The Airport Ride

It's hard for me to believe that only two nights ago we sat at our kitchen table and argued with Jodi that we do Not want to move to Colorado or anywhere else for that fact.  But argue we did.    After all these years, frankly, I admit that I basically love my life and besides, with a BS monitor like mine, I won't do very well in any sort of place where people think that, well, their home is somehow above all *that*. And by *that*, I mean, all the stuff that we witness and tolerate here in Illinois just about every day and Peter (and now even the girls), and I amuse ourselves to no end at the hilarity of it all.  But today, as I dragged myself out of bed in order to ride early enough to miss at least some of the ghastly traffic on our roads here in the Western Suburbs, I had to wonder at the wisdom of staying here. I am an athlete and a cyclist, aren't I?  What am I thinking?  I had missed the pack of bloodthirsty riders that I ally myself with, so, again, off to the wild blue horizon solo.  A middle aged mom on a very expensive red and white bicycle, through Oak Park, River Forest, Maywood, Berkeley, Elmhurst, and so on and so forth.  The routes are tried and true, and if it weren't for my trusty cohort of male cycling buddies I would have NO CLUE where to go on a bicycle around here. In fact, I'd give up, like any other self respecting female rider and surrender to the trainer or a spin class.

Destination: Airport Ride

We have quite a few decent rides, with nice straightaways, sometimes a ridable shoulder, and a few rollers and one or two hills.  After eight years, I wouldn't know the alternative.  But because we have relatively few rides, we have named most of them, and this ride is called the airport ride. It's a ride that takes us due west and slightly north towards the Dupage County airport. It's a tiny place, but at the thirty mile spot we can go to the back side of the airport and use a spiffy clean port-o-let and adjust ourselves, eat a cliff bar, and continue on home.  Today I took a few shots of the parking pad where the small planes are parked.

I have a special fondness for small regional airports--in fact, I once took a flying lesson!  Earlier this year, when I was boarding an American Airlines flight to visit Mom and Dad, I found myself sitting between two  male pilots.  One of the guys turned to me and said: "If you want to know anything about flying, you can ask either one of us."  I looked him in the eye, and said: "If you want to know anything about flying you might want to ask me....in fact, I once took a flying lesson!" I sure told them!  They seemed to enjoy my story, because it was really the tale of me trying to overcome my nervousness while flying on jet planes.   It gave me a sense of what is actually happening when we're in a plane.  We've still basically got to surrender control, but now turbulence and how the craft works makes more sense to me.

You might want to ask me about flying!

And then for the remainder of a long day's ride.  I head back towards home, but instead of coming all the way in, east toward Oak Park, I turn on Finley and go all the way south to another one of our rides, the Bluff Road ride.  After I was about sixty three miles into the whole affair, I took notice of a pond that I've passed many times on my bike.  The wildflowers are in bloom, plenty of birds, a pretty white farmhouse on the frontage road.  Not all bad, right?  It was a scene worth taking in, on this not too hot day, when I had a good solid ride under my wheels, and, I might add, I was the fastest woman I saw all day.