There and Bike Again

So, a few weeks ago (quite possibly during the same conversation that resulted in my Palouse Falls trip), my friend Dale brought up the idea of he and I and both of our fair ladies take a bike ride together before Lindsey and I moved away. But not just any bike ride. No, this ride would involve traveling all the way to the city of Troy, ID and back in a day, a journey I'd only ever done in vehicles powered by internal combustion rather than human legs. To put this trip in perspective, the longest I'd ever ridden in a day before was from Pullman to Moscow and back a bunch of times last summer, a distance of about 18 miles, round-trip. Despite being a beautiful ride along the perfectly-maintained Bill Chipman Trail, this ride never got easy for me even after I'd done it 10-15 times in a few months. By the end of last summer, I'd decided that I really liked biking but was pretty sure that ~20 miles a ride was a good upper limit for me. A year or so later, after 12 months of not riding a bike, Dale was suggesting that suddenly I ride not 18 miles in one go, but more like 52 miles.

I was nervous (understandably, I think) about my ability to actually even do a ride that long, let alone my ability to do it and actually enjoy it more than hate it. I mean, I really like riding bikes, but this was almost three times my longest-ever distance. I wasn't at all worried about the rest of our group's ability to complete the ride (Lindsey has done a triathlon and Dale and Jill are both marathoners), just mine. In my mind, the only things that even made it remotely possible in my mind that I would survive such a ride were the facts that we'd be riding a lot slower than I usually ride to Moscow and back and that we'd be stopping much more frequently. Also, the only real consequence of failure would be having to get a ride back to Pullman, and even then I would have gotten to (presumably) ride more bikes than I ever had before.

I've written a bunch of times before (though I can't find any links now) about how much of the joy of backpacking/mountaineering for me is just the knowledge that all you have to do on a day of hiking is walk, eat, and sleep. The experience is stripped down to the bare essentials of life, spread out over an entire day that doesn't involve anything more complicated than survival. Throw in a few friends and it's basically the most fun I can have, at least on this puny human planet called "Earth." I've never ridden a bike long enough or far enough to apply this "hike all day" philosophy to the process. Even my rides to Moscow and back always took two hours or so at most, so they were crammed into the empty part of a "normal" day. The allure of taking another activity that I love (biking) and injecting it into this stripped-down-day experience was, ultimately, too much for me to pass up. Eventually fear of failure gave way to the excitement of getting to do something fucking awesome. And then we did it. And it was awesome.

Unlike a hiking trip report, there's not much to say about the details of the ride. We pedaled a lot, we stopped often enough and stretched that my legs never got too sore, I got incredibly sunburnt because when you're riding it doesn't feel like the sun is burning you like it does when you're standing still, and I learned that there are many excruciating levels of saddle-soreness, but that it can be temporarily alleviated by standing up on your pedals and doesn't need to definitely be a ride-ender like it's been for me in the past. There's much less room for just mind-wandering and sight-seeing when riding instead of walking, especially on a path that, while excellently paved, is (probably for that very reason) filled with other riders and similar obstacles. There's a lot of room for talking, though, which was nice. And holy shit do you apparently burn a lot of calories riding. I had more trouble staying full for the two days after the ride than I ever have even from the most intense and egregious summiting experiences.

We set out from Pullman at about 9am, hooking up with Dale and Jill near the beginning of the Chipman Trail after a nice two mile warm-up ride from our house.

Lindsey at the beginning of the ride.

The Bikemoot.

From there, we hooked onto the main trail and rode to Moscow along a route that I was used to, but had never ridden in the morning before. A lot of what I think was larkspur was blooming along the trail, so the morning-lit fields around us had a distinctive purple shade that will probably always remind me of Pullman.

You can't really see the larkspur here, but here's the view from my favorite rest stop along the way to Moscow.

The ride in to Moscow was pretty uneventful, though all the extra cold-morning clothes I'd worn had to come off at around mile five because it was developing into a much hotter, clearer day than I'd expected. We took a short water-and-chatting break around mile seven, and by then Moscow and Moscow Mountain were already in the distance. This leg of the ride seemed to go a lot faster mentally than it usually does when I'm riding alone, but we were definitely riding at a much slower pace, which was great. I was surprised how good I felt riding into Moscow, knowing we'd already covered a fifth of the total distance.

