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Day’s Verse:
Not to us, O LORD, not to us
but to your name be the glory,
because of your love and faithfulness.
Psalm 115:1
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Please help me raise money for the MS Bike Tour Cape Cod Getaway. Donate today on my MS Participant page.
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Yesterday Ian and I went to the Nashua River Rail Trail in Ayer and rode our bikes the full length of it — a total of just over 12 miles one way. Going there involved only one iffy thing: We had to transport my Xtracycle to the trail. Here is what we ended up doing:

You can kind of see the dangly orange thing I secured (VERY securely — I still can’t get it off) to the sticking-out end of the bike. We drove carefully and nervously on back roads the entire way, navigating for which my many long training rides had prepared me marvelously. We had no trouble finding it, and here we are before we started:

Ian even looks like he expected to have fun! And, in fact, we both had fun on the remarkably non-rainy day. We averaged 13 mph, which is about as fast as I want to go on Charlotte in any case; just moving her even unloaded takes a lot more effort than riding a normal bike, and I did carry food, camera, our jackets, a tripod, and miscellaneous small things in the bags. It certainly is handy to have virtually endless storage space! We joked about bringing a cooler, and were later amazed to see a lady on a grown-up-sized tricycle with a cooler in the back rack.

We were also fairly astounded to see this on the trail:

It was a live, and when I nudged it, it reared up and extended its claws threateningly. Although we passed plenty of ponds and water holes, it wasn’t near any water, and I still can’t imagine where a crawdad would have come from.

We saw many, many parents with small children on the trail, as well as endless old couples pedaling along extremely slowly. Everybody seemed to have come out of the woodwork when the day cleared up and turned partly sunny. Ian and I passed quite a few people but didn’t kill ourselves to go fast; we took a little under an hour each way, with a snack stop at the far end of the trail. I got several strange looks or comments (“That’s a kinda long bike, isn’t it?”) thanks to the Xtracycle, but she actually rode beautifully on the trail and was the perfect difficulty to keep me going Ian’s speed without feeling like I wanted to go faster.

We made it back to the car unmolested by wandering crawfish or incidents with unpredictable small children. Here we are, much sweatier and sorer, but pretty happy with the experience anyway:

PS – Happy Independence Day! I did go for a bike ride today, but I’ll post about that another time.