don't go wasting your emotion

It's important to be flexible.

In my mind I had a loop laid out which dropped me out on the approach to preschool. I finally got around to checking the chain length on the Long Haul Trucker, since it has been noisy and skippy and blown off; yep, bad news on the chain and cassette. I wasn't able to do the planned route on my next choice (the fixed Crosscheck) either, because the lay back Thomson post won't accept the trail-a-bike hitch. Dang. So I thought I'd take the (shown above) "handmade" fixed wheel Le Tour. But that didn't fit in with my ride schemes, which involved errands, technical dirt, and then picking up the boy from preschool. We'd dropped the trail-a-bike off with him in the morning so I could ride out unencumbered to get him. That empty trail-a-bike is a literal drag. He loves to ride it, and was counting on a bike ride home.


So, after some confused tinkering, I rode the Crosscheck out for the usual dirt loop. At a certain point I decided to explore the potential for that dirt connector about which I've been speculating. Slithering through the neighborhood, I spied a well maintained but little used 2 track that wasn't going the way I wanted but was too loaded with alternate potential to ignore. It had several spurs which did not pan out. It had one that really, really did. It looped back to a place I have been before and I knew where I was again- a nice and remote trail that is swoopy and fun, but with a lousy approach so I don't use it often. This wrapped around to the sneaky back door, which I took. This time I took the left where I generally take the right, and that made all the difference.

A sweeping, windy, rollfast downhill through the live oaks all the way down to the road I wanted originally. No, not the dirt connector; the approach to preschool. It popped out at that one spot I always notice in passing and wonder about idly.

Riding a sweet trail is a balm. Finding a new one is a joy.

So I rode home from there, switched bikes and picked up the boy. Total mileage in the low 30s. We ran our errands together on the way home. An $11.99 24pack of Hamm's is enough to induce a nice shimmy on that Paul's Flatbed.

It is a little too flexible.