 The ride through Moscow (from the Chipman Trail to the Latah Trail) was, surprisingly, one of my favorite parts of the trip. The path was slow and windy, and a little bit too choked with traffic, but instead of forcing us to ride on sidewalks and in streets all throughout town, it took us through some nicely wooded parts of the U of I campus, under some enormous weeping willows, and spat us back out at the east end of town, just in time to link onto the Latah Trail and ride past a huge graveyard, which is always encouraging.

Things were hot and steeply uphill almost immediately outside of Moscow, and here's where, at about the 15 mile mark, I started to feel the distance for the first time. It was the point of exertion at which I would usually stop riding and go home, but over the last few years of running, I've realized that there's a certain kind of exhaustion that you can just push through and keep going because it's not so much exhaustion as it is just breaking through a mental block. Of course, there is a point where you should recognize that you've overworked yourself and stop before you get hurt, but that line is a lot further off in the distance than I thought it was before I started running long distances. I kept pedaling, hoping that the same was true with biking, that I didn't need to stop so much as I just needed to pedal for a bit on level pavement or on a downhill.

Getting up that first big climb was probably the hardest part of the ride for me (mentally, at least), being near-exhausted already and being barely a quarter of the way done with the ride, but once we topped out, there was an extremely sharp drop coupled with a sharp turn and then things leveled out for a few miles before a picnic area appeared on the horizon. We were about 6 miles from Troy at this point (about 18 miles in), and were planning to eat there, but the siren song of the picnic tables pulled us in and we stopped for a snack and a stretch.

Stops like this are what made the trip not only possible but easy(ish) for me because I had both a chance to recover and a chance to feel like we weren't biking every possible second to finish as fast as we could but instead out on a fun adventure to Troy that just happened to involve riding bikes. Oh, and shoveling a handful of chocolate-covered espresso beans into my face at this point didn't hurt, either.

The last six miles of the ride into Troy was great after the break. There was a generous but not terrifying loss of altitude for about three straight miles, and we were able to basically ride for about ten minutes without pedaling, just coasting down and down as the trees grew thicker and larger around us. This was easily my favorite part of the ride. Then, suddenly, we came out of the trees, and Troy was right there in front of our faces. We took our time riding through town, and finding a place to eat before chaining our bikes up outside the Little Bear Creek Cafe.

Riding into Troy.

The Cafe.

It wouldn't have mattered what the food was at that point, as long as it had calories in it. I ate just enough to keep me going until we could reach the Moscow Alehouse, where there was, I was convinced, a veggie burger with my name on it. We spent a nice, leisurely time eating and then playing at the playground because we're adults.

Pictured: Adults.

Headed back out of town, I was dreading pedaling back up that long, drawn-out hill we'd coasted down. I don't know if it was the food or what, though, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd imagined. We took another short break at the top of the grade through before continuing on flatter terrain for the ensuing few miles. During the break, I took a picture of this great tunnel and then climbed up to the road, only to find that the view wasn't that great.

(Not A Great) View

We covered all but the last two or so miles to Moscow after that break (~38 miles total) before stopping again, this time just outside of the city. I climbed another big thing to get a picture of everyone stretching in the road.

Then we rode triumphantly back into town, with me feeling much more like I was going to end up in the graveyard than I had when we'd passed it the first time.

Apparently Lindsey is friends with the Reaper.

In Moscow, we lived a dream of self-indulgent, calorie-deficient Awesome People, stopping at the Alehouse and eating large amounts of food and alcohol. Because alcohol is a great idea when you've been sweating in the sun all day and have just pedaled 40 miles. Then we all rode to WinCo (en route to Pullman) so Dale and Jill could buy camping supplies for the hike they were going on the next morning and I stumbled around in the aisles trying to metabolize the alcohol in my bloodstream and buying a box of S'mores Pop-Tarts because I wanted to.

Then, massively dehydrated from drinking beer and eating salty food, I followed everyone else groggily for the last leg of our ride back into Pullman. 

The home stretch.

There was never any doubt in my mind that we'd finish this last leg, but it seemed to take a lot longer than it should have. On the other hand, I'd had more fun during this bike ride than I had in one single day for a long time, so half-drunk, dehydrated, saddle-sore, and with a decent case of sewing-machine-leg, I still didn't really want the ride to end. But, end it eventually did. We parted ways with Dale and Jill at the end of the Chipman Trail and rode the last two miles back home ourselves.

Me, finishing with my spelunk-biking helmet.

So yeah, it was super-fun, and as with many of the great things we've done in and around Pullman lately, my only real regret is that we started doing it now instead of years ago. Also, my 80s bike is awesome.

