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memories / Monday / overwriting / photo — Comments Off
5
Jan 26

You’ve got two thumbs for a reason

I did what I always do after we invade the airspace of another country and perform some as-yet-ill-described snatch and grab of the sovereign power of state, I went shopping.

Why do you ask?

I recall, through the fog of now almost 25 years and the haze of long hours and weird schedules and watching, with empathy, the people that were in real fear post 9/11. I recall when President Bush said the necessary things, “our financial institutions remain strong” and the American economy was still “open for business.” I remember he told you to get on that plan. Go to Disney World. Help the airlines. Vice President Dick Cheney, long before he was shooting his friend in the face, said we should stick our thumb in the eye of the terrorists. That’s how we win, for it’s our freedoms they feared, and our BOGO sales they wanted. And it seemed silly, then, too, on a micro level. If the health of the nation depends on me showing my fierce Americaness at Best Buy, we’ve got a problem. It’d be months, after all, before Toby Keith delivered a soundtrack for the moment.

I think of that, from time to time. Not the song. It’s a level of saccharine that hasn’t aged all that well, even Keith had something to say about that later. I think about the urge to push people out. It was about confidence and normalcy and distraction in the face of fear and trauma. And, of course, keeping the gears of this machine churning.

Today, we’d be told to jump right back into Meta! Open that ChatGPT window and ask it some foolish question and earnestly accept its reply. We’d have to buy all of our American flags direct from Amazon. We’re all Prime members today. Your flags, made abroad, would arrive in 25 minutes or less, or the DoorDash guy picks up the bill himself.

It will, of course, be the gig guy that takes it in the teeth.

And if he’s not available, we’ve got these robots with 360-degree panoptic sight and sound monitors, to make sure you aren’t watching the Venezuela episode of Parks and Recreation in anything that’s not a suitably detached, ironic fashion.

Well, bub, I’m from Generation X. Watch me work.

Anyway, I went shopping. I needed to get out of the house. I’ve been a bit under the weather. That’s overstating it. The weather was above me. No, that’s not quite right, either. I have had the sinus whatever it is that I get. This version has had two defining characteristics. First, it has been the lightest version of this I can ever recall experiencing. Second, it is persistent. Will not go away.

So I figured, why not experience some of what life has to offer on a gray winter day? This was my Saturday thought. I had only work ambitions today. Saturday I visited an antique mall.

No place, I’m pretty sure, was built to be an antique mall. It is fun to figure out what this gussied up and semi-permanent flea market by another name might have housed in a previous life. The place I went to, I think, was a furniture store. It felt, in fact, like it was still a bit of both of those things. Also, it was clean. It was nice. Nothing terribly old. Nothing terribly interesting. Most distressingly, I did not feel as if I needed a shower when I left the building.

That’s the mark of a true antique market experience, the American experience, if you will.

So I went to another, in the opposite direction. This place is built into a big barn-looking building. And that was built into a hill. And that hill marks a secondary, but important intersection in its town. Across the street is the fire department. At the top of the fire department, inside, but visible from the street, they display the old fire house bell. This is an antique mall, then, that sits opposite people that respect what was.

Inside the red barn shaped building, sharing a wall with the antique mall is a restaurant. It may be the same people. The restaurant does three things. They make a lot of food. They hired the best food photographer in three counties to shoot it. (Food photographers get my ultimate respect. That’s not always the easiest subject matter to shoot.) And they try to tell me that a pulled pork sandwich should cost $20.99.

And, for me, it absolutely will not.

But the antique mall, now here’s a place you could prowl around. Here is a place where the floor creaks beneath you and you wonder if it was your holiday diet, or 100 years of termites. Here is a place where you wonder, How is< that shelf standing upright with a lean like that? Here is a place where you overlook the Star Wars plastic junk for maybe something interesting. Here is a place where you feel like you need to rinse off after your time inside is done.

I wasn’t looking for anything. I just enjoy the experience. Oh, if the right sort of thing jumped out at me, maybe I would be anxious about it for a moment before I moved on, but mostly I was proud to walk around somewhere and not think about work — or, ya know, the state of things — for a couple of hours.

I saw a bunch of hand planes and spokeshaves and other old hand tools I don’t have a need for or a place for. But I have watched people restore them on YouTube and it’s a satisfying transition. At least in a 12 minute video, maybe not the entire process.

