Rabbit – Splattered Brains

We had just stopped at Edwards Ferry during our bike ride to take a break and use the portapotty. I spotted this little one next to the trail.I slowly walked towards the rabbit, fully expecting it to bound away into the grass. Quite unexpectedly, it just sat there – very still.I got right up to it. Eventually getting tired of my meddling presence, it decided to move away to a different location. But it did not leave the trail. It actually moved in the direction of our bicycles. It paused on the trail while I approached. I got almost right in its face.It was then that it finally decided that it had had enough of my botheration. It departed into the grass.

I also had a couple of turtle encounters on the trail during the ride. But these animals would not have been able to get away from me even if they wanted to. They just sat there on the trail watching me inquiringly.

And then there were the Indigo Buntings. There were so many of them! Some day I will be in a position to even get some more pictures of of these birds. Some day I might even run them over on my bike inadvertently. They are not good at getting out of the way.

At one point, I even had a deer keep running ahead of me on the trail for a while, while I kept catching up to it slowly but surely on my bicycle. We were moving quite fast. I had not realized until then that it was possible to keep up with the speed of a deer.

One day I will also be hit by either a squirrel or a chipmunk darting across the trail. It seems inevitable!

And one has to always watch out for those snakes!

I rode my bicycle last week – for the first time this year. It has been a late start. I was going to start writing about the reason why this has happened, but then realized that I had a late start, for almost the same reasons, last year also. So my mindset in this regard, and the preparation for this first ride, mirror what happened last year. I wrote about it in the first section of this blog.

Truth of the matter is that I had gotten my bike cleaned up for a ride a couple of weeks earlier, but had never gotten around to actually taking the bike to the trail. This year, I am finding that the heat outside is discouraging me more than I expected from my efforts to exercise. I have become better at making excuses. Years are catching up.

There were three distinct stages to the ride last week.

The first stage was getting used to the feeling of being in the saddle once again after a very long time. When I am on a bike, the distances and the scenery pass by more quickly and smoothly than I am used to when on foot. I cannot pay as much attention as I usually do to things beside the trail. Nevertheless, it was difficult to miss the large number of birds at the pond at Riley’s lock. I had to stop to take pictures. There were an unusual number of egrets at this location.

There were also a few Great Blue Herons to be seen all along the trail. We have not seen them for quite a while, and their sight, for some reason, brings a feeling of comfort.

The second part of the ride was when I was transported into a world of happy fantasy, where my mind wandered away into some other space. The act of biking itself became completely instinctive. I even recited a nursery rhyme loudly when I went past a section with a lot of blackbirds. My song for the morning included the words – “I want to fly like an eagle, let my spirit carry me“! And then, there I was, chasing the butterfly, and the bird, and the rabbit, as they showed me the way ahead, each for a short distance – as they fluttered all over the place in the air in front of the moving bike, or skipped along in the grass beside the trail, or hopped for a while on the trail, all while staying in front of me. This was my Alice in Wonderland moment, and there were no magic mushrooms involved.

The last stage of the ride was the slog. This happened primarily because I am not fully in shape. (Thankfully, I had decided to do a shorter ride than I normally would have pushed myself to do.) If I had been in shape, I would have been in the zone by this point. This stage of the ride is usually notable because one can end up speeding without even realizing what is going on. But I had to slow down. I was feeling the effort. There were also a few distractions along the way, including having to deal with the hordes of people who had descended on the trail by this time.

I hope I can keep myself motivated to do more rides this year. The bicycle rack remains mounted on the car.