My son, who just turned 22, began trying to unicycle again recently. We went out to a school yard yesterday. I put him on the Zephyr 24" with 6" cranks and let him decide between the Zephyr seat and a Viscount. He has ridden 50 feet a couple of times and is maybe an hour away from just riding off into the sunset sometime. The odd thing is, he likes to freemount to get started. His rides average only about 20 feet or so but he nails 80% of his mounts. Cool. I’ve heard of people doing that before. Naturally, I told him, “no son of mine is going to do that”, and then I slapped him.
This morning, I took the Steve Howard MUni down to Puget Sound through the trails of Carkeek Park. I live at about 300 feet and am a 10 minute MUni ride from an obscure park trailhead. I took Buster the dog with me and rode the trail all the way down to the beach. There’s not much technical stuff other than a couple of staircases of railroad tie frames filled with gravel. Some steep ups and downs, rocks, and washed out regions but it’s mostly gradual grade and wide.
I took the MUni, which is all stainless steel and anodized aluminum, down to the tide flats at low tide. I figure this baby shouldn’t care about seawater, the most corrosive of all natural elements. The dry sand is of course impossible to ride. The wet sand in the flats was ridable but it was kind of like dragging a dead rhinocerous behind me. Going through the water was fun, too. I rode that area enough to get so tired that I did alot of walking on the steep uphills home. The trail is uphill from sealevel all the way and I have to get back to about 300 feet in maybe 3/4 mile.
It’s a walk that Buster the Disguster and I take twice a week, usually, and we’re gone 1-1/2 to 2 hours depending on the tide conditions and what we do. The only difference for him was that he had to run all of the way there and all of the way back instead of walking this time. I was dead tired and wondering if I was going to survive. Buster was just wondering when we were going to go again.