I've made it a goal to get up in the morning and ride at 4am. Yes that's right 4am. Why so early in the morning? Because it's the only time I have to get in a two hour ride. My kids wake up at around six and I being the morning person in our family take care of the kidlets in the early hours. My wife gets to take a little longer to wake up and that is a very good thing. A happy wife makes a happy family! I've been getting up early to ride for the past three weeks. It has become more of a daily occurrence since I quite my job! I've started back up at school and we'd crunched numbers for a while to make sure I could and well I am a happy stay at home dad/student now. My wife works out of our home so we get to see each other a lot more now!
So I've been waking up at 4 am to ride. It's very dark at 4 am. Not just that the sun isn't out, but where I live the street lights are not on, or rather they are non-existent. I have several routes that I like to ride so there's always something different to do in my two hours in the morning. But it seems I've been putting off one of the routes that I really like since I started riding in the wee hours of the morning. It is 25 miles or so and has about 2500 ft of climbing. It's down one side of a canyon up the other side and back. As I set out on the ride this morning a thought crossed my mind as to why I've been putting this route off. Many reasons ran through my head but one that stuck out was that on the opposite side of the canyon up towards the top of the climb is a cemetery. Now I'm not superstitious but I can't say I don't believe in ghosts in fact I might say otherwise if forced to give my opinion but riding in or near cemeteries in the pitch dark of the very early morning on a little single lane road, up in the tree covered mountains is not my idea of the ideal ride.
Before I get to riding near the cemetery I must tell about riding in the dark a little. Riding in the dark is scary. I have a pretty good light but i still don't see what's on my right and left let alone looking behind to see well nothing. Being unaware is scary. Sounds are more scary while riding in the dark. Mostly because you don't know where they are coming from or who is making those twig cracking or bush rustling noises. "Please let it be a squirrel and not a pit bull" or "I hope I'm going fast enough that the skunk can't spray this far! If it's a skunk." There are two scary colors while riding in the dark. The first is rarely scary because it's so common. Red. You see red light on cars and such or stop lights or stop signs but every now and again there are strange little red lights coming from who knows what that are creepy becuase you can't tell what they are attached to. They remind me of the red beaming bird's eyes perched on a tree or bush in a dark forest that you might see in movies.
The other color which is creepy is white. What color are ghosts or spirits or whatever you want to call them? White. At least that's what they are usually perceived to be. Almost everything that's white in the dark is visible to some extent and of course it's not clear enough to tell exactly what it is so it comes across as a hazy fuzzy white color. Yes I saw a few white things on my ride and yes they were all creepy. Nothing like a nice big irregular ovalish shaped hazy white spot which is apparently elevated off of the ground to get the heart rate up. Yes I was a few of these hazy white spots. They were all a little different size and shape. A family of... or a few generations of white floating spots along the road. Luckily I was going down hill. Did I see what they were for sure? Yes. They were rocks. Big rocks protruding from the canyon wall which were painted white so no one would run into them. What they didn't think about is that they might just scare someone enough to turn the other way and go plunging off the cliff. The other thing that I saw that was white was a fence. Now not all fences are scary but this one was. I was riding along thinking to myself that there is a cemetery somewhere up this road and maybe I won't even notice that I've gone by it because it's so dark. WRONG! "oh yeah there's a little white picket fence that borders the cemetery." The white fence is there just so that you know it's there in the midnight hours. Whoever built it was thinking I'm going to put the heeby jeebies into any cyclist who is going to ride by in the wee hours of the morn'. Their wish came true with me. Riding by the little cemetery wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for all of the rustling sounds and creaking trees(I assume creaking sounds are trees) and of course I'm moving slow uphill so there's no getting away from what lurks behind the white picket fence. I made it though. I made it home too. No zombie apocalypes while on my ride this morning. Phew.
There's something else that's white and quite scary in the dark too. It's little white cars like priuses or geos or fiats. In the distance they look like ghosts screaming towards you. They kind of have that humming whistling sound too as they buzz down the road which adds to their scary factor. Just kidding. All you see are headlights.
