Eat, Sleep, Ride

It was back around May of 2005 that I found my Univega at Goodwill, almost seven years since I junked my car, and I've been reminiscing about my early days.

At first I just rode around the parking lots of the Civic Athletic Complex near my apartment, then I dared the steep downhill on Puget Street to some office parks on Fraser Street, where I could practice making turns, riding over speed bumps and through gravel, and signaling, which requires letting go of the handlebar with one hand (I still feel uneasy taking my right hand off the bars). After a few rides on parking lots and side streets I ventured on to the parking lots of Bellingham High School, then up Cornwall Avenue to Cornwall Park, which has beautiful flat, winding paths among old cedars and firs. It's also popular with joggers, dog-walkers, horse-shoe clubs, frisbee-golfers and medieval boffers from the Society for Creative Anachronism. With all these hazards I had to learn not to stare at my front wheel all the time.

My old bike at Elizabeth Park

The ride when I crossed Meridian Street to Squalicum Boulevard was the one that made me a bicycle-junkie, craving longer and longer rides. Squalicum has wide, straight, almost flat bike lanes leading to the marinas and waterfront parks on Roeder Avenue, where you can circle around the paths enjoying views of the bay, boats and big old houses on the bluff above the harbor. A loop from my old neighborhood, through Cornwall Park, to the waterfront and back is about a ten-mile ride.

Soon after that I tried heading inland, riding the Mount Baker Highway as far as the Nooksack Casino. I didn't have an odometer then, but I estimated it was about a 12-15 mile ride one-way. The highway has bike lanes, but car traffic is fast and there can be a lot of big trucks. I once saw several emus by the road side at an animal rescue farm, but they're not permanent residents. Small farms with horses, alpacas or llamas are more common.

When my range extended to rides of thirty miles or so, I discovered the pleasure of sleep. Often when I got home from a ride, I'd sit down to have a snack and fall asleep in my chair, then wake up an hour later feeling refreshed, energetic, ready to get on with my usual boring weekend chores. At night I had an easy, restful sleep very different from the anxious, twitchy nights I was used to.

I confess to often using bike-riding as an excuse to indulge in the pleasure of food - a little too much sometimes. The summer I rode with a fund-raising team from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, training for the Seattle-to-Portland, I could eat pretty much whatever I wanted. By June I was waking up hungry at 4am, and needed to eat about every two hours. Some weeks I finished off more than two quarts of ice cream and still lost weight. I can't get away with that now.

These days I get $69 a month on an EBT card, supposedly for fresh fruits and vegetables, but I mostly use it to stock up on rice, beans, pasta and canned or frozen fruit and veggies. Then I pay cash for sauces and stuff to supplement the staples throughout the month. This is handy for shopping by bike, since I can shop around for better prices and only buy a few easy-to-carry items at a time.

My EBT card should be re-loaded soon, and then I can feature a shop-by-bike tour of Bellingham and Ferndale.