I went and rode a bike

 After my brief and hopefully inspiring picture post of Sunday's pre-breakfast moonset ride, I headed out later that morning for more of a wander.  Nothing extravagant, maybe three to four hours of meandering to see where my nose and wheels took me.  It was surprisingly chill, not that the cold was inappropriate for this time of year, but rather that we'd grown so content with the warmth of the prior week.  Much has been said of New England weather, so I'll leave off without adding any more.  So it goes.

Oh well, maybe I lied.  It snowed!  Sure, not hard at first, just a few flakes, often coinciding with a break in the clouds for sunny snow showers, but upon reaching the edge of downtown Northampton to finish my ride with a visit to Adele, the clouds started dumping graupel, which is both a cool phenomenon as well as a nifty term I just learned in the last year or so from Adele (click on the word for a Wikipedia link).  But that wasn't the most interesting part of my ride's finale.

For there I was, on the side of Route 9, as the white pellets started to bounce, strapping a mini trampoline onto Caleb's back.  It was a chance meeting at a roadside free pile, and I'd recognized Caleb as a participant in one of last year's Valley Cat Hustle events to which I had lent a hand.  Adele and I had run a stop on the CT River bike path bridge, and as part of his challenge, Caleb had sung a stirring rendition of "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" which won our prize for best vocalist.  So yeah, I'd have stopped to say "Hi" even if I wasn't already slowing to poke through the wares on offer, and when Caleb mentioned he'd have to return with a trailer for the mini bouncer, I suggested turning it into an impromptu back pack for his five minute ride home.

It worked!  And I later heard the bungee cords biting into his shoulders caused only minor loss of feeling with no long term effects.  I'm sure we cut quite the pair rolling down the bike lane, because, well, of course I had the majority of an Iron Horse (yay, former sponsor) hybrid bike strapped to my rack after finding it about five miles earlier.  All in a day's riding.

And don't you see, a day's riding seems to inspire adventure in a way that driving places seems to miss.  On a bike, you have less filter from interacting with the world, and the world will often reciprocally interact with you, maybe with sunny graupel, or maybe with that special something you'd been hoping to find, without ever knowing it.  I take great pleasure seeing others enjoying the same type of experience in whatever way it finds them.

One more example: Adele recently signed up for a CSA share with Astarte Farm, a new operation in its second year.  They practice no-till agriculture, with is another something-new I'd never heard of, but definitely speaks to my love of foraging wild grown food, and this past Saturday, they hosted an open-farm with tours to welcome this year's CSA members.  Adele and I rode over as a prelude to mountain biking some nearby trails, and it was with great joy that we rounded the corner to find another bike parked by the barn, and then another on the other side!  Out of maybe twenty people in attendence, 20% had arrived by bike.  Sure, we're still in the minority, but I believe that once a mode of transit can gain a critical mass of people, it gains visibility, and more importantly, normalcy.  

No, I'm not making a case for normalcy=right, but we live in a society where people rarely think about driving places as a choice.  The car is simply how a person gets places.  It's the default, rarely questioned.  So when the remaining 80% of people at the farm see a reasonable percentage arrive by bike in three different waves, maybe half of them will start to think, "Hey, I could do that," especially on a day of more favorable weather (it did drizzle on us), which could bring our total to 60%!  That's a majority travelling by bike, and imagine, wouldn't that be nice.