Saturday Bike Ride

Middleton Community Church. (United Church of Christ.) The sign at the middle-left of the picture says "A caring church for thinking people". Love the well-deserved, religious-right smack-down.

Here they come!
They're getting closer.
Closer....


Old Wisconsin (the silo)/New Wisconsin (Epic Systems)

Here they come again!
They're getting closer.
Closer....
Here they are!

On my first official day of my retirement, I took JoAnna and Eddie on a three-hour bike ride. It took us fifteen minutes to get to the Trek bicycle store on Madison’s far-west side, where we bought new pedals and a pair of clip-on-style shoes for Eddie.

At first, though, he wasn’t going to accompany us.

“I hate my bike for long distances,” he announced glumly, stretched out on the living room couch is a position of protest.

“Oh, that’s great to hear,” I returned sarcastically, “especially after we spent $500 on a bike for you.”

“I’LL STILL RIDE THE FUCKING BIKE TO SCHOOL!!”, he screamed, an outburst way out of proportion to the situation. (But, hey, I used to be a teenager myself, although I never would have used the F-word with the Rev present. How times have changed since 1967.)

“OK, let’s go,” I said to JoAnna, and then turned to leave the room without so much as a goodbye to Eddie.

JoAnna’s front tire seemed a little soft, so I located the tire pump in the garage. In my effort to detach the hose from the valve, I somehow broke off the little knob at the end of the value. (Our bikes have the Presta – “skinnier” – valves.) So now we had another reason to visit Trek. (Fortunately, JoAnna’s tire didn’t deflate.)

In the meantime, Eddie emerged from the house wearing his biking gear.

“Are you joining us?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied, conciliatorily, but without feeling the need to offer an explanation.

In addition to the aforementioned items, we each selected a pair of biking gloves, which, as I learned back in my 1977-1985 biking heyday, eliminate the tingling sensation that usually develops in the hands during long rides. (No, it’s not just to look cool!)

Thanks to a retirement gift card and Eddie’s 20% student discount, which was applied to our entire purchase, the total bill was $170. Eddie’s new pedals and shoes would have cost more than this at their full retail prices.

Once we left the Trek store, we soon found ourselves biking along a series of undulating country roads between Madison and Verona.

“We might run into a few hills along the way,” I warned JoAnna and Eddie before we left the house, as I had mapped out our route yesterday.

Fortunately, we were able to cruise down the steepest hills we encountered. We never needed to use our lowest gears for the inclines along our route. That didn’t stop Eddie from uttering an occasional complaint or JoAnna’s face from turning a bright red.

“I used to hate to have first period gym class,” JoAnna later explained. “My face would always look like this at the end of basketball practice, too.”

After reaching the crest of our most challenging hill, which required no more than a moderate effort to ascend, we were rewarded with a nearly 360° panorama of rural Dane County. I should have taken a picture, but I didn’t want to stop and fish my camera out of my fanny pack.

Once we reached Verona, we looked for a restaurant to eat lunch. (And since it was 3:00 at the time, it turned out to be our supper, too.) Although Verona is one of the fastest-growing communities in Dane County, if not the entire state, it remains severely short on “sit-down” restaurant choices, i.e., where a waitperson takes your order. We had to settle for Culver’s. (Our other option was McDonald’s.)

Once we finished lunch, we still had another hour of biking. While I continued to pedal at a relatively fast clip, JoAnna and Eddie preferred a more leisurely pace. Once I advanced too far ahead of them, I slowed down or stopped to allow them to catch up. They both expressed amazement at the “old man’s” seemingly tireless effort over our entire three-hour ride.

From a biking perspective, it took me less than three months for it to feel like 1985 again.