New vistas

During the winter, I started riding our stationary bike during daily morning phone calls from my daughter in Denver as she commuted to work. The distraction of the phone call kept me from being distracted by other things and wandering off after a few rotations of the pedals.

Now it’s summer and phone calls from Denver come much less frequently. And riding a bicycle inside is less attractive when the mornings are so nice outside. We have several bikes sitting around, left over from the days when our household population was greater, however, only one of them has been kept functional. I started taking a morning ride on it.

I’ve been riding in a bowl. Every morning I turn right at the end of the driveway onto our gravel road. Down a little hill, up a bigger hill, down the other side on a gentle slope to where it tees onto a paved county road. Then I turn left and start to tackle a long uphill slope. I can’t make it to the top. I go as far as I can up the north rim of my bowl and then turn around. At that point I don’t have to touch the pedals for maybe a third of a mile until I reach the base of the steepest hill on my route. I can’t make it up that hill. I go as far as I can up the south rim of my bowl and then turn around and coast down the hill and start the arduous process of repaying all of the energy I saved while coasting the other direction. It’s not at all a steep slope back to our gravel road, just long and mostly uphill. Once back on the gravel, everything comes easily and I’m soon back home, albeit with legs of rubber in my current state of unfitness. The whole process takes between 10 and 15 minutes.

Over the weekend, my husband looked into getting another bike on the road so we could both ride. First he tried the big one. It needed new tires that would cost almost as much as a replacement for the bike. He donated it to the bike repair shop and turned to one of the smaller ones. One tire wouldn’t hold air. Last night, he pulled out another bike and got it going. That’s the one I took this morning.

It’s nice. Big tires. 21 speeds! (Up from 15.) Smooth shifts. I like it. (Thanks, Sondra.) I still didn’t make it to the top of the north rim of my bowl but I topped the south rim. I stood on the top of the steep hill looking at the uncharted territory ahead. Now what happens? Dare I venture outside my familiar little bowl?

Not this morning. I’ve been around long enough to figure out that adding another downhill segment to my outbound route means adding another uphill segment to my return route. (I’m sure there’s some profound lesson to ponder in that, but not today.) There are certainly new possibilities now, however. Civilization lies over that south rim – church, town, the library. Who knows where future outings might take me!