This morning, a first in what I’m hoping will become a Saturday morning tradition, my daughter and I went to the Henry Hudson Trail to ride. The HHT is a 10.6 mile path from Matawan, NJ to Atlantic Highlands (or at least it’s some part of the HHT). I was on my 20" Schwinn and Emma rode her bicycle. If the markers are to be believed we did 4 1/2 miles total. Emma was pretty comfortable and silly me, I thought I’d be able to pretty much keep up with her. As it turned out she’d shoot ahead several hundred feet and then stop and wait for me to catch up. All in all though it went very well.
Later today I finally retrieved my 24" Schwinn from the extended 2 1/2 year loan it had been on. After dropping Emma off at a birthday party I went back to the HHT to get reacquainted with it (the uni, not the trail). Very few problems although it does feel different from the 20"er. Idling is a bit tougher and it will take me a while to get the hang of riding backwards. But I did do 3 miles on it; felt real nice. I got a few comments, including “hey look. a man on a one wheeled bike”, “that looks like fun” and my favorite from a guy low riding a banana seat bike, with many tatoos and smoking a cigarette - while holding his fingers in the thumb and pinky extended way he said “you a bad-ass man!”. Well, if you take a look at my picture at: http://www.unicyclist.com/gallery/faces?&page=2 , you can see why I don’t get called that very often, or er, never before actually.
On future Saturday rides, I hope to be able to keep up a bit better on the 24"er.
Yes, it was one fine day.
Cheers,
Raphael Lasar
Matawan, NJ