Thirty-second posting - BI

On Saturday I went to Block Island (Rhode Island) with my bike club (http://www.soundcyclists.com). It’s a great club, among the largest in the Northeast, with dozens of weekend rides, standing rides during the week, and a traditional Friday-night “un-winder” that lets people get rid of all of the week’s pent up frustration, energy, angst, etc. For the most part, club membership seems to be skewed more toward 30-40+ than younger and normally there is a good mix of folks on the rides, which are organized by speed (A ride to D ride). On Fridays, upwards of 70 people naturally divide into faster and slower groups.

Although the Block Island (http://www.blockislandinfo.com/) ride was published as leisurely paced, I expected a similar range of people (ages and abilities). Of the 25 people, however, there was a healthy dose of the oh-my-god-I-can’t-breathe-because-this-hill-is-so-steep riders as well as the good-for-you-for-still-riding-at-70-years-old-but-no-one-told-me-we’d-be-waiting-for-every-single-person-at-every-lighthouse, not to mention the poor woman who fell on the ferry sailing to Block Island, and then got a nasty gash on her arm, and then was cut off on her bike by a kid running across the road, and then I think she may actually have gotten lost… And finally there was a middle-aged woman with the longest, blackest hair I’d ever seen. Mind you, I was jealous of the quantity of hair, but as it was a windy day, her mop was blowing all over the place – across the picnic table, into other people’s faces, into her lobster roll… (If someone pumped her stomach, I bet they’d find a ball of her own hair in there.)

Overall, though, it was a fun trip – and the beautiful and low-key Block Island is definitely a place worth visiting again. The question now is: Where’s my next trip? NATHAN