After a day of reading and prepping and typing away at my keyboard, I went for a little early evening bike ride. The wind was up, my legs were down and it was slow, but that’s OK. We got vaccinated last night and so I blame the quality of the ride on the conspiracy theories floating through my system.
There was a new-to-me road I wanted to see so I pedaled my happy little self toward the winery, but turned right before I got there, marveling at how I was easily doing 18 and 19 miles an hour up this hill on Wednesday, but doing considerably less than that today. I turned right and then left, and went down this road.
This looks flat when you’re on it and in this photograph.
But it is actually a little downhill. It bends off to the right at the tree line and then toward a creek bed. But the wind comes from that direction, usually, and it is actually a difficult down hill some days. Some days I have to shift to an easier gear to get down the hill. Some days coming from the other direction, up the hill, is easier than going down the thing.
In fact, today going down it felt unusually strong and I was doing about 17, but with minimal effort. And with no legs and post Covid vaccine (which we got last night) I felt a bit sapped and didn’t want to put any effort in. Later, as I reversed this route exactly, I came up the hill almost twice as fast.
That road alters reality, is what I’m saying.
I enjoyed some nice time under the trees elsewhere along the route.
And then I finally worked my way over to the new-to-me road. There used to be a little airport here. It was originally named after the town, but then it got a new name in 2021, when a private company bought it and dubbed it the Spitfire Aerodrome.
That’s just a great word. A great combination of words. It’s evocative of times far enough away that we mistakenly romanticize them. No one says the aerodrome without thinking of dirigibles or dashing pilots with silk scarves and leather jackets or barrage balloons or search lights piercing the sky and … they closed the joint in 2023, to make way for yet more warehouses no one needs.
I rode there it just to see what was at the end of that road. How often can I see an aerodrome? What’s there is a fence, through which you can still see two or three buildings, which look to be in still-good shape. The runway seems to be intact, as far as small municipal runways go. This is the view on the way back out.
I got back just in time to clean up for dinner, and fill the evening with tales about how the new microchips ow floating in my system have made me even slower.