Palouse Falls Hike

On Dale's recommendation, Lindsey and I took a trip to Palouse Falls Recreation Area two weekends ago. As is often the case in the Pacific Northwest, the near-total lack of information about the site online made it a real surprise compared to what I at least was expecting, but in a good way.

The drive to the falls took us out to Washtucna, which evoked a lot of old memories of making the drive to the Tri-Cities and back that way twice a week for a year when I was teaching at the WSU campus there. A few miles past Washtucna, though, you take a left at a huge, very obvious sign, and then we were on "new road," for us at least. The road into the park was one of those many gorgeous, winding, slow-down-and-enjoy-the-view-or-you'll-crash-in-a-fiery-wreck roads that the Palouse does so well, and that far south we were actually somewhere between the channeled scablands and the loess hills that encircle Pullman, so the landscape was extra-beautiful.

I was vaguely aware of the fact that we were paralleling the Palouse river throughout our drive (you actually follow it for a bit just before and then out of Washtucna on our normal Tri-Cities route) and that it would eventually have to turn from a glorified stream into a falls, which would necessitate a drop in elevation, but I still didn't expect the pleasingly monotonous desert-scrub landscape we were driving through to so suddenly transform into a goddamn canyon. But it did, and then we were in the parking lot, just like that, about eighty or so minutes after leaving Pullman.

There'd been some terror on my part on the way there that I'd left my Discovery Pass ($30/yr for access to lots of pretty outdoor things!) at home like a moron, when in reality it was just hidden in that secret corner of space-time in the glove compartment where all important pieces of documentation go the moment before you really need them. Upon arriving at the Palouse Falls "trailhead," though, we found out that it was National Outdoors Day (or somesuch) and so was one of the three or four days out of the entire year when parking was free. Then I found my Discover Pass.

Anyway, the parking area and its environs were a (literal) oasis in a (literal) desert. There was a small camping area and a nice, tree-shaded lawn whereupon people were grilling and picnicking and such. Of course, we weren't there to freaking eat, we were there to tax our bodies physically and almost fall off of a fucking waterfall.

These experiences were a little harder to come by than we expected, thanks to the site's horrible signage-to-useful-information ratio, which was high even by Washington State Park Services standards. Signs goddamn everywhere, but none of them telling us how to actually hike to the falls. See, there's a phenomenal cliffside observation area right at the parking lot, but we'd heard tales of hiking down to the top of the waterfall itself, and so obviously that's what had to be done.

Unfortunately, there was no clear way down. Using common sense, we started off down one of the many, many crisscrossing footpaths that seemed to have the most tough-looking people walking on it. In this case, our logical deduction paid off in a series of higher and higher viewpoints which made it easier to understand how the site's trail system worked and even hinted at the possibility of being able to get to the base of the waterfall. Challenge accepted.

We followed the trail to the left of the original observation point as it crossed over a few high bluffs and then dropped down a bit onto some (active!) railroad tracks. Fortunately, in true Washingtonian fashion, these tracks were populated with hikers just chilling out and parents skipping rocks with their tiny, train-vincible children.

We walked down the tracks aways and then descended the really obvious path down the railroad grade to the river proper. Along the river were the biggest sage bushes (sage trees?) I've ever seen. Lots of people lined the sides of the river around the lower, more gentle "Upper Falls," and this little river-powered desert oasis would have been a great place to eat a lunch (or camp for a night, if it wasn't illegal). We pushed on after a few minutes, though, following the obvious trail along the base of the cliff on the right side of the river (as it flows downstream).

En route to the top of the falls, we ran across a hugely chubby marmot, and some more great views of the canyon walls, and then there was a disturbingly placid pool that suddenly dropped over 200 feet. Water, fall.

Lindsey jumped around a bit on the rocks just above the cataract while I sat on the ground and tried not to look at her (I'm afraid of heights and of other people falling from them, especially), and then we weighed the pros and cons of continued along a rather slippery-looking trail that circled back the way we'd come from but under the observation deck.

It seemed like this trail dead-ended in a 150-foot gravel-and-scree wash that could only possibly be descended with ropes, but if my mountaineering experience has taught me anything, it's that you've really got to be face-to-face with a descent before you can really see how steep it is. So we followed the almost-goat-trail along the opposite side of the cliff wall until we reached the wash.

