Biking on my mind.

It's Friday night, my lady and I went to catch some outdoor music and brews. I found myself leaning against a wall, beer in hand thinking about my riding this weekend making plans. My plans are to hit the FatBike hard tomorrow, on rough trail for 62 miles. Not too hard though, I need to have something left in my gas tank for Sundan and put my HardTail back together and ride  all over Iowa countryside. Cycling fanatic some might say. :-)


Wednesday I took the day off work, so I could take the psycho-X bike and car ride to Cedar Rapids and hop on the Nature Cedar Valley Trail and head out for 80 miles. I did. It was fun. The trail started out boring and was so well kept I could have closed my eyes. That all changed. After a change of counties the trail almost disappeared. It was unkempt, a lot of down trees, and just a small tire rut in 2 feet of grass in some places. Now we are having fun.

See the picture of my bike leaning against the downed trees. Is what the trail turned into. I moved several smaller trees out of the trail paths. Seems nobody was keeping this trail up anymore or using it. After a total of 40 miles I turned around, I would run out of daylight to keep continuing, and was not packing lights. So I turned around carrying my bike across piles of brush and trees. I shall return with lights, I hope soon. A lot of interesting sights along the way as you can see with the abandoned silos.

I got lost, and ran out of water, not good on both accounts. However running out of water at 80 some degrees and humid was a much worse biking sin then being lost. Found the small town of Brandon, refilled my water bottles and asked directions from the town man that rides a bike up down the 3 block main street. We rode out of town together as he showed my the path to Urbana Iowa, and we gave each other the fist high V. I could tell that most would label him as 'handicapped' and growing up in a small town along with the cruelty that often comes out of the playground life probably wasn't always pleasant for him.  But we were both on our bikes and damn the rest of the world we were where we needed to be. We could both forget the thoughts we didn't like, and pedal on.

I made it back to my car before nightfall, and rode an off road to a corn field out of sight, so I could change back into my going home clothes and car ride 70 miles and nobody would arrest me for such indecency. 

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Tomorrow, I shall pack up and travel again. Food and water, and a good bike being my only necessities. Life at it's simplest, is life at it's finest.

Dave