Remember, if you don’t watch a good restoration video now and again, the terrorists win. Stick your thumb right in their eye, so they can’t see to click away at the good spots. Stick a thumb in your eye, so you can’t see to skip the pre-roll ads, because commerce!

I got buzzed on the way home.

I drove responsibly. And only had the chance to get a quick shot through the time of the windshield, which has that extra bit of tint, explaining the colors of the sky.

And that was Saturday afternoon.

football / overwriting / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
12
Nov 25

Don’t get married on a Fall Saturday, anywhere

I tried to get this published elsewhere, but failed. I still like it. I’m sharing it here.

It started, perhaps, as an in-joke. Maybe a brother-in-law joke. Or a t-shirt, one of those hastily designed gaudy numbers you see at fan shops. Maybe the whole thing began as a bit on talk radio. Sometimes the organic nature of jokes, or even traditions, can be lost to us without a very serious investigation.

This is not that.

I remember it all those ways. A guy said it on the air, off the cuff, from the hip, and wherever else one-liners fall from. I saw it on a shirt. And, if you’re there long enough, you live it, unfortunately.

You don’t book weddings on fall Saturdays in the South.

I have been to several Saturday weddings in the fall in the Deep South, an exercise designed to weigh your love of sport and the ol’ alma mater against these two people standing up there. Who are those people, anyway? Strangers, probably. I mean, do you know the bride’s third quarter rushing stats? Have you memorized the tackle for loss numbers the groom has put up this season? What even is the win-loss record of the person performing this ceremony, anyway? Alternatively, it could be a deliberate measure to keep attendance low.

I mention this because, of course, weddings are organized far in advance, but not farther out than the more-than-a-century long tradition of watching dudes hit each other as hard as they can for temporary victory and immortal glory. Long is the memory, short is the ceremony. The same is true for any given football play, but one of these two events lasts longer in the memory of most of us.

Authurine Babineaux and Merrick Bourgeois — two people we don’t know at all, but who prove my point nicely — were married on Saturday, October 31st in 1959 in Cankton, Louisiana, right there at St. John Berchman Catholic Church. The writeup in the paper, as was the custom, describes the bride’s dress and what her attendant was wearing. There’s a photo with the notice, the image has gone fuzzy with digitization, but the new Authurine Bourgeois looks beautiful. The groom is wearing a white jacket. They had a little reception in the cafeteria of the school they both attended. Maybe they met there. Maybe they hit it off there. We don’t know. We do know there was a four-layer cake. We don’t know when the celebration ended, or if they were able to catch Billy Cannon’s immediately legendary punt return.

There are more than 2,000 returns for “married Oct 31” in the 1959 Louisiana newspapers. And some of, most of, or, perish the thought, all of those people who attended missed Billy Cannon’s Halloween Run at Death Valley. But which did they talk about more, as the years passed?

My first fall wedding on a Saturday in the South was in 1993. It was November 20th. It was 11th ranked Alabama at number 6 Auburn. It was the Iron Bowl.

It was a wedding in someone’s home. And they chose to do this event during the football game.

Perhaps there was some other event scheduled in the living room in the next hour.

Oh, the service was lovely, marred only by my running up and down the hall, getting scoring updates from the radio from the bedroom where the groom had previously been getting ready. “Does anyone have a reason these too should not be wed? And what is the score, young man?” Even then, as a young football fan, I wanted to share the news, and that news was the game and newly emerged folk heroes.

Auburn won that game 22-14. The Tigers were on probation that year: no bowls and no TV. Some entrepreneurial outfit sold Radio National Championship bumper stickers. They were everywhere for a time.

That house, where the wedding was, was full of people. I wonder which event is more memorable all these years later.

In October of 2012, my wife and I (who were married in the summer, thank you very much) attended a wedding that was scheduled on the Third Saturday in October. In the South, you capitalize it just like that. The Third Saturday in October. This is the Alabama-Tennessee game, a joyous collision that seriously impacts commerce in two states. Alabama being atop the polls and facing a heated rival probably hampered the wedding’s turnout. There were some other big games with implications that day third-ranked Florida was taking on ninth-ranked South Carolina, number six LSU had Texas A&M, ranked as the 20th best team in the land.

Why, I asked the bride, beforehand, did you choose this time of year? This date? She attended a huge football school. As did her brother and her mother and her father before her. As did everyone up and down her family tree. As did her husband.

