The Long Ride...
The long-ride story is a tale of overcoming adversity, adjusting to the unanticipated, and dealing with unexpected changes to plans. It is a story of resilience, tenacity, and determination... of the individual toughness and character make-up of the rider and his/her ride. Above all, though, it is a tale of surprises and discoveries. No long-ride ever ends exactly as it was originally envisioned or expected to be...
Those unanticipated surprises, however, can just as easily be wondrous events and/or discoveries that delight us and make our day! Perhaps the greatest measure of the pleasure we gain from making a long ride is the very fact unforeseen occurrences will challenge us, delight us, and sooner or later they will alter, subvert, or upend our expectations. For this long-rider, those surprises have indeed become the very things looked forward to most of all!
The long ride experience doesn't start out that way for any of us, however. Nope, at first, we fret and stew about 'problems' and situations that continually crop-up and increase the time pressure we're already feeling. Our thoughts are filled with milestones and locations we still need to tick off our must-do list for a given day...
Or we spin our wheels worrying about how we might make up for the lost time or maybe drop entirely something else from the itinerary. Any deviation from 'the schedule', no matter how pleasant, is also a source of frustration and consternation. The more items on our itineraries, the more ‘tweaking’ and hand-wringing that will be required!
As with most things in life, we don't start with the perspectives and understandings we later pick up along the way. Only through actual experience can we come to some tenuous, delicate balance between efficiency and pure enjoyment.
These days, our girl and her rider have a mostly loose/flexible goal in mind for our long rides, but we don't want to miss out on a single opportunity that might present itself... We’ve come to genuinely relish the continual surprises and delights that always occur. As counter intuitive as it sounds, a really loose schedule is good, but no plan at all is actually best of all in our experience!
Our girl faithfully transported her grateful rider back to Ocala, following the unexpected, rescheduled dermatologist visits to accommodate the removal of a pre-cancer thingy discovered on the original routine visit and then another visit to remove the stitches… three for one, you might say. That turned out to be an entire extra week of unexpected visits to Jan’s!
We’d have preferred to have been headed on a lengthy road trip someplace, but more rounds of rain and foul weather were in the immediate forecast, so… hunkering down someplace became the wisest choice. Hot Tub Johnny had been making noises lately, too, like he’d be interested in joining us on our next venture, so… Ocala became the most obvious hunker locale…
In due course, HTJ and his BIL departed and made the turn at the end of the driveway towards the illustrious Valk clinic in Louisiana… the lair of Trout Dude and Waterbug. Dennis had a set of saddlebag rails he’d been holding for Johnny, and a convenient opportunity for installation on his still new to him ’98 Tourer was obvious. We made an easy two-day ride… in mostly good weather…
We were thinking about a ride to Big Bend NP and perhaps on to the London Bridge in Arizona. Louisiana would be right on our glide path. Naturally, everything would be weather dependent and there were no guarantees we would actually ride to either. Nope, just a vague spot on the horizon to point towards for a while with all the details yet to be discovered and/or decided upon. Heck, I hadn't even ruled out that long overdue ride to the eastern Carolinas, either!
Before we’d traveled five miles from home, however, the first sprinkles found us, and a light drizzle accompanied us for about a mile. By the time we’d found a convenient stop place to consider ‘suiting up’, the precip had stopped. After that only cloudy skies which later dispersed revealing a rather nice day after all! It had been rather cool but not cold, so we had an easy time of it…
Dennis happens to live about ten miles from the ‘Times Restaurant’, and they happen to serve a really good version of one of my favorite meals: Hamburger steak with mushroom gravy, plus grilled peppers and onions! Any combination of 'fixins' works fine but fries and Cole slaw are usually my choice. Anyway, a great meal and wonderful social event to get HJT and his companion cranking and revved up for a serious road trip!
DDT (12)
Speaking of restaurants... A sign in one of my favorite BBQ places...
