Then a friend told me that she was going to ride seventy miles for her seventieth birthday that September and asked if I wanted to join the group. But in a town where bicycles have become nearly as ubiquitous as dogs or Subarus, how could I resist? So in late spring a couple years ago, I finally purchased a new road bike and began cycling, building up to twelve- to fifteen-mile rides in just a few weeks. Now, if I lived anywhere other than Bellingham, it’s doubtful that I would ever have climbed onto a bike saddle again. But after I biked through my teen years, college, teaching and starting a business intervened, and more than four decades passed before I again spent much time on a bicycle. When my older brother abandoned his taller three-speed bike I moved on to it, using it mostly for my paper route.
#Best mtb ride chuckanut movie
That bike took me everywhere-to friends’ houses, to school, on fishing and swimming excursions to Sportsman’s Lake, and out into the countryside to the “bad lands” where it became a horse as we reenacted cowboy movie scenes, or a motorcycle as we played army games. I lived on that one-speed bike for the next few years, zooming around town with multi-colored plastic streamers trailing from the handlebar grips, a wire basket on the front carrying my prized possessions, and a baseball card, flipping through the spokes, producing (in my mind) the sound of a motor. I remember running to the store and grinning ear to ear when I saw that green Hiawatha with the big, fat whitewall tires. Way back on my seventh birthday when I lived in a small Illinois farm town, my parents told me there was something waiting for me at the hardware store. “Life begins at forty and I’m just living all over again.” That’s what the song says, but of course, sixty is the new forty and that’s when I began living my life-my biking life-all over again.