Adventures in Biking

Amy and I decided to make our way to the beach with our bikes today. What we thought would be an easy and fun trip turned into a long and kinda funny adventure. We loaded my car with the bike rack and after going back and forth with Amy and Steph (who had dropped by because she was bored), we tried to reposition the rack, only to bring it right back where it was originally. We put my bike on (it fit just fine because of the bar extender I bought) but when we tried to put Amy's bike on, we ran into the same problem I had before I bought the bar extender (basically beach crusiers aren't bike rack friendly). So we drove to the bike store (with my bike on the rack, just to see what it was like) to get Amy a bar extender. We went back home and put her bike on and everything fit fine. Since it was my first time using the rack, I took a long way to the freeway, just to make sure everything was good. It was fine on the freeway until we got to about the 73 and it was looking a little unstable, so we got off at the fairgrounds and switched our bikes so her bike was on first (it's much heavier than mine and we thought the weight closer to the back would be better). As we were getting on the freeway the first time, I said a short little prayer: "Dear Lord, Please don't let our bikes fall off, our bike rack fall off, and keep my car safe and us safe. Amen." I thought I had covered all the bases. When we got to the beach we discovered that we had secured one of the straps too tight and we couldn't get it off. We seriously worked on that thing for about 15 minutes. We were laughing because of the prayer...we didn't think to ask that we could get the bikes OFF the rack once we got to the beach! Once we did get it off (with much muscle work on both our parts and a short little prayer), I screamed "Thank You Lord! Literally." I think you had to be there, but we laughed for a good couple minutes about that, so much that we were crying. About 2 1/2 hours after our adventure started, we were on the boardwalk in Newport, riding our bikes. It was beautiful down there, perfect weather (not too hot, not too cold).



It was fun but a lot of work and we're hoping that next time it will be easier since we know what we're doing now :)