Revolution of a cyclist: On being unfaithful

I feel like I'm being unfaithful. At the very least like I've been fickle with my affections.

Not from today, but typical of the views I was
forced to look at during the whole ride.
Terrible, I know.

Today was a perfectly beautiful November day. The kind that hardly ever happen and when they do invariably there are a hundred other things to do that steal the day away. But I don't have that problem very often, so I went on a ride with Barbara. We rode up to Fiesole. Pretty much the same ride Leif and I took with Lucy the triathlete and her fantastically in shape for the shape he's in husband.

Barbara is another super athlete, but this time I have ALL my gears so the ride was....not easy, but not terribly hard either. It was a perfect day. Bright sunshine and cool breezes under those impossibly blue Tuscan skies surrounded by green mountains slowly changing their colors to yellows and reds followed us along the winding roads outside Florence.

We rode for three hours, stopping at the top to wander through an outdoor market where Barbara learned about properly preparing chestnuts and yet another older man touched my bike without asking and made small talk with us for awhile. Then we got to throw ourselves down the mountain. My favorite part.

I got home and felt energized by the whole morning, looked at the sunshine and tried to decide what I should do with the rest of the day, because it was too beautiful to waste sitting inside. [That's the northerner in me, by the way. We chase the sun during the winter months. It's a habit that's almost impossible to break, but I'm working on it.] I thought I might go draw at a church I haven't visited yet. It's a ways from our house and I thought I could just hop on my mountain bike and ride over.

My companion through thick and thin.
Even though she threw me once and broke my elbow.

The very next thought was "Oh, I wish I could take my road bike. That mountain bike is just so heavy." Then I practically slapped my own hand for even thinking a thing like that. Even though it's like driving a Suburban it's been my companion for almost two years. It gave me my freedom here.

See: fickle and unfaithful. And now I shall go down and make it up to her by checking the tire pressure and maybe wiping off a layer or two of dust. And never, ever let her know I'm secretly yearning to fly like a bird instead of rolling over everything in my path like a tank.