Thursday, July 1, 1999



The day started out sunny and BEAUTIFUL! and I decided to go for another bike ride this time on the Minnesing Mountain Bike trails here in the park. I was feeling pretty full of myself yesterday after doing 20 or so km’s of offroad biking but today humbled me and taught me some humility in a very painful way. YESTERDAY WAS NOTHING!! compared to this bike trail I rode today. Its hard to describe this trail, it was just a mass of large assed jagged rocks, logs, stumps, mud everywhere, and the mountains I biked up! Geez I couldn’t get up a number of them on the bike, and the ones I did get up I had to use the highest gears I have on my bike. Ive never before today found a need or use for my 21st gear and geez I coulda used higher gears then that today. Now sadly it wasn’t all fun... Bout 5km’s into the 10 loop I was planning, I wiped out... and HARD! I was coming across a rickety bridge and didn’t notice a space between the bridge and the ground, I kinda hit that hole and before I knew it my front wheel stopped dead and I went full over my handlebars and landed hard on my shoulder and upper back on the muddy jagged rocks below me. The damage felt minimal to me, numerous bruised ribs and my legs was seriously thrashed and bleeding profusely im am happy to say though that my bike didnt get hurt at all, lucky for it, it fell on ME! ~sigh~. Now... being that I was already 5 km into the trail I decided I would continue on and finish the trail even after this mishap. There was no saving in distance to go back rather then forward so I figured I wanted to do the loop in its entirety... Not to mention im stupid :-) and dont give up even though I know I should.

So I continued on, more smarter and cautious now id like to think... I didn’t have a helmet on so I HAD to be careful, I was ONLY lucky the first time...

My risk at additional injury paid off when around the start of the 3rd loop on the trail I came literally face-to-face with a mother and calf moose, I was like less then 10 feet from them at one point as they walked by me to go into the deep brush. How cool is that!!! Even though a picture would have been cool to capture and preserve that moment, im glad I decided not to take my camera with me or else it would have surely been smashed when I had my accident. The rest of my trip was uneventful(good or bad). Except it started raining near the end of the trek so I was caked in mud from head to toe by the time I got to the car, so I just chilled for a while in a cabin at the trail-head till I dried out a bit before leaving. This 10km’s of biking was more then enough biking for me for the day. But even with it raining I was not about to stop hiking!(after bandging my legs up that is...but man these little bandages are NOT big enough, NOTE TO SELF- Bring BIG bandages on my next gypsy trip) I did 2 more hikes today, a 2.1km which sucked and how! And then I did the Bat Lake(battery acid lake) Trail, which was a good trail but it was raining far to hard most of the time for me to truly enjoy it at all. And worse yet about half way through that trail I had remembered how I left the window flap to the tent OPEN this morning to air out the tent a bit, so I rushed like hell through the last half of the hike to get home to my probably now floating bed in my tent.

Happily though when I got home I found that the tent was still dry inside... well sorta I mean the humidity was still brutal inside the tent.

It didn’t stop raining till 9pm now. During the rain I decided to drive to the town of Huntsville for sumthing to do, and got some gas, milk, and pizza subs for tomorrow, yummy! ;-) But now that its stopped raining I think I will go to bed...

PS...gawd this high humidity from the daily rain makes the bed feel SO gross and wet, YUK!!