the best rides don't always go the farthest
On Friday we left our school group gathering a little earlier than we would have otherwise, to keep a date to ride bikes in the woods with people we didn't know as well. In theory, anyway: I issued an invitation to all the homeschoolers I know how to contact en-masse in the Greater Boston and Greater Lowell areas to take a ride with us at Great Brook Farm State Park, in the interest of maybe finding some other people to ride with on weekdays. As it happened, while we had a fine group of four adults and seven kids, all but one adult and one kid were people we already knew very well indeed—including the folks whose house we'd just been at. Oh well, that's good too.
riding at the farm
Since our party included two adults without bikes and one three-year-old on a balance bike we weren't exactly chewing up the miles. Instead, we proceded around the wide and smooth Pine Point Loop at a reasonable pace, with the older cyclists zipping ahead and then stopping to ride steep slopes to the side of the trail or climb big rocks or leap over horse jumps as the spirit took them. At some point a few of us did one actual mountain-bike trail, which was a chance for the old MTB hands Harvey, Zion, and Elijah to show off, and for a couple kids newer to the enterprise to experience how much fun it could be.
But as delightful as it is to be on a bike, it was the rocks and streams that were the real fun of the day. A couple of non-Archibald kids and I had a great time climbing the biggest of the rocks we came across, and then playing on a gigantic seesaw formed by a 40-foot (maybe? I didn't have a tape measure) white pine trunk that had fallen on a waist-high rock just right. While we were doing that Zion, Elijah, and a friend got very muddy playing around the edge of the pond, and then decided that the only thing to do to get clean was to submerge themselves up to mid-chest in the spillway.
no mud left on those legs
Which they've probably always wanted to do anyways, so I guess it was fine. But Zion at least wasn't totally happy—or warm—for the rest of the ride. Did he learn his lesson? I'm sure he did not. Water is too hard to resist.
So is bicycling. We'll be out again soon!