getting there on skinny tires

Too much chocolate and sitting around this weekend; I gave up, got off the bike and walked up the top of a hill for the first time this morning. It was the first really cold day I've biked, but not as bad as I had dreaded from my barely-warm bed in the drafty upstairs of the farmhouse.

Trying to cross 33 from Sterling to Reservoir I discovered the helplessness of a biker facing a light triggered by a magnetic sensor. Tim had warned me. He said they sense metal at two places, so the only way to get a green on a bike is to lay it down wide across the area. Slightly inconvenient. Who knows what the woman behind me would have thought if I'd done that this morning. When she pulled up I'd already watched the cars opposite me get a left-turn signal, and the 33 traffic get greens twice. We waited through another cycle together and I realized that she needed to pull up to trigger the sensor. She'd (very kindly, I suppose) left a good ten feet between me and her. I motioned for her to pull up, and we finally got a green on the next go-around. 

Sigh. It's those kind of things that are discouraging, that make you feel small and like you're struggling with just a few allies, against a very large beast. But the people at the Blue Ridge Cycle Shop are helpful and friendly, and Wayne Teel said making this statement with our lives (by biking) is the way we start moving to lower carbon-dioxide production. 

And every afternoon when I bike back into this sloping land of Melvin and Betty's and the sun is lying all golden on the fields and the cows are rustling in the barn, I swear I'll stay here until there's actual ice on the road and I'm absolutely forced to move in close to a bus stop.