The bike riding to work on Fridays continues even if only one of us actually rides all the way to the Valve Store. In the morning Donna rides to the halfway point and turns around and heads home on a different route and I continue on pedaling our old standard route to ASCO. At the end of my work day I saddle up and Donna meets me right across the street from the plant having ridden the standard route to within the last tenth of a mile. There is really no reason for her to cross the busiest road on the route only to have cross back 10 minutes later.
People are so used to us riding the tandem in together that you might be surprised to learn how many people wonder how the whole thing works now when I tell them she rides halfway in with me in the morning. “Does she have to walk back home?” “What’s it like to ride that bike with no one on the back seat?” “Ohhh, you have other bikes…”
This morning when a cubicle1 neighbor said, “I didn’t think you were here.”
“It’s Friday,” I reply, “I bike rode in.”
“Oh, I didn’t notice the bike.”
“That’s because it is half as long as the tandem,” I tell him eliciting a chuckle.
This got us talking about cycling and as it turns out he was into mountain biking about the same time as we were back in the middle 1990s. I wonder if we ever crossed paths as we talked of riding some of the same local trails and we both even had ridden the Tsali Trail up in western North Carolina. But I don’t think we were at the same places at the same time because even though it was 20 years ago Donna and I would have been hard to forget. Among all the usual pick up trucks, jeeps, SUVs and big cars, it was hard to miss a Miata with 2 mountain bikes mounted on the trunk at trail head parking areas.
Lick Fork Lake Trailhead
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- Somewhere Along the Tsali Trail
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- Brian’s Bridgestone MB-4
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- Donna’s Bridgestone MB-5
- or modular workstation as this morning’s Dilbert strip calls it