Confession: mountain biking brings out the Toad (from The Wind in the Willows) in me: “the open road, the dusty highway—Travel! Change! Excitement!”
The whirring and feel of the gravel under the tires, the shrieking whoops of the kids riding down a steep decline, rolling hills and skylines floating by in waves of greens and browns and blues, and the smell of the dirt and dry grass, it’s a pretty magical experience. Heh except for when you pass the occasional desert squash, and then there’s the fleeting horror-filled moment of “what the—is that me???” If you haven’t smelled desert squash, you can get a good idea of what it smells like if you go without deodorant for a few days, onions and burgers is putting it mildly.
I will say though, it can be and has been a bit on the nerve-wracking side too. Packing seven bikes into the back of a van is no joke, not to mention making sure tires are filled and brakes are intact, on top of the regular, getting-out-the-door ritual of finding shoes and locating jackets. And then there’s the ever lingering worry of flats, falls, and rattlesnakes. The adventure starts long before leaving the house.
The kids and I started biking a few years ago, and it was eye opening to realize that those paths I had seen snaking across the hills along the freeways for years were actual, rideable trails, leading to hill tops and landscapes I thought existed only in my imaginings of faraway places. One of these days, most likely when I’m old and gray, I’m going to take my bike and watercolors and run away to the hills and take up an hermitic existence as a mountain biking, plein air painter. The end.