She offered that the weather is too unpredictable in the spring. (It is not.) And that there would be TVs at the reception. (There were not.) It was a fine wedding. I remember there was a bar at the reception – but no TVs with games. On the bar were little chalkboards which told you the preferred drinks of the bride and groom, so you could order the same and be just like them. I don’t remember her choice, but the groom’s drink was rum and Coke.

You don’t have to ask yourself where he was on the idea of a Saturday wedding in the fall.

A few years later, in 2016, we attended a wedding in Tennessee. One of those where the bride and groom had reserved a beautiful chapel and everyone looked terrific, and every single person was in a festive mood. It was a mild October day. I was just getting over a cold and had a terrible coughing fit during the middle of the service. I left so as not to interrupt the beautiful ceremony.

I regained my composure but couldn’t get back to my seat without causing another scene, so I eased up the side of the chapel, and stood along the wall behind these guys.

He was anxious about the event; the game I mean. That installment of the Tennessee-Georgia series turned out to have one of the wildest finishes in the history of the sport. Those border rivalries are always tense, taut, and played close to the rented tuxedo vest.

The young couple got married and we gathered outside for the ceremonial send off. The bride and groom ran through the gathered loved ones and into the waiting car. That’s when the bomb was thrown, and the subsequent Hail Mary.

And that’s when this grown man, the guy above, a pillar of his community, a member of the local education board who was eager to see off a loved one started doing chest slides in the lawn in front of the chapel. The bride was beautiful. The bride was upstaged.

This isn’t about me, but that would become one of my bigger moments on social media. All the right people and outlets amplified the post and eventually it got back to the guy above, a person I did not know. I thought he might be angry that I’d outted him in profile. He thought it was hilarious. I assume that’s because his team won.

And that’s one of the risks you take with a wedding during football season. What happens if the wrong team wins. Now who has a sour taste in their mouth about your wedding day? Your guests? Your partner? Your parents? You?

“But, dear writer,” you may say, “this is not my concern. I am not in the South. I will not be wed in the South. I live here, in the world wide web.”

Fair enough, bride-elect or bridegroom-elect, but consider, that sport is part of culture. We, being social creatures, export the best parts of our culture. This, of course, is made that much easier – and each game made that much more important – because of the dazzling array of streaming and cable packages available to us today. These, then, are cautionary tales for the entire country, certainly a lesson less and less limited to the South.

Put another way, UConn and UMass have been at it since the 19th century, that series is tied, and they have two contests coming up in the next few years. Don’t ask a Huskie or the Minutemen to choose.

If you’ve got love and joyous union on the mind and there are leaves and footballs in the air, consider your audience, and consider the spring or the summer. Green leaves also make for a beautiful photographic backdrop. Baseballs are flying around.

Your guests will likely be paying much more attention to you than a routine pop up to right.

cycling / overwriting / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
19
Nov 24

On the occasion of a record breaking ride

Most rides are for the ride themselves. Or for riding with others. A lot of them are for exercise or to enjoy the great outdoors or both. Take a break, unwind, race a friend you can’t beat, go somewhere. Indulgent as they can be, they always seem to carry at least some sort of purpose. But this ride, today, was just for me. I realized, just before I left, that this would be the ride where I broke a personal best for miles pedaled in a year.

It happened right in here.

After that spot, every turn of the crank arm, every loop the chain made, every time I shifted through the cassette would all be new, a record, a best, an achievement.

You don’t think about that over the course of a ride, but it’s there. When the legs protest, you remember it. They’ve stomped and danced and glided through more miles this year than you’ve ever asked of them before. When your lungs don’t ache, maybe it’s for the same reason. When the lactic acid takes a little longer to burn, maybe that’s why. Or all of it could be that you’ve learned a new kind of patience this late into the year.

All of this is racing the sun, trying to stay on the right side of daylight. I set off through town and out the other side, doubling back into the town again, where 10 miles had gone by in the blink of an eye, thinking about the possibilities of what this ride could hold, given the hour and the time of year.

Yesterday I wanted to do this same route, but started too late and wisely changed my plans. This afternoon, which became the early evening as I swooshed and whirred along, felt like a ride that could go on forever.

