By Hook or by Crook

They say even the best laid plans oft go awry; curious that my shoddy ones ever get off the ground then.

I bought a bicycle off craigslist for less than I'd hoped (good because I forgot to bring a lock-- that cost more than a quarter what the bike did) and spent hours carefully packing my bag (forgetting that to fill up my Platypus I needed to nearly empty my pack) and looking up routes to get to Flattop (which I neglected to write down). No matter. What is clear in retrospect is that riding this Kmart brand mountain bike with a 40 pound pack is not like riding my Panasonic back home. Quite the opposite.

Downhill is fine, except for the jerky breaks (that pack adds considerable momentum, usually trying to rack me on the handlebars) and level ground is tiring but doable. But the road named Toilsome Hill-- that is another story altogether. That song "...nobody/ said it'd be/ easy..." played though my head a hundred times, and still it was all I could do to walk the bike from one sidestreet up to the next and then yet again. Pickup after pickup passed by, with empty beds, staring at the weird kid struggling. And then... just as two locals came pushing their own bikes up to where I was thinking about locking up the bike for good and just walking up the damn hill, a self-described Mexican pulled over and we all three piled in the back. Not the glorious way to the top, but I have to remind myself the bike is a means and not the end. These mountains at the end of the road though, glorious enough for the both.