Distracting Myself (and You) With Photos...

At 4 pm this afternoon I found myself walking through the grocery aisles of Walmart singing out loud.  Truth is, I wanted to be left alone and typically people tend to avoid strangers who talk to themselves or sing loudly in public. Apparently this would have worked better had I been singing something random and not along to the music, because my bee-bopping along made me a magnet for small children wanting to be entertained.

Anyhoo... music... loud and badly.... it's what I do when I'm working through... stuff.

I finally broke down two weeks ago and saw a specialist for my hands who told me the news that I've known was coming for ten years... surgery... on both.  He gave me a cortisone shot in one wrist which was A-MAZE-ING, but is only a temporary fix.  I will say that I had no idea how much rotation I had been missing over the years and how nice it is to not wake several times through the night from the pain.  The tingles still happen and the aching is slowly coming back, so I will be headed into Boston for nerve testing in the next two weeks to see if they can pin point the source of the nerve damage.  Odds are it's in my neck or shoulders, with higher odds being my shoulders, which will also warrant surgery. But that's a story for another day...

Today's need for isolation was brought on by a different news of surgery, another that I have put off for many years, that needs to be done.  The plan is to do them together, as the hands are covered under workman's comp and I can limit the amount of additional time I will need to use from the second surgery, which of course freaks my husband out, but like I reminded him, unless he somehow grows the parts, or is a fat old white republican member of Congress, he doesn't get to decide what I do with my body.

So yeah... there's that going on... with about a bazillion other things.  None of them bad, per say, just complicated.  Rather than talk about that, what do you say we tell you about what we did last Wednesday?

The day was gorgeous here... 69 degrees, sunny... a rarity even with the mild winter we've had.  And being a half day at school, Youngest and I ditched out, grabbed the bikes and headed south...

 And hopped the ferry to the Island...

 Very quintessential New England, no?  I love the Vineyard, but sadly my dreams of living the island life were long ago extinguished due to my lack of winning the lottery and my husband's deep hatred of all things awesome.

Our bike ride started down the coastal ways between Vineyard Haven and Oaks Bluff....

 About three miles down, over the only functioning drawbridge on the island, the bike paths finally open up...

 Eight feet of wide open paved "road" just for bikers and the occasional pedestrian.  Being off season we saw only a handful the entire time.  We were headed towards Edgartown, tracing the bike route we would be doing with the Scouts later this year.  Aside from the occasional stopping, we made the first 11 miles to the Edgartown harbor, home to the Harbormaster and Chappy Island ferry, fairly quickly.  The neighborhood was quiet, waiting for it's summer residents to arrive.  The smaller of the homes along this stretch rent for $25K a week in season.  This is their most popular hotel....

The Children's Memorial Lighthouse has a cobble stone  with children's names engraved.  I'm not sure of the story behind it, although I did find out it's only open to the public twice a year.

  Youngest claimed his place on the base of the lighthouse, and snacked on some Fritos while I scouted for bathrooms and signs of life. Not finding much, we meandered through the neighborhood back towards our main route. We stopped and had lunch at some little hole in the wall, and while it lacked in decor, it made up in in the yummiest of food.

We headed inland, towards West Tisbury, where you find a bit of a different kind of New England...

 Farms.... lots of them.  Lots of open space, wind power, homemade goods, Alpacas... coolness.

 There is also a State Forest on the island, and while it is very secluded, the paths are very well traveled, even by fowl-kind, apparently...

And this, my friends, is where our fun half day trip takes a turn for the not so fun.  We took a left... and got very lost. And in trying to get un-lost, we got more lost.  So lost even Suri had no idea where we were.  So we retraced, got to the main road, and discovered our mistakes.  But now, instead of being 19 miles into our trip we were 25 miles in, and Youngest's awesome "king of the world" feeling he had at the light house had faded into a full on, throw the bike on the ground, "this sucks" kind of feeling. Not gonna  lie, I too was looking for a bus stop and wondering if I called the non emergency police number if they could come get us.

But we carried on... another 4 miles to Oaks Bluff... where I saw the ferry.  Barely able to contain my excitement, calculating that we could catch the ferry here and pay the difference, we cruised on in and realized... it's closed.  Like under construction kind of closed. Setting sights on Vineyard Haven, we begrudgingly started our last 3 miles, up island.

*sigh*

So yeah... there are no pictures for this, since we were now nearing 5 pm and we had no plan for night riding.  We sailed into Vineyard Haven just in time to watch the sun go down and darkness take over.

Thirty two miles.

I slept great for the next two days, and remarkably was only sore where my legs had rubbed the seat for 8 hours.  There is something about high mileage cycling that I really love, so much so that I'm thinking of getting a hybrid for both Youngest and myself.

Because as fun as it was, I think it would have been easier had we not been on 26" mountain bikes with mostly flat tires.

So... that sums up the most interesting of what we've been doing... how about you?