Yesterday was perfect bike riding weather. I love the fall. The cool, crisp mornings that heat up to nearly perfect temperatures. That was yesterday here in Kansas.

I went over to Lawrence and did a perimeter loop of Douglas County on gravel with a bunch of other guys. There were probably 25 of us or so at the start. Some weren’t doing the full 100 miles, but wanted to get a good ride in before family obligations got in the way. Anyway, no matter how far you went, it was a real nice day to ride a bike.

I’ve done this ride the past 4 years and this was by far the nicest weather for it. Eastern Kansas isn’t as flat as one might think. It rolls pretty good. We rode on a lot of pretty primitive roads. They weren’t dirt, but they didn’t receive gravel or maintenance on any kind of routine basis. I love those roads. Only maybe 10 cars passed us the whole ride. It hasn’t rained here for a long while, so when a car did go by, there was quite a dust plume.

It was 65 miles before we stopped for lunch. That is a good way to split up a long ride. 2/3, 1/3. I never would normally stop and eat a full lunch out training, but this wasn’t training, it was riding.

Thom Leonard got a bunch of bread from WheatFields, brought cheese and meat. The only thing we were missing was red wine. It was hard getting going after lunch. A lot of guys decided to just roll back to town, so it all split into smaller groups, which was fine.

All and all, a perfect way to spend a Sunday. I have no regrets not going over to KC to defend my Boss Cross lead. I was/am mildly crippled from Saturday’s race. Probably all the running in the sand and the bumpy course. Whatever the reason, I made a good decision to spend the whole day out on my bike with friends.

We were riding in and out of fog early on the ride.

A photo of the group from over my shoulder. I can't believe I actually got a picture of Dan Hughes here (All black a couple guys back on the right). Dan spent maybe 5 miles total riding with us. I'm not quite sure what he was doing the rest of the time other than going real fast all day long.

Bill's rear shift cable exploded and he was stuck in a 14 for a hour. Then I remembered I had some Gorilla tape with me for a boot and he was back in business the rest of the day.

Most of the ride was out in the open, but there was a fair amount of tree covered climbs.

Brian and Catherine at an overlook. The trees are just starting to turn.

Lot of the roads in Northeastern Kansas are lined by these stone fences. They were constructed by the early settlers and through the century up to German POW's during WW2.

This is a good example of what we call hedgerow here in Kansas. It is really Osage Orange trees, but we still call it hedge. The wood is super hard and dense. It was said back in the Indian day, that a good hedge bow was worth two horses. Shows how hard it would be to make a bow out of hedge back then.

Coming back into Lawrence everything is much more organized and sculptured than out in the country.

When I was a kid, I used to ride my bike with my brother. I had a blue Schwinn Stingray and I’d sit on the handlebars, facing backwards, and Kris would sit on the seat and steer. We’d both pedal, with me pedaling backwards and Kris pedaling forward with his feet on top of my feet. It was amazing to us how fast we could get going with both of us pedaling.

We started wandering way past the boundaries set by our parents. We eventually got all the way to the Kansas River, that splits the city North and South. We eventually found a park, a couple miles from our house, where some kids had built a make shift BMX track. I don’t think there were banked corners, but it had lumps in it and was all dirt, with no grass.

We never spent too much time at the track. It was the fall and during school. By the time we got down there and each of us rode a few laps, we had to head back home before it got dark. No one said a thing about kids making a bike track in the park. We didn’t think a thing of it, except that it was super cool.

I went by that same park yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised that there were a few kids hanging there. But all were really young, with at least one adult for each kid. But, the bike track has been gone for decades. It is just flat, boring grass now.

I was thinking how strange it is that there is no chance that a bunch of kids could get together and “build” a BMX track in the middle of a city park now. I got called into talk to the Topeka Parks Department Head a few years ago, for mowing a mile loop in a park by my house. He threatened to arrest me for mowing the grass down to the level that the city was supposed to keep it at. I explained we were having a race there the next weekend and that 8 inch grass didn’t work, but he was adamant on his stance, since he’d received a nasty call from a County Commissioner that lived on the park.

Anyway, it all seems wrong. Why not have a bunch of kids on their bikes riding around in the grass in a little used park. It is what we all call cyclo-x, but for them it would just be fun. Sometimes I wish that Americans today had a closer mindset to Americans of old. “If it doesn’t hurt anything, then why not?” was the logic my parents and the parents of most of my friends used. Most of the best experiences I had with I was young didn’t involve any adults at all. Why not let our kids get together to invent and build some stuff on their own. It couldn’t hurt.

This is nearly the exact bike I had when I was young.