Sunday Ride

I used to take this kind of outing for granted.

It was kind of an improvised affair. I originally planned to ride to my brother's house for a soirée celebrating my Dad's and stepmother's birthdays. He lives a ways out in the golden ghetto that is Johnson County, Kansas, I think door to door it was shaping up to be about a 22 mile ride. I didn't get as early a start as I wanted, and I was worried about making it on time—odysseys by bike into the deep burbs are sometimes challenging on a time-frame because you'll be counting on a stretch of trail that turns out to be torn up for a highway project and the next thing you know you've got a five mile detour, and in any case it's hard to make up lost time on a bike.

Corinna had suggested riding part way with me, then turning around to come home and get my car, meet me at my brother's. She's getting tons better, but she doesn't have the range to do a 40-plus round trip, and time wise I wasn't up for round trip. So I'd ride there, we'd drive back together with my bike on my handy-dandy rack.

She suggested that we both just ride together part way and then double back and drive together from home, saying I'd get the same number of miles in, but of course that wouldn't be true. I'm used to this, it's nothing to do with her brain injury, there has never been a plan she hasn't wanted to tweak, revise, edit or propose an alternative to. It's not that things have to be her way, she vandalizes plans of her own devising with the same disregard she shows to mine. Instead of doing A B and C, she'll say, I could just do D and E, F would cover the same bases as A and B and C was probably a bad idea in the first place.

But in this case, while I knew I wasn't getting any 22 miles in, more like a dozen, my fears of ending up an hour late compounded the delight of just riding around with Corinna and I went with it. We kind of toured Argentine and then looped through the West Bottoms before coming home and getting in the car.

She spotted these murals, they're on Leslie's Taqueria, a place I've ridden by dozens of times and never noticed the art. It's mostly tucked into an alley and behind the building, but it's obviously been there for some time, the paint is peeling.

Besides rediscovering the joy of riding bikes for the hell of it with my wife, I rediscovered my pocket camera. My Nikon D7000 has been a dream come true on many levels, I'm a very satisfied customer there. That 35mm prime lens is awesome, and one of these days I plan to add an 85mm and maybe a wide angle of some sort as well.

But since getting it, I've kind of forgotten the pocket cameras I used to shoot incessantly. They were all I could afford for a long time, and I learned a lot of manual shooting with Canon Powershots over the years that translated to the dSLR when I finally got it. But I never shoot my D7000 from the saddle as I ride around, it's too unwieldy and too expensive if I were to drop it. I picked up a used Canon Powershot to replace the last one I broke, got it off Craigslist for $80 last may, but I keep forgetting I have it.

But it's perfect for those moments when you spy some folk art and don't want to stop, haul out your big rig and all that. Or for shooting pics of your wife riding with you.