Ride Across INdiana this weekend

Warning: blog post topic wanders (or should I say, "meanders?").

In a bit more than thirty hours, I'll be setting up for RAIN. This will be my seventh in the last eight years (I missed 2006 due to a work-related SNAFU).

This will be an interesting trip on RAIN for me. I will be celebrating my first wedding anniversary by riding a tandem recumbent bike 160 miles or so with my wife.

I think it's cool to think that three years ago, she hadn't been on a bike in over a decade--perhaps over fifteen years. Now she's excited about riding 160 miles in one day. She rides to work much of the time (on her own Vanguard, now!). We use bikes for much of our errand-running--something I'm not sure she had even considered three years ago (we met a bit less than three years ago). It was almost like some part of her said, "Wow, this is a great way to do things," as I showed her my own modus operandi (and how my own methods have changed over the last three years).

Yeah, I've been a sometimes-bike-commuter for over fourteen years--indeed, I have used a bike for transportation (albeit sporadically some years) since I was a kid (I rode my bike to work for my first job--pretending to be a fledgling bike mechanic--as a fourteen-year-old). In my late teens, I still used my bikes for transportation when it was necessary (although like many in that age group, I LOVED to drive a car!). I lived in Denver the summer after I turned nineteen, and didn't have a car there at all. I could sometimes drive a car my aunt had, but typically rode instead.

I haven't always thought about being car-free, and I still have things that are most easily done with a car. I'm kind of enjoying the "car-free-light" life, though. Jenn and I are managing, for the most part, with only one gas-powered vehicle these days (one car has been out of service since April, and we haven't gotten around to fixing it simply because there has been too much else happening). We borrowed a car from her folks for a week or two, but used it little enough that I haven't really missed it since we returned it to them some weeks ago.

Oh, well. Lots to do yet in preparation for tomorrow. Off I go...