Riding out of town

The thing about a year-long goal like Brenda’s 5,000-miler is that it can tend to get goofed up if you get out of a routine.  (That’s what prompted me to think about the “…and still staying sane” part of this blog.)  We like cycling a lot.  But that’s not all we like to do.  We also like camping, and kayaking, and traveling, and going to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings, and spending weekends away, and stuff like that.  I think that people who meet a 5,000-mile cycling goal (or at least those who easily meet it) often don’t do much else that year.  But we’ve got plans to still do other stuff too.

Like this weekend for example—we’re planning on taking our little teardrop camper over to the beach on Friday, and spend Friday night, Saturday, and Saturday night incognito.  So here’s the question:  do we take the bikes or not?  (Actually, we’ve even thought about taking both the bikes and our tandem kayak.)  Taking the bikes on out-of-town weekend trips is fun because you get to ride in new areas and on roads you’ve never ridden on before.  But sometimes taking the bikes on out-of-town weekend trips is kind of scary because you have to ride in new areas and on roads you’ve never ridden on before.  I’ve done a lot of out-of-town event rides, so I’m pretty much used to it by now.  But on those rides, somebody else has (at least theoretically) done a lot of research to find bike-friendly roads.  When we do it by ourselves we’re on the hook for finding our own places to ride.

Now, this is one of the good things about local cycling clubs—if you can hook up with one of them, you can often join them on one of their regular rides.  I’ve done this before on a trip to Gainesville to visit my parents.  This works out really well because somebody else has already done the research, and you get to ride with a group.  The trick is you have to make sure your ability matches up with the group's ability.  When I rode in Gainesville I found a B group, and I hung with them for most of the ride, but got dropped about 5 miles from the end.  (Good thing I had a map, so I could find my way back to the car.)

So I think we’ll take the bikes, but we’ll have to see if we’ll be able to hook up with a good C group over there.  If not, we’ll just have to see what we can do.  Either way it’ll be alright—we’ll be able to ride with each other, and that’s what counts!