Over the years, you get to know yourself–not the person you wish you were, or think you should be, but the person you really are, way down inside. For example, I’ve finally made peace with the fact I’ll never be successful at bike racing, a pastime to which I’ve dedicated considerable time and energy over the years. However, I have come to not only accept but embrace the fact that I’m a cool mom, and that’s something you can’t take away from me:
I’ll give you my beer when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Furthermore, while I may not be particularly “successful” by any conventional metric (or really any metric at all), I do manage to ride my bike on weekdays, and that’s gotta be worth something:
When I first set out this morning I planned to stay on my side of the Hudson, but I can’t seem to ride in the vicinity of the Tappan Zee Mario Cuomo Bridge without crossing it:
I suspect this is because there’s something in human DNA that compels us to traverse large bodies of water, and in this sense the only thing that separates me from the Polynesians in their outrigger canoes or the Vikings in their longboats any of the the other peoples who undertook long voyages by sea and explored distant lands over the centuries and millennia is, well, pretty much everything.
Nevertheless, what I may lack in bravery I more than make up for in artisanal bicycle luggage, and I shall leave no bridge uncrossed in my quest for gravel, that most relevant of surfaces:
Nor shall I retreat when confronted by strange beasts:
Now I’m no zoologist, but I suspect I this may be a distant ancestor of the creatures I regularly encounter on my side of the river:
They must have crossed some prehistoric land bridge thousands of years ago, such as the GWB, but until we find their EZ-Pass records we may never know.