Outdoors

I had a complaint that the last few posts have been about bike parts and nothing outdoors...How's this...This is outdoors.  I have a snowmobile my Dad and Mom gave me that doesn't get a lot of use...first time this year.  I use it for packing the trails around our place for cross country skiing and sometimes I putt around the area close to home, but that has been about it the last few years.  My father was a pioneer of the snowmobile trails in our area.  He was the man that made the first snowmobile trail that actually left our little town and went someplace.  People teasingly called him Trail Boss, and in reality, he was.  He later made the plans for many of the Douglas County trails, garnering easements and sometimes working in conjunction with neighboring counties to expand the riding possibilities even further.  The result from this early snowmobile trail pioneering today is astounding.  I rode 70 miles tonight leaving home about 4:30 and getting back home around 7:00, and that would not be possible except for the exceptional trails I rode.  They call them table top...hard and smooth.  Just look at the pictures.  A person needs to be very careful out there these days, especially with the way the trails were tonight, and I fully understand the desire to grab a fist full of throttle, as I was riding these machines at a very young age.  Yearly in Wisconsin, there are several people killed.  The snowmobiles today are very fast.  Zero mph to 100 mph in seconds, but on the other hand, 100mph to zero sometimes results in a DEAD stop.  It is for this reason that I rarely venture out on the trails and when I do, I try hard to keep a lookout for oncoming sleds.  Although tonight being a week night, in that 70 miles, I was passed by two snowmobiles and met only one.  Our first two snowmobiles were 1968 Evinrudes and shortly after came some Yamaha's and a Rupp.  My Mom and Dad worked side jobs so that we all had our own snowmobile to ride.  We would take the snowmobiles on winter picnics which sometimes involved a dozen or more people.  We would stop in the middle of no-where land, start a fire and cook steak, hot dogs and drink from the old mitten (the old mitten usually contained a bottle sometimes used for medicinal purposes...i.e. one could drink from the mitten and pull his own teeth or put in his own stitches, if so desired.) Some of these rides were in country where a house could not be found for many many miles and that is where most of the picnics would take place.  I feel fortunate my parents worked hard so that I was raised doing the outdoor thing.  Be it summer or winter, we played outdoors.  This is in all probability the reason I can't tell you about movies and such...and I think that's OK.

It has been cold around here as of late, and I have been a big sissy.  I have been riding the trainer and running the elliptical...doing a few indoor bricks.  I will get back out on the bike shortly, but in the winter I ride the same route most of the time for some reason, and it gets boring posting a picture of me bundled up along side the fixie.  This is an outdoor post.