Day 15 - 😣🏕🤗

It's been a long day (starting out saying good-bye to my dear friends in Indianapolis) with a few stories. I'll try to keep them concise without losing the point.

Gopher: I was somewhere near the airport in Indianapolis. I was happy to have one of those two-foot shoulders. The morning traffic was pretty consistant & I had just the room I needed. UNTIL I noticed the gopher in my path. " No problem", I thought, "small animals are skittish, aren't they? Surely he will hear me coming. He'll be on his way before I get there, won't he?" Well, of course not! I could not easily orchestrate the gopher, the one-inch lip to get to the road, and the gravel-to-grass which led to the ditch. So, I slowed down & gently range my bell. All that did was make him curious. When I was almost on top of him, he perked his head up. He saw me only moments before we would have crashed. He first ran away from the road (and me) "yay", but then seemed to think it would be better to go into attack mode "yikes"! It looked as if he stared me down ready to take a bite out of whatever he could reach! (And I was convinced he could reach my juggular - or at the very least my leg!). So, I did the only safe thing I could think of. I screamed, raised my feet off the peddals, & prayed for the best. As I passed him, his little head was directly under my right peddal. I don't know what happened to him, but I remain safe from any gopher bites! 😉

The rest of the stories are not as entertaining, but added to the "longness" I mentioned earlier. The bike trails I have found have been lovely, except when they are not marked (a wrong turn on one added an hour & extra miles to my ride), or under construction (my directions got me that far, then I had to reroute).

Which reminds me of another entertaining story. As I stood at the crossroads of the trail and the new route I was mapping on my phone, I heard some young neighborhood boys passing by & noticed they were on their bikes. One was yelling, "HEY!!" After the second one, I figured it might be for me. When I looked up from my phone, the leader of the pack (of three) gave me the best James Dean impression he could muster & shouted this invitation, "Wanna race?" Instead of ALL the things of wide range that I thought of saying (😉), I responded with a polite, "No thank you. But you guys have fun!"

And on that note, I will say g'nite (especially because in my editting,I just lost a few other paragraphs I had typed earlier) 😞

#PeopleMet #wildlifenature