Anyway riding bikes is fun. Keep spinning.
So I've been waking up at 4 am to ride. It's very dark at 4 am. Not just that the sun isn't out, but where I live the street lights are not on, or rather they are non-existent. I have several routes that I like to ride so there's always something different to do in my two hours in the morning. But it seems I've been putting off one of the routes that I really like since I started riding in the wee hours of the morning. It is 25 miles or so and has about 2500 ft of climbing. It's down one side of a canyon up the other side and back. As I set out on the ride this morning a thought crossed my mind as to why I've been putting this route off. Many reasons ran through my head but one that stuck out was that on the opposite side of the canyon up towards the top of the climb is a cemetery. Now I'm not superstitious but I can't say I don't believe in ghosts in fact I might say otherwise if forced to give my opinion but riding in or near cemeteries in the pitch dark of the very early morning on a little single lane road, up in the tree covered mountains is not my idea of the ideal ride.
Before I get to riding near the cemetery I must tell about riding in the dark a little. Riding in the dark is scary. I have a pretty good light but i still don't see what's on my right and left let alone looking behind to see well nothing. Being unaware is scary. Sounds are more scary while riding in the dark. Mostly because you don't know where they are coming from or who is making those twig cracking or bush rustling noises. "Please let it be a squirrel and not a pit bull" or "I hope I'm going fast enough that the skunk can't spray this far! If it's a skunk." There are two scary colors while riding in the dark. The first is rarely scary because it's so common. Red. You see red light on cars and such or stop lights or stop signs but every now and again there are strange little red lights coming from who knows what that are creepy becuase you can't tell what they are attached to. They remind me of the red beaming bird's eyes perched on a tree or bush in a dark forest that you might see in movies.
The other color which is creepy is white. What color are ghosts or spirits or whatever you want to call them? White. At least that's what they are usually perceived to be. Almost everything that's white in the dark is visible to some extent and of course it's not clear enough to tell exactly what it is so it comes across as a hazy fuzzy white color. Yes I saw a few white things on my ride and yes they were all creepy. Nothing like a nice big irregular ovalish shaped hazy white spot which is apparently elevated off of the ground to get the heart rate up. Yes I was a few of these hazy white spots. They were all a little different size and shape. A family of... or a few generations of white floating spots along the road. Luckily I was going down hill. Did I see what they were for sure? Yes. They were rocks. Big rocks protruding from the canyon wall which were painted white so no one would run into them. What they didn't think about is that they might just scare someone enough to turn the other way and go plunging off the cliff. The other thing that I saw that was white was a fence. Now not all fences are scary but this one was. I was riding along thinking to myself that there is a cemetery somewhere up this road and maybe I won't even notice that I've gone by it because it's so dark. WRONG! "oh yeah there's a little white picket fence that borders the cemetery." The white fence is there just so that you know it's there in the midnight hours. Whoever built it was thinking I'm going to put the heeby jeebies into any cyclist who is going to ride by in the wee hours of the morn'. Their wish came true with me. Riding by the little cemetery wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for all of the rustling sounds and creaking trees(I assume creaking sounds are trees) and of course I'm moving slow uphill so there's no getting away from what lurks behind the white picket fence. I made it though. I made it home too. No zombie apocalypes while on my ride this morning. Phew.
There's something else that's white and quite scary in the dark too. It's little white cars like priuses or geos or fiats. In the distance they look like ghosts screaming towards you. They kind of have that humming whistling sound too as they buzz down the road which adds to their scary factor. Just kidding. All you see are headlights.
Anyway riding bikes is fun. Keep spinning.
Brother, lets make a deal...We both want to ride, but we both have kiddos to take care of and riding in the dark IS scary and kindof dangerous! We can switch off watching the kiddos so that we can both go for rides in the morning. Im not sure when you have school etc. but lets figure out a good schedule to do this! Are you with me?! ;0)
ReplyDeleteI'm In! I'll send you my schedule.
ReplyDelete