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National Bike Week – Bike to Work Day

Sometime in February, a coworker from upstairs said that she’d like to do Bike to Work Day as an ’employee wellness program.’  She’s the one who does Walk Across Arkansas, and a number of other wellness things – she’s a gerontologist – and she thought we should do Bike to Work again.

In the past, Extension has done Bike to Work Day as part of the 4H program, with really limited success.  LaVona and I decided that we’d do better.  Against my better judgment, we formed a Committee.  I hate committees.  But this one was pretty good, because we picked people we liked, and every month we’d ride across town to eat lunch someplace and talk about what we were going to do about Bike to Work Day. Continue reading “National Bike Week – Bike to Work Day”

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National Bike Week – Cyclofemme Womens’ Ride

One thing I brought back from the National Bike Summit this spring has to do with women in cycling.  Only 25% of cyclists in the US are women.  Why is that?  Because, as a group, we really do need different things than men in order to be comfortable riding bikes.  Women like to ride as a social thing, I learned.  Women like to feel clean and safe.  Women like to feel accepted when they ride.  And if women can be encouraged to ride more, more kids will grow up on bikes.  It’s worth working on.  I hadn’t realized it before. Continue reading “National Bike Week – Cyclofemme Womens’ Ride”

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Poor Hayduke

Hayduke’s been swimming so much that his ears have been bothering him.  We ordered some stuff online that was recommended as a sort of dog swimmer’s ear remedy.  It reviewed well, and we figured it would help.

Last week, we noticed some little bumps on top of his head.  No big deal, we thought – they’re probably some kind of bug bites, or scratches from sticker bushes incurred while crashing through the underbrush in the woods somewhere.

But this week, on Monday, the little bumps were all over his poor head, and they were bothering him.  All around his ears, and all down his neck, were little bleedy bumps.  On Tuesday they were worse, and by Tuesday night they had spread to his muzzle.  His eyes and mouth were all swollen.  He was really feeling bad, and it was scary for him and for us.

First thing Wednesday morning, he and I were at the vet’s office.  The awful hives and the swelling were an allergic reaction to the ear stuff, they said.  He got a terrible haircut and some benedryl and steroid shots, and I stayed home all morning with him until the antihistamines kicked in and the swelling started to subside.  He’s got different ear medicine now, and some oral antibiotics, but it’s going to take awhile for these awful itchy bleedy hives to go away.

And the worst part?  He’s not allowed to swim for ten days. So stay away from “Vet’s Best Ear Relief” or else your $12 in over-the-counter product will turn into a $150 vet bill!

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We Has Boats

Well, we did it.  After a couple of weeks of semi-intensive research both online and in the water, we settled on what we wanted, confirmed our choices on the lake during the Ouachita Outdoor Outfitters spring “Demo Day”, wrote the check, and picked up the boats.

We figure that this year, we’ll skip our usual out-of-state week-long vacation in favor of buying the boats and then taking a couple of super-long weekend trips to boat around in our home state. Continue reading “We Has Boats”

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Little Maumelle River

 

We borrowed boats from our friends over at Arkansas Outside to try out a stretch of the Little Maumelle River.  There are so many things I love about central Arkansas.  Imagine being able to paddle a kayak for eight plus miles down a river, within the city limits of the largest city in your state.  We began at Pinnacle Mountain State Park and floated through a forest of cypress trees, ending our trip just past Two Rivers park, at the boat launch at the bottom of River Mountain Road.

Ivydog was nearly perfect.  Hayduke was terrible.  He and I ended up in a single kayak, hanging back out of sight of the rest of the group.  When he can’t see anyone else, he’s a lot calmer about being in the boat.

I wish I’d had a camera, because he was extremely excited today about lily pads.  We floated through big stretches of water that’s so still and shallow that lilies grow in big ‘fields.’  Hayduke thought it was great fun to hang his big head out of the boat and try to snatch the flat leaves in his mouth.  Once he grabbed a lily bud and pulled it up, four foot stalk and all.  He looked at me as if to say “well, I caught it, but now I don’t know what to do with it.”  We left a trail of leaves with bites taken out of them.

Hayduke is a nightmare on the water but he has so much fun it’d be sad to leave him at home.

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Adventures in Dog Boating

In preparation of a future Buffalo River trip, we decided to spend the morning on Lake Ouachita.  We could try different kinds of kayaks and canoes, we figured, and we could check out how well the dogs would do on the water.

Ivy likes water but not too much, and she’s a little afraid of riding in cars, and she generally likes to sit up straight and be admired.  I predicted that Ivy would sit still in the middle of a boat and allow herself to be paddled around the lake like the princess that she is.  I was right.


Continue reading “Adventures in Dog Boating”

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Falling Water Gravel Tour

Mandy’s shaping up to be a singlespeed rigid mountain bike girl.  She wears plaid and she smells bad and she says she has three speeds:  pedal, pedal harder, and walk.

We spent some miles last weekend on gravel roads up near Sand Gap.  Jarion decided to play SAG wagon / fisherman, which meant we could ride light and put our gear in his Jeepett.  It was a great weekend of grinding up gravel hills, flying down them, wading in the creek, eating steaks in the rain, and playing cards in the middle of gravel roads. Continue reading “Falling Water Gravel Tour”

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The Rebel Alliance

BACA, our local bike advocacy group, has been pretty stagnant for awhile.  Membership’s sort of gone flat (click here to sign up).  Lots of clubs and groups don’t feel represented.  Lots of minor events are sponsored, without much effect.  Meetings felt useless to most cyclists, and people stopped coming.  The most recent board tended to get into shouting matches at their meetings.

Major local issues went unnoticed, or worse, BACA board members said the wrong thing in public and other cyclists and groups spoke up to disagree.  The city and county government stopped listening because they didn’t know who to listen to.  BACA could have an enormous impact, but it doesn’t.

Or it didn’t.  Some of us got together to talk about it.  It turned out that a lot of cycling families and groups felt the same way we did.  We extended some olive branches to teams that have been feeling like outsiders.  The sort of vague, leaderless group ended up hatching  a group volunteers excited about serving on the board to make it a wider, louder, more active advocacy organization.

I managed to get a spot on the nominating committee, and four days after that committee was established, we had a full slate of officers to nominate – mountain bikers, road racers, blog writers, trail builders.  The April BACA meeting saw that group voted in, amid angry confusion and loudish cheering. It makes me smile to watch people do what they care about, and I’m looking forward to this year.  I’m looking forward to having an advocacy group here in LR.  I think they’ll accomplish great things, starting right about now.