Biking With Sheila

A photo montage in five acts.

Here are some children bicycling nicely through the woods. (Sheila squints carefully) Oh wait, those are my children. You can't see them all, but there are three children there. Oh, and a husband. Don't forget the husband. He's in the very front. And yes, we all have helmets on. Unbecoming, hair-squishing helmets.

This path is just for people on bikes and people on foot. No cars. Our house is on a hill overlooking this path and we spend a lot of time watching the action. Sometimes you see horses (watch out for the horse poo!) and sometimes you see flocks of Spandex People, intent on their own agendas. "Hey lady, get your kid under control!" one of them yelled at me once, after almost colliding with FDPG. I won't tell you what my reply was, because I don't want to singe your ears, but let's just say I didn't hold back. Once we saw some Spandex People collide with each other. They didn't hold back either.
Very early in the mornings you sometimes see the dim headlights of the odd moped, taking an illegal shortcut from a late-night debauchery in town. It's a lively place to go biking. You can ride all the way into town. Oh look! There are those children again, riding across a trestle bridge. That's Max in the wind-filled blue t-shirt. He also has a Magic 8 Ball helmet but you can't see that. There was a stage in his life with that helmet when he would love to have known that I'd told you about his Magic 8 Ball helmet. He also has Magic 8 Ball pens, Magic 8 Ball party favours, and the standard Magic 8 Ball, he liked them so much. Some days we'd ask the Magic 8 Ball if I was going to be Nice Mum or Evil Hag to him that day, and some of us would roar with laughter at the absolute hilarity of that question, but I digress. Now he's more circumspect about his Magic 8 Ball accumulations. I don't know if I'm more circumspect. Somehow I doubt it.

Here we are almost downtown. That's the city centre you see off in the distance. We don't live in a very large city, which means that the city centre is rather on the small and easily captured by a camera side.





A bridge. Mountains. Sun glinting on the water. Condominiums. A boat.At one point we ride over a highway. I like this view. It seems so prettily incongruous for a highway view: green trees, rolling hills, clean roads. When I lived in California everyone I'd meet, when apprised of my Canadian-ness, always hastened to tell me how clean (the part of) Canada (that they'd visited) was. I heard it so much I grew to believe them each and every time. In some ways it is cleaner than parts of Southern California. Like this bit here. (or did I Photoshop the garbage out? Only my hairdresser computer knows for sure)