It all looks so different on a bike

We just got back from a 37-mile ride in a part of town that I’ve driven around in for years, and I’ve even ridden my bike through much of it.  But at several places along the ride I was reminded of one of those great lines from the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”  Butch & Sundance are on the run from the law, and they’re riding (horses, not bikes) across all kind of terrain, through forests, streams, over rocks, and at one point they stop and look back to see if they’re still being followed.  Butch is trying to convince himself that they’ve outrun the posse or at least that the posse won’t know which way they've gone, and he says “I don’t even know where I’ve been, and I’ve just been there!”

It’s funny—you can drive a route in the car, and then when you ride it on a bike it can look entirely different.  It’s also happened to me the other way too—I’ve ridden with a group several times over roads that were kind of new to me, and when I tried to do part of it in the car the whole thing looked entirely different.  At times, I wasn’t even sure I was on the right road.  In the car, things come at you faster so you only really see the big things, and you see big things even if they’re off the road quite a ways.  But on the bike, your field of view really focuses in on what’s right in front of you.  You really only see the things that are right on the road, or right next to it, and you get a real good look at them because they don’t go by as fast.  Giving driving directions I might say “Go down here till you come to the library and then turn right.”  Giving the same directions to someone on a bike I might say “Go down here past the driveways with all the gravel in front of them and then when the pavement changes and starts to get bumpy take that next right.”  In the car, you’d never notice the gravel or the change in pavement, and on the bike you can very well not notice the library.

But the great thing about group rides is that all you have to do is just stay with the group.  As long as the ride leader knows where he’s going, you’re golden.  And typically a person will only lead a group on roads that he’s ridden himself many times.  Of course, it’s nice if other people in the group know where you’re going so they can know when to take the lane for turns and things like that, but really, that’s just gravy.