Posted on by Rebecca Barnes

Last bike ride: a study in contrast

The bike path near our condo used to be the best feature of the area where we live near Old Town Littleton, Colorado. Maybe it still is, I can’t decide. 

The trail winds its way along Big Dry Creek for miles, then follows the South Platte River. A cyclist can ride all the way into Denver if you don’t mind the smell of pot, and occasional drug addicts ambling along. 

Go the other way and you’ll end up atop the Chatfield Reservoir Dam, winded and perhaps wishing you had driven, but awestruck by the purple mountain majesty and the sparkle of sun on the wide water. 

Sometimes I also take the bike trail from here all the way to the Highline Canal trail, which winds through the back of neighborhoods filled with mansions, manicured lawns, stables, and pools.

Either way, I see things.

Maybe that’s because I cycle like I walk — slowly. I guess you could say I’m going nowhere, fast, and that’s true in more ways than one, since I’m no longer working, and we don’t have any big travel plans this summer. But the slow pedaling keeps me humble. When I’m bicycling on the path I hear “on your left,” so frequently, even from skinny octogenarians who pass me at incredible rates of speed for their old bones, that I sometimes wonder if I’ve accidentally stopped altogether. 

Of course, when biking in Colorado, it’s important to remember that a lot of cyclists on the bike paths here are like a lot of hikers on the trails here—super serious. Me, not so much. My bike is old and crappy. I got it for 40 bucks on Facebook Marketplace. I don’t wear Lycra. I have no real cycling gear other than my helmet. I like a wicker basket between my handlebars so I can take home things like the vintage greeting cards I found at the thrift store on 50% off white tag day, or so I can bring along an apple to eat. I don’t have clip-in shoes. I wear worn sandals. I wear shorts and blouses, and cruise along at a speed that makes my heart pump faster but doesn’t endanger passing geese or have me accidentally ingesting the fluff floating in the air this time of year from the enormous Cottonwood trees. 

And I see things.

On weekends the path is very busy. There are a couple of beer pubs, a winery, and a coffee shop where a fiddler and a couple other string players sent music notes drifting through the breeze toward the river the day I passed by. The library bookmobile was parked there, too, I noted it, so I could check books out next time. That was when I thought there would be a next time.

I stumbled into the Paris Flea Market event at the Aspen Grove shopping center last Saturday. Reminded me of the actual Paris flea market Ron and I went to when we were in Paris several years ago. We bought some vintage tourist brochures with renderings of old chateaus. I framed a few and hung them. Of course, the Colorado version of the Paris market included lots of very American things, like tie-dye, country chic décor, and overpriced food trucks. I ate the apple I’d packed in my basket.

Then I road back the same way I had come and watched the river flow along, its deep water quiet and calm, flanked by lush willows and primrose bushes. I saw two dogs in backpacks, tongues hanging out, fur flowing in the breeze as they rode along with their cycling owners.

I only passed one other cyclist – he was pedaling a large cart like a rickshaw. It held two older, possibly disabled people. The sign on the cart said something about making cycling accessible. I actually thought at that moment that maybe I could help do that as well by writing about this path for people who could never bike along it. I didn’t think that would ever include me. 

I saw beekeepers at the Hudson Gardens. 

I saw the 154-foot SpaceX rocket booster that arrived at its new home outside of the DISH Network Corporate Offices in Littleton last year. It was impressive! I’ve never found a tax deduction that large. Neither have I ever earned even a fraction of what the Dish chairman has lost. This is a guy who started by selling satellite dishes out of his car in the 1980s before his net worth literally skyrocketed to well over $20 billion a few years ago, according to Forbes. Sadly, he free fell back to earth with a mere $1.4 billion this year. But then, the economy of late has made most of us losers.

Not far from DISH are the benches where men hang out and sometimes build fires, or camp. They may be some of the 600 or so folks DISH has laid off in the last couple of years. I hope not, but as the latest innovation even at DISH illustrates, namely that of the no-dish satellite. No one wants a dish, or a cable anymore I suppose. We want our entertainment coming to our screens from nearly invisible sources, just like it did in the good old days of radio and antennae television. 

