The Latest Quandry

The latest quandry is whether or not to bring my road bike with me to France. I have been doing alot of biking, and friends who know this are encouraging me to bring my bike. I'm thinking about the hassle of getting it on the plane, but maybe I should be thinking about what it would be like to have it with me in Nice. Or not having it with me. Hmmm.

I've been biking since I was a kid; we always had bikes and did biking as a family every once in a while. After college, I commuted on my bike through Central Park to work on 49th and Madison Avenue from the Upper West Side during the summer. My friends Lysle and Paul got me hooked on biking, I think. They used to take me across the GW Bridge to NJ and Route 9 (is that it?) up toward Bear Mountain. Those were great bike rides. After they left NYC, I still went biking up there. (Lysle competed on the Women's Tour for a while; she and Paul are still racing in Seattle.)

When I moved to DC, I brought my bike, and did bikes up through Rock Creek Park - having been introduced to them with Lysle and Paul (who preceded me in DC, but then promptly left for the Northwest when I moved here!). I commuted on my bike to law school and when studying for the bar, spent the summer biking, running and swimming, in preparation for my first Triathlon. That's when I bought my first real road bike, which I took with me to Cape Cod for vacation (and training) and had some great rides up to Provincetown from Orleans.

When I started work in DC, I didn't bike so much, but I still had them around for spins in the Arboretum with Greg Klein, or around Hains Point in the early morning.

In Philadelphia, I used my bike to commute from downtown to West Philly, and Bob and I did a lot of biking in the Park, which had great bike paths.

Back in Virginia after b-school, Bob and I did a bit of biking, but it wasn't until 2003 when we joined friends Maggie and Charlie on a Backroads Tour in Normandy and Brittany, France, that I became hooked on long distance biking.

After my divorce, I started biking with friend Tom, who introduced me to the Potomac Peddlars here in the DC area. (My sister and her family have also always been game for a good bike along the Potomac in DC.) I did a few Saturday morning bikes with the group, but it was more fun to do them with Tom - more fun to have someone to share the scenery and tales of the trip and a beer afterward. In 2006 we decided to do the September Club event, but even amid kidding suggestions amongst us that we do the Century (100 mile) ride, we chickened out and did the Metric Century (100 KM, ~66 miles). We were determined not to be whankers the next year, and did some heavy duty preparation in 2007. We trained so well that the 100 miles in September didn't feel like the enormous mountain that we thought we had to climb. The Hills of Maryland ride (~75 miles) that we'd done a few weeks before had seemed much more challenging, somehow. This year, we've been trying to find a century that happens before I leave in August. Turns out the Reston club has a century on August 24th, the day before I leave for Nice. Why not?