Most of the riding around Gardner I've done with the Chocolate Fairy has been in the dark. Well, there was the Chocolate Fairy tour, but that was more about spreading the gospel of theobromine than it was a ride.
This was more of just a ride around. We did stop and visit Pastor Kurt, who had an even bigger fleet of bicycles than last time I visited him, many of them destined for Africa. I've been wanting to introduce Corinna to Kurt for awhile now.
There was a strong south wind. A woman at Bonito Michoacan taught me, the other day, to describe this condition in Spanish and for once a Spanish lesson stuck. Hace viento.
We fought the headwinds first to get a tailwind coming back, but of course it wasn't quite that simple, we ended up considerably north of home before it was done. Going south, I was grinding up a gentle grade and decided I might have to resort to my granny gear when I realized I was already in my granny gear.
Then coming north, I was averaging around 20 mph in the flats with little effort, thinking I could actually use a bigger front chain ring.
We saw a dairy cannon, one I remember seeing on a ride last year. One of those times I wanted to stop for a picture and decided I'd get it next time. Which is always a mistake, you have to stop and take the picture or there often isn't a next time.
For that matter, I remembered it being a pair, something I thought was funny since 'dairy cannons' usually do come in twos. Maybe my memory is faulty, or maybe they got rid of one. There was a spot on the lawn that could have been the former home of a second gun.
I even managed to deliver some bike & hike action, not maybe as glamorous as a levy, but a train was parked across Clair and it was either go around it, backtrack, or grind out several miles of gravel further from home and probably not get back on time.
It was further than it looked to walk around the end of it.
We finished with a visit to the condemned bridge. When I moved to Gardner, you could still drive across it if you were brave. Now you can stand on it and watch the trains, which doesn't take as much nerve. Sure, it's condemned, but if it were about to fall with us standing on it, the railroad would probably have taken it down as a precaution.
An empty coal train came around the bend and right as it got to the bridge cranked up the diesels in a serious way. It was startling, deafening, and very literally awesome.
The homeless camp had a generator, they said they got six hours of TV out of a gallon and a half of gasoline. The train is the opposite sort of thing: as enormous and efficient as the camp generator is tiny and inefficient.
I'm not a big fan of passenger rail, it's not all that 'green' in most cases, but it's a fantastic way of moving large amounts of non-perishable freight.
Corinna has led me on plenty of explorations of what gets labeled the 'urban core,' so we were overdue to look around the rind of the metro area.
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