I thought about that when I stopped, to put on my windbreaker. I was close to home, but determined to take the longer way back, so I mounted the headlight and left the full finger gloves in my pocket, and riding down that three-mile straight stretch of chipseal. It goes on forever because I want it too, particularly today. And through this stretch I feel a melancholy, a paradox that comes up with the truly great rides. It’s going to end soon. And the season will end soon, which is unacceptable. I don’t want this ride to end, either.

Sometimes you want a ride to be over. You have things to do or somehow the fit seems off or you’re just not feeling it, but there are days when you want it to go on forever, and this was one of those days, evenings, now, because the sun has left me and I’m listening to the rubber on my Gatorskins shuzzzz away in the gloaming.

That’s a great road. No traffic, beautiful farm scenery, two little rollers that can make you feel powerful or humble, or a bit of both. I only want that road to end because of what’s waiting at the turn.

At the bottom of that road is the best part of the ride, a brand-new ribbon that you could soft-pedal at 20 miles per hour, but it only lasts four-tenths of a mile, far too short for something so luxurious.

I have to work my way through two parking lots there, and I become aware that my neck has tightened up because my fit is never quite right and, also, I’m a little bummed about how this ride is coming to an end — I have been out for about two hours and heard two voices in that whole time, a crossing guard in town, who told me to “Go ahead honey,” while she held up her stop sign and a woman two towns later who stepped into the crosswalk as I came through the intersection, she laughed and I apologized and she said “Oh, that’s OK,” and we wished each other a great afternoon and you could hear the smile on her face as I pedaled away through a sleepy small town block. It was those two people and me and road noise and the click click click of my bike and this rattle in my headset, a loose screw that I need to tighten — why should any of this end?

I realized I’d put my foot on the ground just three times during this whole ride. Sometimes the timing is right and that was today, and this turn weaving behind the small car dealership and the gas station beside it, I had the timing right, rejoining the highway and a bike lane with no one coming from either direction. The bike lane there sometimes feels huge and sometimes small. Today, it felt small. I felt big. I felt like I could do anything on my bike, even though I can’t. I felt like my machine was asking me to do more, but it certainly, by now, understands my limitations.

This is why you don’t want these rides to end, why you don’t want colder weather to run you indoors, because you eventually tap into something elemental about this. Something basic and cosmic and purposeful and purposeless. I don’t want to lose that. Not for a minute or four months. It takes too long to find again and would require years of continual study to understand or explain it. Besides, we’ve lost too much this year — family and friends and elections and car keys and cyclists and opportunities and remote controls — and how much must we lose? How much is the right amount? But we lose it all, don’t we? And that’s when I heard the Canada geese somewhere to my left, to the west. They’d blended into the dark blue-gray of the sky, making those incessant honks and barks, those beautifully chaotic, continual sounds. They stay over there to the left, in a wildlife sanctuary, between some pastures, harassing the cattle, adding a bit more to the soundtrack as I stand up and suzsh suzsh suzsh my way up the fourth-to-last roller on my ride. You know the one, it tells you how you’re feeling in defiance of everything else you’ve done, and without any consideration for what else is still ahead, three more little hills, in this case.

At the 4-way stop, the one with the haunted house on the corner, a truck hauling a trailer is waiting for me to pass, even though he has the right of way, and I think, not for the first time, it would be great if everyone understood the rules the same way. But he waited, and I did a track stand for a respectful amount of time and finally I went, even though it was his turn, and even here, it felt like I could have held my bike up for forever. But I could not. But it felt like it just then, and now I wonder, maybe my bike doesn’t want this ride to end, either. Is that what it is? We’re both feeling this moment the same way? The air in the tubes and the softness of the grips and the loose-but-tight grip of my cleats in their clipless mates have all made this tiny little magical moment, which is persisting, but also fleeting.

Down and back up again, just two hills to go. I’ve been thinking, for four miles now, about how I didn’t want this ride to end, about that girl I knew in elementary school, some friends from the 10th grade, a professor I once had, the work I must get to. How the mind wanders. How it can wonder in its wanderings! I thought about the incredible feeling I had on my first ride outside this year, the sweet joy and optimism that came with it, and the feeling of this one, right now. I’m starting to think I should write this down and one word falls out of my mouth as I pull the bidon away one last time: Elation.

Sometime, in December, probably, I’ll have to take my bike to the basement and put it on the trainer. I’ll ride away on Zwift for several months. I’ll pedal a bunch, I’ll sweat a lot. I’ll be breathless. I’ll go nowhere. It’s just not the same.

