Now that darkness is falling on our city a little later, I can get away with not bringing my headlamp to work to ride my bike home at night.  On Wednesday night, I decided to take a leisurely bike ride into Fairhaven to check out the new shipment of Marcia Bloom Skirts at my favorite store: Fun To Shop.  I hopped on the Interurban only a few blocks from work, and meandered on the gravel trail.  Along the way I was joined by many, many people out to enjoy exercise and the beatiful sunset along the water.  People of all ages, classes and interests were out and about, either walking, riding, biking, or even skateboarding.  I kept saying to myself how lucky I was to have found such a great place to live.  I love it here. 

I dropped into Fairhaven and since the boardwalk along the water was so crowded with people - a great thing in my mind - I took the quieter road to the center of town.  Once there, Miguel met me and I started trying on a few skirts when our friends Adam and Lenore just happened to walk into the indoor courtyard on their way to dinner.  So lucky for me, I then had 3 critics to tell me what they thought of the different skirts I was trying on.  In the end, I walked out of the store without any new Marcia Blooms to add to my small collection, but with even more of an appreciation of this lovely town of ours.  

Today, to strengthen my love of Bellingham, I took the dogs on a 10-minute drive to one of the several biking trailheads in town about 10:00 in the morning.  Miguel, Sean and Adam were off on a 20-mile training run for the upcoming 50K, so I decided to go on a nice bikeride instead.  It was a cold, foggy morning and the air was brisk against my skin on the way in.  It didn't take long to get warmed up, and then we got high enough to be above the fog.  Up there, the sky was blue as blue can be, and the glare on the clouds below was so bright I couldn't even look directly at them.  The city was nestled beneath the fog and as far as I could see were just trees and clouds below.  We cruised around the trails for about 2.5 hours and hardly saw anyone else for the entire trip.  Mt. Baker was beaming with light and a beautiful sight in the background.  Again, I just kep thinking to myself "How lucky am I to live here?"  I know there are probably countless places in the world where people love to live, and for different reasons.  For me, there is no place I'd rather be.  

Alright, here goes my first attempt at a blog entry on our website.  I'm expecting lots of comments from all of you out there reading this.  If you give me some good feedback, I might even invite you out for the next ride!

Heather and I have recently reinstituted our weekly mountain bike rides at the cost of missing a bit of Frisbee here and there.  It's funny how difficult it is sometimes to get the motivation to gear up, load the bikes on the car and hit the trail.  Once we get going, however, it is a different story and we always enjoy the excursion on the local trails.  Last week was no exception.

Since it has been fairly hot recently, we decided to go for a ride in the evening (7:00).  This way we could take both the dogs and not worry about them passing out from heat exhaustion.  Heather wanted to ride in the Chukanuts and so we parked at Highline road and began making our way up Cleator.  This is a 3.5 mile climb that pretty much works us every time.  I wasn't especially looking forward to it on my single-speed.  I had also ridden with some friends that morning for about 3 hours, so I was already a bit worked.

I should also mention that Heather had the brilliant idea of stopping by Diego's to get some fish tacos and a burrito so that we could eat dinner at one of the tables on top of Cleator.  I also brought along a frosty malt beverage to enjoy with my Mexican food.

The ride up took about 45 minutes and was actually quite enjoyable.  Once at the top, we ate our dinner along with a little help from Mocha and Lucy.  Who knew those two would like fish tacos and burritos so much?

After dilly-dallying for a bit longer, we got on our bikes and started heading down.   The first trail is called 'double black diamond' by mountain bikers and is affectionately known as 'chinscraper' by the local running community.  This trail is pretty steep and had some fun root and rock challenges.  We made it down in the dwindling light and Heather took the challenging upper exit onto Fragrance Lake Road.

Once we got down to Fragrance Lake, Mocha and Lucy had to take a quick swim, drink a bit and unceremoniously shake off the water on some innocent bystanders.  Due to the ever-growing darkness, we quickly got back on our bikes and rode around the lake to the '2-dollar' trail.  By this time, we started hearing a bit of thunder off in the distance and it was now dark enough that the trail was difficult to discern.  At this point, it was time to employ the 'loose arms' technique of mountain bike riding.  Since it was nearly impossible to 'read' the trail for roots, rocks and small drop-offs, we had to keep our arms loose so they could extend or contract when necessary, kind of like shock absorbers.  About 1/3 of the way down the trail, the thunderstorm really started to pick up and we began seeing flashes of lightening.  Based on my rough estimates, the storm was still at least 10-12 miles away.  We began to feel the excitement of riding in a thunderstorm at dark and quickened our pace as much as was reasonable. 

After some pretty fun riding, we found ourselves back on Cleator road with just a short jaunt back to the car.  The sky was really starting to light up and we saw lots of lightening bolts out over the San Juans.  As the thunder grew louder and the storm got closer, we arrived back at our car, just as the first drops of rain were starting to fall. 

Isn't Bellingham a beautiful place?  There aren't that many places out there where you can get out to awesome trails in such a short amount of time.  We really are fortunate to be living up here where we can enjoy so many different outdoor activities.

Enjoy the trails.  

Miguel