This is obviously not a picture of singletrack or mountain biking, but I thought it worthy of posting here. On Friday, I picked up this beautiful bike. I call it my minivan because this is the closest I will ever get to owning a minivan. It's sweet and rides smoother than my cruiser bike. Hazel loves it, Tygh loves it, even Brian loves to ride it (it's adjustable for our different heights). Win win win.
After a raucous Friday night of eating Indian and Nepali food and going to the First Friday Art Walk, we woke up Saturday morning and headed to Salida for a different kind of pedaling.
We found this:
It turns out that the singletrack in Salida is awesome- perfectly suited to our ability levels, well signed, easy to follow, with great views. So worth it. Especially since it's a whopping one hour drive away.
Saturday night, however, was not a gold medal night for us. It was ridiculously windy and pretty cold (colder than Gunnison- WTH?). Our camp stove broke. Hazel was being quintessentially FOUR. Tygh woke up at 2:30am and proceeded to scream for an hour. In moments like that, we always question our "camp as much we can" ethos and wonder if it would be better to Just. Stay. Home.
Cooking Girl Scout Style (over the fire). We debated just going out to dinner, but then we realized the foolishness of our conversation. Seriously. We had a fire. We could do this. So we did. We had a lot of carbon with our dinner but it was delicious nonetheless.
After so many nights of camping and sleeping 11-12 straight hours, we were apparently owed a non-restful night. Tygh thinks this is very funny. Brian does not.
As I was getting ready to ride at Methodist Mountain, Hazel decided it would be cool to be a trail runner. No way am I going to disagree with that. She was gone for a good five minutes before we started asking each other if we should hunt her down. Oops.
From my Mt. Hood Ski Patrol jersey and my O2 Endurance bike shorts all the way down to my Cherry Blossom Stage Race socks and Keen bike shoes...Oregon REPRESENT!
Upon our return home, Brian thought it would be clever to inventory the amount of items we take camping and take a picture. He came up with 639 items.
On Sunday, I was in downtown Salida with the kids while Brian was out riding. I laid Tygh down on a towel on the sidewalk and Hazel spread all 200 of her dolls all over the sidewalk, making sure that anyone who had to walk past had to step gingerly over her dolls. As I tried to discreetly change out of my bike shorts, a man walked by and asked, "WOW. You must be on a really long camping trip." Uh...no. We're only out for one night, thank you very much. This was after I met a couple on the trail earlier in the day who asked me if we live out of our truck.
Can you say, "SHIT SHOW"?
And, as it happens every weekend, we came home tired, happy, dirty and hungry. We regretted not a single moment of our trip and immediately started discussing our next adventure.
Because we have no short-term memory. But also because we love to be outdoors together, shit show or no.
As a side note, I saw this and laughed my ass off at the comments. Hut-to-hut hiking with a 1-year-old? Fine. But carrying said 1-year-old in a front carrier and still shouldering a full pack just so I can go "backpacking"??
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
Yeah...no. That's never going to happen. Even I have my limits.
