NIGHTTIME BLOGGERY

It’s fun to stay at the YMCA. No, really. I promise it is. My wonderful Aunt Mo hooked it up for the Bike the US crew yesterday—we’re talking noodles, bread, inside sleeping space! My gosh, my rustic natural instincts barely knew how to handle all of the indoor luxury!

            Today was filled with unfamiliar bits of Ohio; the ride was weirdly disparate from the nostalgic trip into Cleveland—all of my childhood haunts were gone. The only truly dependable things were the corn and the headwind. At one point, Leigh and I agreed that the wind was strong enough to knock us off of our bicycles—but not the strongest we’d ever encountered. I mean, we are champs after all.

           

            Some things that I did today that I have never done before

1) Bicycle race through a field of barley (I think, maybe.)

            So. We were pace-lining through a relatively strong headwind in Middle-of-Nowhere-Farmy-Town, Ohio. Skylar raced up to Matt and I (we’d dropped most of the group) and suggested that we take a picture thigh-deep in barley, holding our bicycles above our heads like some sort of bicycle baptism (I mean, I thought of Simba in The Lion King, but Disney has poisoned my imagination, so take that as you will). Obviously we all agreed. After the photo, Skylar challenged me to a race through the stalks; I am a glutton for challenges and accepted. We lined up—I promptly hit a pot hole (how did a pot hole get into the middle of a barley field?!)  and flopped over. Skylar was christened King of the Wheat Fields. We chose to ride away and ignore the tattoos we’d made in some poor barley Farmer’s crop.

2) Ford a river. On a bicycle.

            So when you’re biking the US for MS, you’re on a route. Sometimes you ignore the route—like when it leads you through gravelly canals, or, more pertinently, when it’s underwater. Yes. A group of us made a turn onto some tiny farm road that looked like it had maybe seen the wheels of two cars in entire lifetime—in the horizon, there was a weird sheen. A gloss. “Well, that’s odd!” A few of us said. We pressed forward. The sheen was an ocean that the rain had sown right in the middle of the road. How convenient! Some opted to walk across; I stuffed my Sidis down my jersey and clambered back aboard Sampson (my Serotta). The water was, at its deepest, about sixteen inches deep. Oh my lord.

3) Eat an entire pizza.

            I would sensationalize this too, but it sort of speaks for itself.