squirting in my shoes. At one point we got lost and went down (and up) two large and rocky hills we didn't need to. It was cold, I was sweaty and Pissy Princess made an appearance. Shea handled things as best he could: waiting at the top of every hill with a cookie extended in my direction and helping me get my bike across the bigger stream clearings. He was noticeably wary of the looks I was cutting him and fell into startled silence when, upon turning another corner that revealed another hill, an admittedly terrifying scream of anger gurgled out of me. (The cookies were his saving grace.) Luckily, my extreme frustration and tantrum only lasted about a twenty minutes and we popped out of the park at a Parilla where i was fed mountains of sizzling meat and all was well. (Until I got some sort of Giardia from the shit/mud puddle episode and was laid up in bed for three days cursing my fate!)

So, that was that. Did you have fun laughing at me? Here's a nice shot of a battle wound on my thigh... a week later:



On that note, I'll leave you with some food porn:






my sourdough skillz are getting pretty legit btdubs.

Stay tuned for the brew blog.

CMC

No comments:

Post a Comment