I pedaled under a couple more bridges and I was back along the creek. I pedaled past the dog park where a man frequently brings his Mexican wolf. To the dog park. He is the alpha male, obviously—the wolf, not the man.

Toward the end of my ride, I climbed up the hill to the place where a green miniature train follows a track around Belleview Park. Families lay out blankets and picnic along the wide, grassy banks of the creek there while their children wade into the water and squeal. None of them seem to have any idea that only a few months ago the former mini-train conductor was indicted for some sort of cottage-industry mortuary that turned foul; READ: corpses rotting in his hearse and cremations backlogged. (Fiction is less interesting than real life these days.)

I zoomed through the last tunnel. It’s off-and-on strewn with graffiti and then painted over in patches. I rattled across the final wood-planked bridge, and I was back within view of our condo. A birthday party for a three-year-old was just finishing. I braked for kids carrying balloons and packages to the parking lot then panted my way up the last hill to check my mail. I spotted the pickup truck where a woman sometimes lives.

I saw all those things. And I thought I would go on seeing them all summer on those trails. But today I walked by the bike rack on my way to the mail again, and our bikes were gone. The lock cable had been snipped like a string.

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Posted on by Rebecca Barnes

Riding Around Colorado

Ron and I have been walking everywhere lately. We’re trying to stay healthy and fit for our upcoming excursions in other places, and to get in better cardiovascular condition for ski season. We walk to the grocery, the dentist, the library. We walked our ballots over to the voting box this week for the election. It takes time to walk, and planning. But it resets the soul somehow, puffing out stress and breathing in the simple rhythm of walking upright.

But when I found a bike on Facebook marketplace for 40 bucks, I was ready to add to our exercise options. It was clear out in the suburb of Aurora, but for $40, we figured we could afford a road trip. We took the toll road that rings Denver all the way around to a place so far east it may have been Kansas. That added a few dollars to the bargain. The tolls in Denver are astoundingly pricey. (The toll from our house to where the bike was equaled $9.85!) 

Ron and I often walk up to Waneka Lake in Lafayette.

Ron still had his bike from 30-plus years ago. He dusted it off, greased it up and put the chain back on about 20 times during the first ride we took. No matter, our old bikes are seaworthy enough, not unlike the rather rustier ones we rode up and down the Gulf Coast in Florida this summer. (Grateful for those as I recall pedaling our way up Casey Key and wondering which mansion along the pristine beachfront was Stephen King’s writing alcove.)

It was in Florida where we re-ignited our interest in bicycling. It was primarily out of necessity since we didn’t have a car. But we enjoyed it so much. And now that we’re stoked on spokes again, this fall we have found Colorado to be, well, slightly hillier than Florida. In Colorado, even paths and roadways that appear flat from a distance have found us huffing and puffing in easy gears. 

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you heave to sweat up the hills and can coast down them.”

Ernest Hemingway

Though they are daunting, all the hillocks also promise fantastic vistas. Pedaling up the Rock Creek and Coal Creek trails around Lafayette has shown us giant cottonwoods turning yellow, deep blue Flatirons slanting upward, and Long’s Peak rising snowcapped in the distance.

I’m also excited to be perched high on my bicycle seat when we ride through some parts of the trails around here that lead through settlements of prairie dogs—little beasts I find unnerving at best. I have rodent phobia (musophobia), so the few moments when we are coasting through prairie dog towns are tense. And Ron knows that sometimes something as innocuous as a breeze, much less a rodent, can topple me from a bicycle. So, when we cruise through rodentville, he looks back at me frequently, knowing how much I hate it. 

Along the Coal Creek Trail near Lafayette, Colorado.

But the dogs just sit and rudely stare, silently threatening to pop up or down like weasels, or tarts. Their shadowy holes lie waiting to startle me like a jack-in-the-box or a whack-a-mole. But phobia or no phobia, we’ve had no incidents so far with these rodents. However, we have had a few minor maintenance problems as we get back in the groove of cycling.

