50!, Part II

Single-speed mountain bike, but on the highways (the proverbial roads less traveled near Mammoth Cave, Kentucky). Many hills. The picture says, if not a thousand words, at least fifty miles worth of words (however many that might be).

Riding Over the Cave, 4th of July

Mammoth Cave National Park is normally a pretty bike-friendly place, but one goes there on engineless two-wheeled conveyances at one's peril on the Fourth of July weekend: a veritable cacophonous caravan of motorcycles (many of them piloted by helmetless specimens who seem to feel superior to their pedaling cousins) and smoke-belching diesels descends on the park, for reasons known only to themselves and the Rangers who must occasionally intervene. Nevertheless, I entered and escaped the park unscathed after a ten-mile ride, bearing with me the electrons ordered in such a fashion as to produce this image. On the trailer behind the truck are not one but two smaller conveyances: a tractor and, behind it, what appears to be a decapitated station wagon. No sign of the owner. Probably off on his Harley.

Safely home, I watched the Tour de Crash (aka France), only to be dismayed that some idiot brought an apparently leashless dog, or at least a dog whose leash was incompetently operated. Seriously, who cares enough about cycling to spend hours in the sun for the chance to be hit by a water bottle flung by a passing rider, yet fails to know no dog can resist the sight of one bicycle, much less 200 of them? I guess it's all in a day's ride. . . .