Aly & Bryan are always up to something…
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| Photo by Judy Lansky |
In May, every year, there’s an international event honoring those cyclists killed while riding. This year’s local event saw about 75 local cyclists riding silently, in pairs, from the Clinton Library to the state Capitol. We wore white shirts, and on our backs we pinned cards with the name and age of a fallen bike rider. Continue reading “National Bike Week – Ride of Silence”
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”
Our new boats had been sitting in the garage, teasing us all week. Bryan and Mandy have new crossover kayaks and I have a hybrid (a kayak that looks a lot like a canoe). Jarion has a greenish fishing-ready sit-on-top, and Kathy chose an orange sit-on-top that’s now outfitted with a yoga mat trimmed to fit Ivy’s special sitting spot.
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.
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.
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”
Our friend Vinny decided that we should have a tweed ride. He’d seen photos and stories from tweed rides in other cities, of people in old-timey woolen clothes smoking pipes and riding bikes, and he thought we should have one in Little Rock, too. Continue reading “Tweed Ride”
Happy New Year! The last supper of 2011 was Jarion’s excellent steak and veggies, eaten by the light of a camp lantern on a picnic table. We spent the last night of 2011 in a tent near the top of Mount Magazine. It’s a windy, windy place.
We were up early, in the cold. Jarion had lost the lighter the night before, so I loaded up the early risers to obtain a replacement (and coffee) at the Lodge. Then we drove back to camp for pancakes and eggs and sausage before loading up the dogs and the gear and driving back down the mountain.
Continue reading “New Years Hike”
This is our niece, Emma. What a sweet face! Who wouldn’t agree to a post-Christmas campout with these eyes?
Bryan’s brother Kevin, his wife Julie, and their little girl had plans to camp at Petit Jean State Park over the holiday break, so we joined them. We had short dayhikes, lazy afternoon naps in camp, and good Dutch oven food. It was a nice break from rougher weekend trips. Continue reading “Petit Jean Campout”
Our Unicycle Support Group decided to ride in the Little Rock Christmas Parade this year. Since we hadn’t thought to register separately, we just rode with the cyclists from BACA. But we all wore green shirts and we made a sign. (We forced the non-unicyling member of the Vire family to carry the sign, and he handled the task with aplomb and grace once we removed most of the tinsel.)
The parade was fun. I rode a bike with panniers to hold the green and red beads (leftover from Mardi Gras 2010) we passed out to the people we rode past. Mitch and his kids and Mandy and Luke did stars and hopped around and played tag and were just generally goofy. Since we were between a float sponsored by a windshield company (complete with a grumpy-looking old lady in a plywood sleigh) and a handful of Quakers with “Peace on Earth” signs, people enjoyed having something funny to watch. The parade was a success and we’ll do even better next year (when I can ride, too!)