I’ll bike for curly fries
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I met up with the lovely Marshmallow for a drink and some curly fries after work today.
I’d won a prize in her scavenger hunt competition and it was a handy excuse to meet up and indulge in some delicious curly fries. They may not look like much but, oh boy, they were delicious!
They were definitely not part of my healthy eating plan but I don’t really care (The second plateful was probably a mistake however)!
I blogged a few weeks ago about how I wanted to start riding my bike again and today was the day. It was another beautiful sunny day and I just wanted to get outside and do some exercise as a preemptive strike against the curly fries. I went for a run yesterday so I thought it would be a good to do something different and start cycling again.
So I got my bike off the hook in the garage and pumped up the tyres. Then I had to try and find my helmet. We have mandatory helmet laws here in NZ so I couldn’t go out without it. After 15 minutes of increasingly frenetic searching I found it and headed out.
I made a bit of an inauspicious start as I got my gear selection wrong which made me feel a bit silly. It’s been a while since I’ve been on my bike!
I got onto the road and started cycling along. Within 500m I remembered why I didn’t like cycling that much. Auckland traffic is terrible! I had a close call with a bus so, first chance I had, I headed off road into a park.
The Orakei Basin is very close to my house and there is a very nice track that goes around the edges of the lake (it’s actually a tidal estuary but it looks like a lake). It was a great ride along a gravel track under some huge trees. There were heaps of people out walking their dogs and truth be told I got chased a few times. However, I’m faster than dogs! I followed the track until I couldn’t go any further then turned around and headed out of the park and into suburbia.
Once I was off the main road I found the traffic wasn’t really a problem. The next part of my ride was mainly uphill but I found it wasn’t really a problem. I think I’ve lost quite a bit of weight since my last bike ride and I really noticed the difference.
I got to the top of the hill and then it was a high speed run downhill all the way back home. That’s one thing I really like about biking - downhills!
My bike is back hanging from the ceiling of my garage but I think it will be seeing a few more outings in the near future. I think I need to invest in a bike rack for the car. I much prefer off road biking and there are quite a few good biking tracks around town.
