39!

I turned 39 today. To celebrate I planned a weekend bike trip to a rail trail I wanted to explore. Originally I planned to park at one end and bike to the other and back over two and a half days. The trail is only about 62 miles long so this wasn't terribly ambitious, but I have never really "bike camped" before so figuring out how to jam all my stuff into two pannier bags was a bit of a challenge. Turns out, I didn't even end up doing that. A mudslide on the trail closed a portion near my first campsite and I ended up skipping that section entirely. My friend Rita came with me and we decided to make camp at a state park near the trail and just leave our tent there instead of taking it down and setting it up in the rain. We biked 50 miles the first day and 25 the second and did a hike up the canyon to check out some cool waterfalls. It was a wonderful weekend, despite steady rain and cool temperatures. We saw tons of wildlife including a bald eagle, a bear and an otter! Too many birds, some that I'm still working on identifying. On our hike up past the water falls we saw more jack-in-the-pulpits than I've ever seen before and there were even some trillium still blooming. It wasn't the trip I planned, but I was happy with how it went. When I started writing on this blog, I wanted people to know that you don't have to have all the answers before diving into an adventure. Thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail was a pretty big adventure, and still one of my proudest accomplishments to date. Before I set out on that trip, I had backpacked exactly 3 times. Now I carve out smaller pockets of time to try new things. I'm glad that I still feel brave enough to try new things. For this trip I was worried about running into a bear or having a mechanical problem with my bike that I didn't know how to fix. Well, we did run into a bear, and on the second day I could pretty much only ride in one gear. We gave the bear some room and he eventually wandered off. And it turned out there was a piece of very thin stick jammed in tight and rapped around the gears and that all it really needed was a good cleaning.