I eat a fair amount of honey.  I always have.  I think I “got into” honey back when I was a teenager and a vegetarian.  Back then, my brother and I went through a ton of honey. That and molasses.  We used to make whole wheat pancakes nearly everyday and cover them with molasses.  I don’t eat much molasses anymore.

I think that honey is good for you.  I’m not sure why I think that.  I really haven’t read anything about how honey is an antioxidant or anything.  I just feel better when I eat honey.

Kris and I once bought a 5 gallon tin of honey from our friend, Mike Hudson’s uncle.  I’m not sure how many pounds of honey that is, but it was super heavy.  I’m guessing it weighed somewhere around 50-60 pounds.  It took us a while to get through that in.  It crystallized and we had to reheat it over and over again to get it out.  It probably lasted about a year, which is sort of unbelievable considering how much honey we ate.  If my weight guess is close, that is nearly a pound a week.  It doesn’t seem like that much, but taking into account that is every week or the year, it was a lot.

I am kind of a honey snob.  All honey tastes a little different.  I’m not a snob enough to know what flowers the bees use to make the honey taste better.  I just like to try a ton of local honey, then when I find it, I try to stick with it.  It is funny how the better honey always costs the most.

I would like to have my own bees and make my own honey.  My friend Jeff Unruh, from Topeka ,has some bees and sometimes gives me some for Christmas.  It is so good.  A friend sent me an email and told me that each bee produces 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.  Man, it takes a lot of bees to make a pound of honey.

Anyway, I’ve been eating lots of honey recently.  I put it on just about everything.   I think that anything that doesn’t spoil on its own has to have some special properties.  I hope so because I eat a ton of it.

This is my favorite honey right now. You can order it online. It is a little pricey.

I pulled out this that had been kicking around the house forever. We got it in Europe. It is a little messy, but sort of fun to use.

Tucker is acting all good, trying to entice me into taking him somewhere.

I graduated high school early.  I decided, after about a semester of high school, that it really wasn’t for me, so I started cramming extra classes, taking classes during lunch, etc. to leave early.  I already knew that I wanted to race bikes and, for some reason, I guess, I thought I needed to graduate high school first.

My brother and I decided that we should go down to Tucson Arizona to train during the winter. I’m not sure why we picked Tucson instead of Austin or some warmer place closer, but Tucson was it.

We left Topeka with virtually no money.  We thought we had enough money to live for 3 months, but the housing prices in Tucson was more than double that of Topeka.  We had sticker shock.

We’d driven my 1964 VW pickup truck there.  The rear tires were so bald that you could see the plys.  We had a Sierra Designs two person tent sent up in the back that we could sleep in.  It was set up when we were driving and one of us would sleep in the back, the tent flapping in the wind, while we drove.  It was pretty cold.

We got stuck in a terrible ice storm in New Mexico.  The pickup built up thousands of pounds of ice which slowed it down immensely.  It wouldn’t hardly got 60 mph, but with ice build up from the bottom to the ground, it couldn’t manage 50.  That was probably a good thing.  We ended up spending a night in a hotel, a Motel 6 (when Motel 6’s cost $6), the only hotel night the whole trip.

As I said, it was too expensive to rent somewhere.  We didn’t have enough money.  We were trying to find a room to rent from someone, but didn’t have much luck.

We were mostly camping up on Mt. Lemmon.  Sometimes we would go to the University library, which was open all night, and find a couch, out of the way, and just sleep there, pretending we were students that had just fallen asleep while studying.  Then, in the morning, we’d go to the gym and shower in the locker rooms.

We got a fair amount of riding in.  The desert was so foreign to kids from Kansas, so it was always really interesting.

It all went south after a couple weeks.  We were camping up on Mt. Lemmon, sleeping in the tent.  We had our bikes locked to the bumper of the VW.  I guess the cable was too short to go through our fronts wheels, because they weren’t locked.  When we woke up in the morning, our front wheels were gone.  We only had one set of wheels each, so it made it pretty impossible to ride.

We drove into town to go to a shop to try to find some cheap parts to build up some new wheels.  Higher end race wheels weren’t pre-built then, you had to buy all the parts separately and build them up.  We stopped and bought a cheese sandwich with guacamole.    We were vegetarian back then.  The guacamole must have been bad because right after we ate it, we both were super ill.  Food poisoning.

Sometime, while recovering from the food poisoning, we both agreed that we needed to head home.  We were out of money, we couldn’t ride our bikes, and we figured we just had enough money to pay for the gas home.  So we started up the VW and drove home without stopping.

I don’t really have many good memories from that trip, even though it was pretty much my first real cycling road trip.  That is strange because time usually makes you forget the bad and only remember the good.  Maybe there wasn’t that much good?  Anyway, something must have went right, because I got the travel bug, plus the bike racing “disease”.   And neither have been cured.  Funny how life works out.

I’d like to go back to Tucson and do the Tour de Tucson.  That race has always been on my list, but it has never worked out.  Maybe this year.

I’ve ridden Mt. Lemmon since. Back then I might have had only a 19 in the rear, with a 42 small front ring. It was probably a little hard.

Tucker saw a rabbit.