At some point in here, we realized that there were actually totally normal-looking people fishing at the foot of the waterfall, so it started to seem like it must be possible to get down there without any special equipment. Turned out that there was a steep but walkable dirt-and-scrabble path that ran down the hill in the opposite direction of the wash. We followed it down, half-walking and half-sliding for the entire 200-foot descent, and then enjoyed a lunch at the foot of the huge waterfall, which was, as I said above, a lot awesomer than we'd been led to believe by our pre-hike research.

Going back up the dusty path to the top of the waterfall required a bit of exertion, especially under the desert sun as we were, but it wasn't nearly as hard as descending had been. From the top of the waterfall, it was a pleasant cool-down hike back to the car. All in all, we probably spent about three hours in the park (at most), and then we took the "long way" home: south out of the park and east through Starbuck, then back up north to Dusty before heading the rest of the way home the usual way. This drive was especially (and unexpectedly beautiful), and included some amazing train bridges and great views of the Snake River.

Blitzen Trapper Blows the Roof Off the Kenworthy, Hundreds Presumed Overjoyed

So, the night before driving the ten hours to Klamath Falls, Oregon for Lindsey's on-campus job interview, we remembered at the last minute that months ago we'd bought tickets for a show that Blitzen Trapper was playing in Moscow that night. We waffled on whether or not we should actually go at first, then decided to check it out, because how often do nationally-recognized bands come to town? By the end of the show, we were really glad that we did.

Blitzen Trapper has been one of those bands that's been hovering at the edge of my brain for a long time. Like Wilco years ago, then Josh Ritter, then Radiohead, and most recently Mike Gordon Band (and even Phish, honestly, at one point in my life), Blitzen Trapper is a band that I'd heard of, and whose songs I'd heard a few of, and whose musical pedigree I knew. I've had a suspicion for awhile that they were a perfect match for my musical tastes, but for some reason I never managed to "get into" them properly. When I get excited about a band, I tend to need to hear all of their albums and get obsessed with the minutiae of every single track for a few months to the near-exclusion of all other music. This detail-oriented approach is really satisfying on one hand, but on the other hand it makes diving into a band a big investment, and I think I need something to really grab me before I'm willing to get really obsessive/excited. Often, this "something" is seeing a band play live.

A band that's good live is usually infinitely more interesting to me than a well-done album (though not always). A band that comes out on stage, plays their hearts out, and are accomplished enough as musicians to not just regurgitate a record back at me in its entirety is way more likely to get me excited about digging into their catalog than anything else. For one thing, I like the idea of musicians who play for the sake of playing, not for the sake of crafting one finely-tuned and "perfect" manifestation of their songs and then leaving it at that and seeing how far they can ride that one moment of creation. This is probably ultimately why I like bands like Phish and Wilco so much: they're clearly playing for the joy of playing, and part of the result of that process is that it is a process. Sure, both bands put out great albums with great songs, but there are also many, many versions and live takes on those songs that have their own quirks and details that are worth digging into. It satisfies the weird, obsessive, collector's mentality I have when it comes to music while also serving as a tacit reassurance that the musicians enjoy what they're doing enough to keep creating and recreating as part of the process of writing and playing together.

Spoiler alert: Blitzen Trapper hit all of these buttons in about the first ten minutes of their show at the Kenworthy. They're clearly really talented, their music runs the gamut across a number of genres that I enjoy, and they weren't at all afraid to just rock the hell out for the sheer joy of it. The show was apparently their first back after a long period of being away from touring, and while some rust definitely showed (missed changes, lots of forgotten lyrics), it was such a small, intimate, and fun show, and the band treated the whole experience so informally that the roughness added to the show rather than subtracting from it.

I only knew a few songs (mostly from their album Furr, which is the only album of theirs that I own), but they played a few of the hits off of it as well as a lot of deeper cuts that were nonetheless immediately accessible and satisfying for anyone inclined toward some Americana/folk/jam/70s-rock/psychedelia mash-up.

One of the things I like best about the band is the lead singer's voice, which is somewhere between Bob Dylan (when he's folking) and Geddy Lee (when he's rocking).

They're also a lot more prog-rock in some respects live than I expected from the album that I'd heard, including a number of new, possibly-on-the-new-album songs that recalled Wilco's more abstract soundscapes to me, and I'm almost more excited now about what they'll put out next rather than what they've already put out. Here's a great video from the show of the new song "Heart Attack" (sorry, no embedding).

My favorite part was probably an especially spirited version of "God & Suicide" from Furr. There was also an amazing impromptu rock/psycho keyboard/harmonica jam at the end of some other song, but I don't know what song it was and there doesn't appear to be any video.

