Recently I moved back to my old work location, which is significantly closer to home. Ten miles, to be exact. Last time I worked at this particular location I got into the habit of cycling to work, and thought it might be nice to start cycling in again – especially as there’s rumor they may move my project to another location some 40 miles away by the end of the year so I really ought to make the most of it while I still can. As it’s been a couple of years since I cycled more than round the block with the kids (although they cycle so slowly it’s almost walking sat on a bike…), I thought I’d better start with some distance trials. So this weekend I got my bike out, dusted it down, and determined to set off round the neighborhood.
At the end of last school year, the local school authority announced that in a bid to cut costs they were reducing the bus service. The school bus service used to be free to anyone who lived more than 1/4 mile from the school, but they upped this to 1/2 a mile which, given that the area within 1/4 to 1/2 a mile from the school is fairly densely-populated, will leave quite a few more people either walking their kids to school in the sweltering Texas heat, or (more likely, given that this is America) driving them in, adding to the congestion around the school and increasing carbon emissions. Nice. Not that it bothers me; I live over 1/2 a mile from the school, so my kids can still get the bus in with the rest of the riff-raff. Which is lucky because I only moved to America because I thought it would be cool for the kids to go to school on one of those iconic yellow school buses. That and having my mailbox on a stick at the end of the front garden, so I have to leave the house to check the mail and can’t turn into a complete shut-in.
Anyway, to make life easier for the poor kids who were now required to walk to school, the local council (or whatever they have here) decided to build some nice, new walking/bike paths. Actually, the paths were largely already there, but were just dirt tracks alongside the many bayous that criss-cross our area – they just laid down compacted gravel, and then built bridges under the main roads that the kids would otherwise have to cross. (Although technically I guess they built tunnels, as they go under the road…). Although the dirt tracks were much more fun to cycle along on a mountain bike (there being no mountains within 100 miles of here) than compacted gravel, it is nice that it all joins up nicely and you don’t have to cross any major roads, so I thought that for my first cycling foray I decided I’d check out these new bike trails.
I worked out a nice figure-eight route that would take me up to the high school to the North (which none of my kids go to yet, but…) and then loop back to head back past my house and East to the elementary school that my youngest goes to (the other two now being at the junior high a mile to the South, and to where the bike paths currently don’t run). I joined the trail at the top of my road, which meant that I only spent about 100 yards on tarmac, which is great, because then I can pretend I’m ‘getting back to nature’. The first half of my route was pretty good, but by the time I had done the first loop and was passing home, my legs were killing me and my back ached like a mother. Not like a motherf*er, just like an actual mother who was 9 months pregnant with 20-lb twins. But I’m nothing if not persistent, so rather than wimping out and just slinking home, I headed past the turn-off to my house and continued on the loop down to the elementary school. Again, they’d done a great job on the paths, although they’re really going to need to run lighting all the way along it if they expect the kids to walk down there in winter.
By the time I reached the elementary school (about a mile further on) I had gotten my second wind, so in a fit of what I can now only assume was sheer madness, I decided to carry on past the school, and into a bike trail through the woods that I’d been down a few times before – just as a destination on its own and not on the back end of a longer route. And it was lucky that I had been down there before, as it was now all overgrown, and from my vantage point of 4ft above ground level, it was difficult to see exactly where the six inch-wide track was. Though I shouldn’t complain – last time I went through here, it was a foot deep in water in places which made things very difficult. And at least the water having subsided allowed me see the branches that the recent storms had brought down, which I had to get off my bike and step over. Or, more accurately, hurdle over at a run, as whenever I stopped, a billion mosquitos appeared from nowhere and started snacking on me. A billion. I’m not exaggerating – I think they called in reinforcements from the West Nile, as no sooner had my foot hit the ground than my arms and legs were virtually black with the little buggers. Though if they’d just waited until after I’d been through the bramble patch that blocked a good chunk of the route they could have just licked the blood fresh from the scratches and saved themselves the trouble of actually digging into my sweaty flesh. I would have probably been in more pain had the nettles not numbed my legs by that stage. Although, numb legs or not, I still felt the length of bramble that had managed to wrap itself around my back spokes and was consequently flagellating my ass with every revolution of the wheel. I guess I could have reached around and pulled it loose, but hey, I didn’t say I didn’t like it…
Worse than the undergrowth (although overgrowth would have been more accurate), though, was the wildlife. I didn’t see any deer, boar, or armadillos as I have done on previous bike rides through these woods, but at least none of them attacked me, which the one I saw this time did. And what was it? A butterfly. Sure, you may well laugh, but when you get smacked in the face by a fricking huge butterfly at 15mph when you’re least expecting it, those suckers hurt! I think Muhammad Ali got it all wrong – you should saunter along towards someone, like a bee, and then when you get close enough, just when they think you’ll do the sensible thing and go around them because they are bigger than you are, smack them right between the eyes. Chances are they’ll fall over from the sheer shock of it if nothing else. As I did. Spectacularly.
But despite the ever-increasing personal assaults on my personage by flora and fauna alike, I did at least manage to get home in more or less one piece, smug in the knowledge that I must’ve gotten a month’s worth of exercise all in one go, and was nicely primed for my cycling commute to work. However, much to my disappointment, my trip meter registered it as a mere 7.77 miles, versus a 10 mile trip to the office, so maybe I’m not quite ready yet. I don’t know how long it took as annoyingly resetting the trip distance apparently does not reset the trip time – unless it really did take me the 6 hours 56 minutes the trip meter claimed, which seems excessive, unless I blacked out for a bit when that butterfly assaulted me, which is quite possible. But maybe this is a sign I should just accept that I’m no Bradley Wiggins, and go back to a more stately bimble around the block with the kids, instead. At least then I can get in their slipstream and use them as a shield against marauding gangs of butterfly tough-guys out to pick a fight…
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