Wide Load

Easter Sunday when I posted this on my blog I was trying to be funny.

 Today, there is nothing funny about it. 

My butt hurts.  It’s the truth. 

Ashy and I decided to go for a bike ride yesterday.  A pleasant country bike ride on dirt roads next to green pastures. 

We headed south atop our cheap Walmart bikes, rode to the first county road that runs east and west, and took a left turn. 

Being married to J-Dub, he has taught me a couple of things.  One of which being,  there is a mile between each county road.  I hadn’t been out more than a mile down the road my house sits on and we were up for an adventure to see what lay beyond the mile marker.

So we pedaled east on an extremely rocky road for about a mile, took a right, and began pedaling down a tiny dirt road with nothing but cows on the left and oil equipment on the right.  I turned on my IPod and we sang Sugarland and Rod Stewart at the top of our lungs.  We saw a fearful coyote running from our melodies, cows curiously eyeballing us, quail skittering across the road, the green of wheat fields gently blowing.  Life was good.  But the road was long.  My sitting bones began to ache.  I hadn’t ridden a bike in, hmmm, let’s say, 3 years.  After riding the lengths of a couple of county roads, I cursed sitting on that tiny little pointy bicycle seat when what I really needed was a tractor seat. Plus a yellow banner across my backside screaming WIDE LOAD in black lettering. 

But what do you do when you’re a long way from your home and your house is no longer a speck on the horizon?  Do you turn around or continue on in hopes of a road soon?  We continued on, enjoying our afternoon and ignoring the pain.

Finally high wires and electrical poles came into view and I knew we were nearing another road running perpendicular.  Sure enough, the next road appeared.  We took a right turn to head back west.  Then Ashlynn needed to pee.  After a pit stop in the bar ditch, we walked our bikes a while on wobbly legs and sore keisters, gathering a couple of pretty rocks on the way.   Time was crawling by and we decided it would be faster to get back on and ride, to push through the pain like real athletes.  Then Ashy began developing a blister on her thumb from holding the handlebar and being jostled through dirt roads.  The  sun burned down on our necks, the wind gave us a bit of resistance, but the IPod was on shuffle, so we kept singing and kept on riding.

An eternity later we came to our road, made a right turn heading back to the south, completing a four mile square.  But before we made it home, first Ashy had to stop and pick some cotton from another barditch. 

With bulging pocket of rocks and cotton, our little trailer house on the prairie greeted 2 tired, sore, hot and thirsty wanderers as we crept up the lane.

It took us way over an hour and a half to ride 4 miles.  On a good day, if I book it, I  can walk faster than that.  It just didn’t make any sense to me.  Even with dirt roads, and stopping for walking, peeing, and picking rocks and cotton, it shouldn’t have taken us that long to ride a bike four miles.   So I hopped in my car today to measure the distance.  J-Dub hopped in with me.  Come to find out, on two of the roads, they didn’t have intersecting roads every mile, instead it was every two miles.  So our 4 mile ride that I thought we’d taken ended up really being close to 7 miles.  And boy let me tell you, my tail bones can account for  every inch of it today. 

But even with the soreness, yesterday held one of the most enjoyable afternoons I had spent in a very long time. 

The simplicity of sunshine, songs, and sweat does a body good. 

And a soul.