Member-only story
Cyclogues
“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.” Ernest Hemingway
Home is where the greenways, rivers and old railroads are. Because of these, there are those bicycle trails that make a street address a home; and my home is only a couple of blocks away from access to hundreds of miles of designated mixed-use trail systems.
In winter months, I have no real use for stationary bicycles and a diminishing tolerance for riding in single digit temperatures. So, in any given year my butt will not feel a bike seat for several weeks at a time; a fading muscle memory from the few unseasonably warm days in mid-December in which, with luck, I can count on to put my old 1972 Schwinn Varsity on the crushed limestone of the spurs, stems and tributary trail systems of the Illinois Prairie Path — America’s first mixed-use trail system — until about late February or March.