Zenful Weekend

Sunday was our road trip day to the beach, but now that I think about it, most of Saturday was also a road trip day. We started off in the morning with our new bicycle route. We did this ride the weekend before and I enjoyed it so much I just couldn’t wait to do it all over again. The first time we were slackers and drove our car to the center of town to begin and end our ride. That shaved about 8-10 miles off the ride and granted us a downhill finish rather than an uphill finish. Given this was a new unchartered route for us we decided to play it safe - something that we don’t normally do. And as it turned out the ride felt like a walk in the park and we were both embarrassed to climb into the car at the end. I think just the newest of the route is what made it feel so easy. When you ride the same route over and over you get way too familiar with ever little nuance. I know exactly where every hill is, the degree of incline, which gear I ‘should’ be in, etc. It sometimes takes the fun out of biking. Heaven forbid I find myself in a lower-than-usual gear. That just ruins the day. But on a brand new route there is no ‘normal gear’ to strive for. I just pick the gear that feels right at the time without much thought.

So this time we departed from home on our bikes. The weather was perfect and I had my new favorite thing in the world (my Droid) strapped to my aero bars. I’m amazed that I haven’t crashed my bike yet due to the fact that I’m constantly looking at, what is now my on-board computer. That thing is simply amazing. Not only does it give me a map and track our route as we ride, but it tells me how fast we are going, how many miles we have already traveled, and even how many calories I burned. Love it!

And it’s amazing at how the ride we thought was so easy wasn’t really all that easy after all. I truly thought the ride was ‘pretty flat’ but at the end I hit this handy little button on my phone to show me the graph of the route. This is what it looked like:


Those spikes are all the hills we went up and down. Gadzooks. Over 800 calories burned. It’s amazing how I didn’t remember all the uphills. I kept saying, “I don’t remember this. Are we going the right way?” All I remembered after the first ride was how pretty it was and how much I enjoyed the new scenery.

Well enough pedaling for the day. We got home, changed clothes and jumped on our motorcycles for the rest of the day . . . riding in search of ice cream. Now THAT was pure enjoyment. Who cares about the hills when you can just open up the throttle? Nothing like taking a guilt-free motorcycle ride after huffing it up all those hills on our bicycles.

And at the very end of the day, in my meditative state, I made that little rock sculpture pictured above. OMMMM