I saw someone on social media yesterday beaming with pride that their oldest kid had learned to ride the day before and she pedaled away yelling, “I feel freeeeeee!” And, kiddo, it never gets better than that. She’s an old pro by now, because you know she was riding yesterday, and again today. So she knows, but it bears repeating. Be home when the lights come on, or for supper, or whenever your parents tell you, but it never gets better than that. It doesn’t have to. How could it? It just stays that perfect. And you can’t get that feeling on a trainer, no matter how many endorphins you tap into.

My average speed fell away, because why would I want this to end? And I circled one of the neighborhoods, the road shaped like a horseshoe. My neighbor built that development. It’s his, and he thinks of it that way. He still plows that road himself if it snows. He probably contributed, then, to those potholes on the backside of it, the ones I dodged in the semi-dark, chin down to the stem, hands over the hoods like a Belgian champion, using the fullness of the subdivision’s road as I turned into the final length of that horseshoe. The flow of a bicycle in the diagonal is a triumph. You feel freeeeeee. And maybe I could do anything my bike wants to do, even if it is a bit slower.

What is speed, anyway? Today, it just seems like a way to end a ride sooner. That’s a fool’s racket. A hustle with no payoff. At the end of that subdivision, I did another reasonable approximation of a track stand to let the traffic clear, so I could turn left, and then quickly right again. Now a car is behind me, and it’s finally fully dark. I charge up the little hill, throwing my bike this way and that up this penultimate roller, looking like a French prima donna, feeling like a million bucks, thinking of those headlights on me, and wondering where they disappeared to. I glanced over as I switched my headlight on, and the car was gone. So now it’s the downhill and it flattens out to the 90-degree turn into the back of our subdivision, the last hill, then a right-hander and around the big circle to the house. Two cyclists we know live back there, but I don’t even think to look in their yards today. I was, I realize now, too taken with imagining the next ride.

I wonder where it will take me, and how my legs will feel about it. I remind myself, once again, to start earlier in the day next time. This ride was 40 great miles, without even that much fuel, or water, considering the temperatures. I could just as easily have done another hour or two, amused by the muses and the thoughts they bring, bemused by how much better this little tale was, because I was fully in composition mode, while my legs brought me home. Some days it feels like they could go on forever. You must take advantage of those, I said to myself for the 6,000th time in the last 15 years of doing this.

There are days when it never gets old, days like this one. Not the fastest or a technically superior ride, not the first new road discovered, but just a ride for me, filled, in that last little bit, with hopes and fears and love and dreams. My dreams never grow weary.

cycling / history / markers / overwriting / photo / Rowan / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
4
Sep 24

Here are 1,000 quick words

Today began with so much ambition, and maybe half of the plans were accomplished. (More for tomorrow, then!) I blame the super late night, last night. But, hey, all of the professional tasks were achieved. Emails answered, questions asked, and so on. Dishes were also done. Some laundry was completed. It wasn’t all bad. Take that, super late night.

Oh yeah, I wrote something yesterday for the work Substack. No one has called to complain yet, so there’s that. Here it is.

This is terrible and senseless. And the extended Gaudreau family, who are experiencing a hurt that’s hard to express and impossible to heal, are by no means alone.

The National Safety Council has it that the number of preventable deaths from bike crashes rose 10% in 2022 and have increased 47% in the last 10 years (from 925 in 2013 to 1,360 in 2022). The League of American Bicyclists notes that 2022 was the deadliest year ever for cyclists. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s 2022 records show more cyclists were killed by motor vehicles than any year since they began charting the data in 1975.

Talk to a cyclist, any sort of cyclist that rides on roads, and you’ll quickly hear themes emerging. The infrastructure is insufficient. Drivers don’t see cyclists. Drivers are distracted, or inconsiderate, or worse. Vehicles have gotten much, much larger.

Every cyclist you talk to has a story about a dangerous moment, a scary encounter, or a truly life-changing experience they’ve had on the open road. A place where they also belong, by the way (go here to see the specific laws for your state). It goes beyond a random heckle or a dated Lance Armstrong reference.

