Prepoceros

The drive took a couple days, so yesterday was our first full day in the condo. The weather here is GORGEOUS. Oh-em-gee, you guys. When we got in on Sunday afternoon the inside of the condo was warmish. The thermostat was set at 60, but it clearly wasn’t running, and we couldn’t find an on/off switch. John called the front desk to ask where the A/C controls were, only to find out that the building doesn’t HAVE air conditioning. We’d never even considered the possibility that you could build a modern building and only put in a heater, but I guess when the average high in August is 71, you can bear a couple warm days here and there.

Sunday night we got a marvelous view of the Perseid meteor shower. We didn’t have to walk half a mile from the village before we saw clearer skies than you’ll ever see within 50 miles of Houston. We were lying on the ground stargazing in the middle of a road in the near-pitch dark, when we heard three teenage girls walking toward us. Then one of them was all, “Wait, is there something in the road?” and they all stopped short and held their breaths, from the sound of it. I broke the silence by giggling, and John assured them we were just people. Later we agreed that he should’ve growled like a mountain lion instead.

Yesterday we took a nice couple-hour guided hike around the top of the mountain, learned ourselves up good about bears and flowers and pika and pine trees. There wasn’t a direction you could look without catching a stunning vista.

We saved John’s most-anticipated activity, mountain biking, for today, so we’d be a little better acclimatized to the thinner air. The biking here is all downhill, on the same mountain they use for skiing in the winter, so you and your bike ride the chairlift up, and you take bike trails back down, weaving back and forth across ski runs and through forested areas. It sounds like a piece of cake, riding a bike downhill, but y’all, that shit is hard.

Some of it is physical effort. There aren’t many places you have to climb, but the trail is littered with bumps, rocks, tree roots, and gravel. I don’t know if “littered” is the right word, because most of the time you’re riding over roots and baseball-to-watermelon-sized rocks more than you’re riding on dirt. As a consequence, you don’t sit down much (lest your ass be horribly bruised) and have to stand on the pedals.

The beating your legs take, though, is nothing compared to what your arms and wrists go through. When you stand, your arms end up carrying a lot of the weight, while trying to keep the handlebars relatively steady against the constant jolting of rocks and roots. Since you’re going downhill, you have to ride your brakes most of the way down, or at least we novices did (me especially, since I’m a big old scaredy-cat). Since I have small hands, keeping pressure on the brakes was hard on that stretchy bit between my thumb and index finger.

Beyond the physical effort, downhill mountain biking requires intense concentration. (Look at me, acting like I know what I’m talking about.) Every crooked little rock is lying in wait to throw you into the nearest tree. I don’t think I thought about a single thing except the trail for the whole three hours it took us to get down the mountain.

But never mind my dramatizing—there’s not that much to complain about. It was hard, but so much fun. John loved it, despite going over the handlebars twice, once into a rock pile, where he tore a few bloody gashes in his arms and legs. I feel guilty that I went so much slower than he did, so that he had to stop all the time and wait for me, but I think we both had fun anyway. We came home, had a quick lunch, and fell into bed for a three-hour nap. Just now a soak in the hot tub soothed our sore muscles (and burned our wounds). The biking is the highlight of the trip so far, at least until Thursday’s whitewater rafting. Vacation!

Tags: photos

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 11:59 pm and is filed under miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.