Anyway, it was an amazingly great show, not even considering the fact that it was in the intimate-but-with-great-sound local Kenworthy theater in Moscow, and we didn't have to fight for parking or worry about public transit to get there. The morning after, I also found that Blitzen Trapper has a huge collection of their live shows on Archive.org, and that many of the recordings or SBDs or SBD matrixes.

The takeaway here is that I'm going to be listening to Blitzen Trapper a lot more this summer.

Schedule For a Perfect Day

515am - Wake up at Lindsey's house in Post Falls.

545am - Have massive breakfast of frozen waffles at said house with friends and Lindsey's family.

630am - Leave the house and drive to Coeur D'Alene through spring morning mist.

700am - Get changed, line up at the starting line, get lost and not have time to hand off car keys and heavy jacket.

730am - Start Coeur D'Alene half-marathon, running side-by-side with Lindsey.

732am - Find Lindsey's brother's wife while running with a jacket with car keys in the zip pocket. Hand off my jacket and keys.

~740am - Meet up with and run briefly with Jadd, Lindsey's brother, then get left behind as he speeds up to run on his own.

~750am - Meet up with my friend Jill's mom, Shelley, who's flown in from Iowa to run the race, and start running with her.

~800am - On approximately mile three of the race, swallow a Shot Block whole and almost die of asphyxiation. Force self to hack it up, regain ability to breathe, keep running.

~815am - Lose feeling in right foot, stop to retie it.

~830am - Regain full feeling in foot.

~915am - Part ways with Shelley to run faster.

~955am - Meet up with Daniel and Jadd, who finished the race ahead of us, and run the last quarter-mile or so with both of them.

~1000am - Finish the race with a last long sprint to the finish line and clock in with pretty much the same time we finished with last year at the Leavenworth half-marathon.

1030am - Meet up with Dale alongside the track and run in with him as he finished his fourth full marathon.

1100am - Drive back to Post Falls to play with puppies and recuperate.

100pm - Eat a huge lunch in the backyard of Lindsey's parents' house, consisting of various summery-grilled foods and potato salad and cole slaw.

130pm - Take a nap on the ground.

200pm - Socialize with lots of great people that I don't get to see often enough.

300pm - Leave to drive back home to Pullman in gorgeous (but cool) weather with Lindsey and Daniel.

500pm - Get back home, unpack.

600pm - Drive to theater with Lindsey, buy tickets to Iron Man 3 and an enormous Coke Icee.

630pm - Watch Tony Stark blow the shit out of bad guys for a few hours.

900pm - Drive to Emerald Garden with Lindsey and order huge amounts of cheap Chinese food. Bring home leftovers.

1030pm - Go to bed and commence sleeping forever.

The end.

I Want To Ride My Bicycle

When I was a kid, I remember marking the passing of the seasons with little interest, generally speaking. I mean, there was obviously a difference between the school part of the year (drudgery!) and summer (freedom!). I played baseball in a community league for about a decade, and so there was always the beginning of the season to be aware of, but I never really got excited about it, per se, because I was never really sure why I was actually playing (I was bad at batting and thus the whole rigamarole was terrifying). I always looked forward to our family's spring/summer vacation(s), but those happened sporadically and at different times each year.

Basically, my life (again, generally speaking), sort of all blended together into one big, long, agency-less Thing that I sort of just rode along whilst being mostly ambivalent. Now, I'm aware of the fact that I was a weird kid, and I'm sure that played a part in my perception of summer as mostly being warm winter and fall being cold spring, but I think not really having the ability, as a child, to choose to do and then actively do things that emerged from my own mind on my own meant that everything always sort of felt like it was happening to me more than that I was making it happen, and that made it hard to really value any experiences as "mine."

Of course, this totally makes sense: I should not have had the hypothetically endless, adult freedom I have now when I was a kid, for all of the obvious reasons. So I'm not complaining; instead, I'm taking a really roundabout route to saying that now that I'm (sort of) an adult and can do what I want when I want (at least when I'm not working), I've managed to successfully dig really deeply into establishing a lot of season-centered rituals that are my own and that, as a result of being something I've built of my own volition, imbue certain seasons with a layer of significance I never attributed to them before.

Okay, so, all of the above bullshit was just me saying "As I get older, I realize I'm making my own traditions, and that's exciting!" Sorry about that.

Do you really not have anything better to do than to keep reading?

April is now not only the time that school gets out for the summer (and the cruelest month), but the time when Playing Frisbee starts again. July is when it's safe enough at high altitudes to start climbing mountains. August is when it's time to go see Phish concerts. November is when it's time to strap on snowshoes or skis and play in the snow. And so on.

