Last night, Joel and I went to Lawrence with a bunch of his co-workers to ride the River Trails.
It’s a rare treat and one I go for every time it’s possible.
The river trails are great for a mtb moron like me. They’re not rocky, just swoopy and twisty, which is pretty much my ideal.
As hot and dry as it’s been lately, the river sand is trying to re-assert itself, and so some of the corners are just deep, powdery sand wallers, and if you hit the corner at speed or pedal through it, you end up doing a Dukes Of Hazzard type rear wheel slide. Joel relishes drifting the corners that way. For me, it’s one of those little gooses of adrenaline that leaves my palms slightly numb. Eeek!
When I met up with Joel at the shop to head on to Lawrence, I had been in kind of a sour mood. Working at customer service more or less ruins me, and I’ve pretty near hit the wall where having to talk to people for 8 hour straight every day is concerned. But pretty much as soon as we were out on the dirt, my nasty mood peeled off me like so many layers of dried up onion skin, and I started just having a good time.
I’d catch intermittent whiffs of honeysuckle, and that glorious scent kicked off a little philosophical re-epiphany that I need to have or keep in mind more often. Things like the scent of honeysuckle, bike rides in the woods, eating really good watermelon; these are transient simple pleasures and I need to make a point of taking advantage of these wonderful things whenever I can, ’cause the opportunity is not available just “whenever.” You only get good watermelon in the summertime. Same goes for whiffs of honeysuckle. Getting the right weather and the opportunity to get out on the trails is a matter of serendipity in the thunderstorm-prone midwest. When the stars align and the trails are dry, and I have a ride out to Lawrence, I’d be seriously amiss if I didn’t just go for it!
I have to do enough things that I don’t enjoy, like be grumped-at by the general public as a matter of course in order to bring home a paycheck. If I don’t get in on the good fun when I can, I’m going to end up a vitriolic and miserable shell of a human, and really, the world doesn’t need any more of those. Believe me.
I’m glad you were able to go do that and have a good time : )