Ron’s front tire deflated about a mile into one section of trail one afternoon. He had run over a couple of goat’s head weeds, also aptly named puncturevine, and well, his inner tube was tapped. I rode back the way we had come, and he walked his bike up to a trailhead where I eventually met him with the pickup truck. We drove off to Wal-mart for bike repair supplies, and Ron talked about how he had been impressed with the number of friendly offers of help he got while walking his flat- tired bike. He took it as a hopeful sign of humanity still left in our race. I hope he’s right.

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Posted on by Rebecca Barnes · 1 Comment

Bicycling with Manatees

Thank goodness Florida is flat, but so is a frying pan. Bicycling around these island places means most days we have sandy tires, hot seats, and sweat dripping down like we’re melting crayons. Feeling saddle sore and pedaling like crazy to get over an occasional bridge hump, makes me recall the bike ride I did in college that left me riding in the sag wagon and never finishing the miles I had pledged to cycle for multiple sclerosis. That time it was heat stroke. The high temperatures radiating off the blacktop in the late summer in Kansas left me too spent to pedal on. And I was only in my early 20s. Now I think I’m too old to be that hot. Also, we have ocean breezes that ruffle through our sweaty shirts and cool us down a little as we adventure on two wheels here. And we have the adrenaline of exploration. In Kansas I may have glimpsed a few cows chewing their cud in a field beside the road. Here, there are manatees!

The cruisers we rented in Ft. Myers Beach took us along the main road, past friendly construction flaggers, onto bike lanes that came and went like the sun behind a cloud and then out again, onto pedestrian walkways, and then back into traffic, pickup trucks speeding around us, cars blasting music. A few times we rode along the beach. When we could find the right consistency of sand for our tires, beach rides were perfect. The cool sea air blasted us the whole way and we avoided traffic altogether, only having to lookout for bucket-toting tots digging holes, beached humans wearing earbuds, or the odd fishing pole line.

One sunny day we rode south from our condo to a park on Lover’s Key where we could ride all over trails that held a multitude of birds and plants that were new to us. Then we rented a kayak and paddled our way through the estuaries of mangrove forests searching for manatees. We had been assured by the woman at the rental place that we would see these fantastical creatures. So when we paddled the two miles up to the end of the snaking watery trail and still hadn’t spotted the hulking mermaids I began to lose hope. My knees were turning bright red from sitting in the hot sun and if it hadn’t been for the dripping water off the oar that cooled my legs with each stroke and the broad-rimmed sun hat that kept more freckles from popping up on my face, it would have been too hot to go on. But once we turned back to retrace our way we didn’t have to go too far before the manatees appeared!

First, one bobbed his head up out of the water, snout first, a few yards ahead of our boat. We paddled like crazy toward it and then glided silently to where we thought it might pop up again. We saw it closer then, and could make out it’s rotund brown and speckled body beneath the water. We could see the dark shadows of his nostrils and eyes.

We paddled on and then spotted another manatee and sat silently waiting, hoping to see it closer. It did not disappoint. This time the sea cow swam right over to our plastic yellow craft and tipped her body around as though saying hello. She swam right next to us, close enough to see the texture of her scarred hide and the algae growing on her belly. She swam around the bow and along the other side of the boat and beneath it showing us her amazing hulking size. Sea cow is an apt term for landlubbers like me to understand the heft of these beasts. 

Not sure how sailors would ever think this creature was a mermaid.

We exchanged open-mouth gapes with the young couple in the kayak across the way from us who also saw this manatee so close. After what seemed to be enough time in reverent pause we paddled on. We saw a small manatee munching on plants that hung over the water, and another amazing more people in kayaks.

Eventually we pulled our watercraft back up the bank and walked our soggy bottoms and squeaking shoes to the beach, where we welcomed a cool dive into the Gulf water. We ate sandwiches and listened to the surf. We let our shorts flap in the breeze and dry out a little before riding back. We saw the fins of a dolphin several yards out in the waves, and the usual sea birds: egrets, herons, sand pipers, and gulls. But none of them were as close, or impressively large and docile as that manatee. We’ll be thinking about her for a long time.