May is quickly becoming the time when the weather gets nice enough to start riding my road bike again, and that is awesome.

You may not have already realized this from the context clues earlier on in this post, but I was a kid once. And when I was, holy damn shit did I love riding my bike. I imagine I loved it for the same reason that most kids love their bikes: because having the agency to travel on your own is rare and valuable when you're eight years old, and because the feeling of going really fucking fast is awesome. But riding was also pretty dangerous where I lived, due to my neighborhood being a labyrinthine suburban construction that was nonetheless intersected by a few high-speed-limit streets (it was an older, 70s-style surburb, not one of these new-fangled, self-contained safety-bubbles). So, I wasn't allowed to ride much at home because there was always a chance that an errant turn would launch me into a 45 mile-per-hour traffic flow and end with my entire torso getting SHREDDED LIKE CARNITAS.

So I was only really allowed to ride in controlled environments, like within campgrounds and such when we were on vacation, and by the time I got old enough to be allowed to ride at home, I was fourteen or so, and thus less interested in being someone who STILL RODE A BIKE than I was in  eventually getting a car and DRIVING FAST and PICKING UP CHICKS or whatever people do in high school. But man, for awhile there I really loved bike riding on vacation and wished fervently that it was something I could have done more regularly.

When I moved to Kent to go to college, I sort of got back into bike riding again, but it was more practical than anything else. I rode to and from school so I didn't have to buy a campus parking pass and I rode to and from downtown and the grocery so that I didn't have to pay for gas. Kent was a very comprehensively sidewalked town, but there weren't a lot of wide-open stretches to ride on, and so while I preferred riding to driving and often to walking during those years, there wasn't much whimsy inherent in riding from intersection to intersection for miles at a time.

Pictured: Fascinating riding territory.

When I moved out to Pullman, I initially planned to ride my bike to and around campus in much the same way; however, the overall hilliness of the town and my then-massive-laziness combined to discourage me. Plus, most of WSU's campus is surrounded by house- and apartment-living assholes who have little to nothing to do each weekend but to smash a bunch of beer bottles in the streets (and I mean a lot of beer bottles), so that makes riding without extreme tire protection a gamble. Anyway, I got used to walking everywhere, I liked walking everywhere, and I never thought much else about it until Lindsey started expressing her enthusiasm for riding the Chipman Trail between Pullman and Moscow and, fortuitously, my friend Daniel chose to sell his old but snazzy road bike. That was almost two years ago now, and over that time, I've pretty slowly but surely reacclimated myself to the ways of brake adjustments, tire inflations, and chain repairs, in addition to learning to ride a road bike for the first time (which is really, really different than riding a mountain bike or hybrid bike, and really, really fun).

The first time I rode my Peugeot, the tires seemed irresponsibly thin and it the bike impossibly fast; it seemed inevitable that I would die riding a two mile loop around Lindsey's parents' suburban neighborhood. Maybe the old adage about remembering how to ride a bike is true, but clearly there are different kinds of bikes that require different processes of learning, and I was starting this particular process from scratch.

Anyway, eventually I got the hang of it, and the speed of the bike compared to a mountain bike and the ease of riding (supplemented by padded gloves and padded bike shorts) won me over. For much of last summer and fall (and a very little bit of winter), I worked up to riding the Chipman Trail from Pullman to Moscow, and then, eventually, rode the entire loop at least once a week just for fun. The Trail basically parallels the Moscow-Pullman Highway, the road that I've been taking back and forth between the cities for years in my car, and there's just something really fulfilling and self-sufficient about riding back and forth alongside that same road under your own power. Plus, unlike the bike routes I "explored" as a child, the Trail is free from motorized traffic, is well-paved, and yet takes you through some gorgeous, open Palouse country in its run between the cities. Basically, in rediscovering the joy of biking, I've gotten to ride like I'd always wanted to be able to ride as a kid: the Trail is aesthetically beautiful enough that I often find myself dismounting in order to snap a few pictures and yet travelling its length serves a practical purpose as well: transportation between cities.

The trail continues to run to the next-over city of Troy, and later this summer a few friends and I have a plan to ride that entire loop (Pullman > Moscow > Troy and back, about 50 miles) over the course of a Saturday or Sunday. It's the first bike ride I'll ever have been on that could rightly be considered an adventure, and I can't wait to see how my rediscovered excitement about biking stands up to the challenge of an entire day's worth of riding.