DURTRIDIN'GURL: Now that's a ride...

Craig and I have done shuttled rides back to our house before. You have someone drop you off or you leave a vehicle and you pedal all the way home on a combination of single track, dirt road and pavement and some more trail. However this time we wanted to do it with a group of friends and have a BBQ afterwards. With some thought and looking at our map we decided on a route and let everyone know we were on for a long, epic ride this past Saturday. We had 8 brave souls on this sunny and rather hot July morning. We would have plenty of technical ups and downs, log piles, skinny single track, a tiny bit of route finding and a creek crossing to keep it all interesting.

Our stoked crew ready to go.
Craig, where's your helmet?
Image taken by Kim.

I didn't take many pictures that day, just two and they were taken by Craig of myself and Glenn. But Kim took a few to document the day. We had a lot of fun, pedaling through the rocky goodness, stopping to cool down in a nice cold stream, we ate, laughed and made decisions on what we wanted to do. Everyone did great and was happily exhausted by the end of the day. The ride took 6 hours and was about 30 miles, it ended with dark and brooding skies, the few drops of rain felt good on my skin as I battled up the last half mile to the house. I was pretty much done at that point, I didn't want to sit on my bike anymore, I had nothing to give. That doesn't happen that often to me but I don't do that many 6 hour rides, 4 hours is about average in the summer. When I got home I was bonking, apparently needing more fuel than I had taken in. I proceeded to eat a block of goat cheese and drink root beer when I finally sat down at the house. Then the BBQ began, more friends arrived and we all roasted our own varieties of tasty beasts, hung out, stared into space a little bit (me), laughed some more, watched the 7 dogs run about, relaxed as darkness filled in and a cool breeze came up. It was all good in the end, fatigue and exhaustion from honest physical effort is divine in it's own way. Everything seems well earned and simple. We'll do it again, everyone suffered with smiles if they suffered at all. My only regret is that we were all too tired to play around in the Pleasure Park afterwards, we'll do a shorter ride with a BBQ and then some Pleasure Park later this summer. I didn't even look at my bike the next day, we needed a break from each other but we're fast friends again today.