Each cyclist has their own reason for being there. They love it. This is how they commute. This is their exercise. Their childlike freedom. Their community. Their only means of transportation. Whether they are carefully calculating their watts, carefully balancing their groceries, or they are teaching their kids how to ride, no matter why they find themselves on two wheels, their experiences with motorists are common, profoundly troubling and they penetrate deep into the psyche.

We’re seeing that in a survey we’ve conducted in the light of the killing of Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau. The Center for Sports Communication and Social Impact is asking cyclists in South Jersey a series of questions, has immediately received more than 500 responses, and the responses continue to roll in.

I was asked about this at 1:09 p.m. yesterday, 37 minutes later I had the first 770 words down.

And then I thought about it during most of the two hours I spent on my bike this evening.

My shadow went hunting for historical markers. Between the two of us, my shadow and me, we found quite a few, starting with the cheapie you’ll see below.

And this is the long straight road, the flat part of it, heading back home. I was halfway to a great ride. The bike felt smooth, in that way we spent all our time hoping to feel.

You get just a few experiences of la volupte, if you’re lucky. It’s so rare, maybe, that you can mistake a tailwind and a stellar ride for the sensation, la volupte.

La Volupte translates roughly to “voluptuousness”, and while the first thing the mind goes to is a sexual definition, my favorite is, “the property of being lush and abundant and a pleasure to the senses.” In a sport where pain is worn like a badge of honor, those times when cycling is lush and abundant and a pleasure to the senses are what makes us want to climb onto our bikes again tomorrow.

Today wasn’t that. But it was something, an experience I have noticed before. Some days everything just feels sure, steady, at your command. My problem is that when I’m always going slow when I have that experience. I was not flying today, but, also I was not going slow. I had three Strava PRs, including a two-plus mile drag at the end of the ride. While my legs were not carrying me especially quickly, they had the decency to keep turning over without needing to stop, which was nice.

We return once again to We Learn Wednesdays, wherein I am tracking down the county’s historical markers via bike rides. By my count, this is the 46th installment, and the 78th marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series. And this one is, in fact, barely a marker.

In the 17th century, this was a place focused on trade and shipbuilding. One of the first ports, 1682, around here was near where this photograph was taken. There were British customs houses here. There’s still a local port authority nearby. It was an important center of trade until the Revolutionary War. The founder, John Fenwick, who we’ve learned about on two different Wednesdays (here and here) laid out this street for commerce and traffic.

Wharf Street was 90-feet wide, lined by houses and shops going all of the way to the docks and water. The people here here saw wheat, corn, beef, pelts and lumber come and go. Fishing was popular in the bay, oystering was a booming pursuit into the 20th century. Growth and overfishing killed the sturgeon and caviar business. Crabbing survived. The railroad, which came in 1876, was here by then, and so was the second industrial revolution, which was about glass around here, owing to the special sand that everyone was walking on, the sand that Wharf Street was built on, the street that was here for all of it.

Two genealogy site suggested Wharf Street was renamed for a prominent settler, Edward Bradway, a Londoner who landed in 1677 and built a fine house down by the water. Later, the town fathers updated the name again to Broadway. There are still Bradways in that town.

The next several weeks of markers are down that road. Some are really great; you’ll want to keep coming back. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

adventures / California / cycling / overwriting / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
9
Apr 24

First ride of the year

After 1,323 miles on the trainer during a mild winter, this afternoon was my first outdoor ride since December.

Right from the start, and throughout this 30-miler, it was wonderful. The weather was perfect. The wind was in my face. My legs burned, but kept going, and I got a text that my lovely bride’s swim had been canceled, and that she, too, was going out for a ride. I managed to find her, and we did the last six miles or so together.

Now, at last, spring is here.

Erudite wheelmen would speak of the hum of their wheels, the grip of bar tape, bidons.

Poets would write of the power and purpose of getting back into the drops. Really, it’s heart and joyful freedom.

Freedom to ride hard, to soft pedal, to weave over the road like a kid. Freedom to try on that hill, or to not. And the thrill of coming down the other side, no matter the effort on the way up.

It’s the carefree feeling we rode with as kids.

Already, it feels like a great year of riding.

But maybe you’re here for a different sort of enjoyment and relaxation. Got you covered. Here’s another shot from an entirely unremarkable vista view on the Pacific Coast Highway.

They have so many of them that they don’t even name them or, really, even mark them all that well. But they’re each lovely. We assume they’re all lovely. We weren’t able to see each one.

Guess we’ll have to go back one day.