The roads that my dog and I were biking on were excellent. I am addicted to not really knowing what the answer is, when I go on a ride. There are no websites to spoon-feed you 'practical' details about these dirt/gravel side roads and two-tracks. (Contrast this with single track riding, where some smartphone app answers everything in advance.)
There were pleasant surprises on today's ride. Granted, it doesn't take a lot to please me, as long as it is a surprise. Recently graded roads, flattish terrain, and nice grazing land with higher country in the background.
I was so contented I wondered why it had bothered me for years that I had to do all that riding by myself, or rather, with just a dog for a companion. I am now longer bothered by it. Perhaps enough years of committing the same mistake makes a guy adopt the attitude of the old horse in the movie, "Babe", who told the farm's malcontents, "The only way you are ever going to be happy is to accept the way things are is the way things are."
But it was more than that. I turned at an intersection to begin the return trip, and saw something that I never would have expected: mountain bike tread marks in the gravel road. Here? Impossible! The culture of this rural country is all about guns and bibles, huntin' and feeshun'.
Now I know the effect that Defoe was aiming for in "Robinson Crusoe," when he saw the famous 'footprints in the sand.'
It is funny how experience is sometimes the only thing that can enable you to appreciate something that you are 'supposed to' appreciate, but couldn't, in the past.
As it turned out, I saw the biker who made those tracks just a few minutes later. He was as shocked as I was to encounter another mountain biker in this county. He smiled in agreement when I mentioned that being an oddball is under-rated.
There were pleasant surprises on today's ride. Granted, it doesn't take a lot to please me, as long as it is a surprise. Recently graded roads, flattish terrain, and nice grazing land with higher country in the background.
I was so contented I wondered why it had bothered me for years that I had to do all that riding by myself, or rather, with just a dog for a companion. I am now longer bothered by it. Perhaps enough years of committing the same mistake makes a guy adopt the attitude of the old horse in the movie, "Babe", who told the farm's malcontents, "The only way you are ever going to be happy is to accept the way things are is the way things are."
But it was more than that. I turned at an intersection to begin the return trip, and saw something that I never would have expected: mountain bike tread marks in the gravel road. Here? Impossible! The culture of this rural country is all about guns and bibles, huntin' and feeshun'.
Now I know the effect that Defoe was aiming for in "Robinson Crusoe," when he saw the famous 'footprints in the sand.'
It is funny how experience is sometimes the only thing that can enable you to appreciate something that you are 'supposed to' appreciate, but couldn't, in the past.
As it turned out, I saw the biker who made those tracks just a few minutes later. He was as shocked as I was to encounter another mountain biker in this county. He smiled in agreement when I mentioned that being an oddball is under-rated.
Comments
I agree that being an oddball is under-rated as well as being abhorred by the collectivists in this country.