Biking with Petey

I don't write about cycling as much as kayaking because let's face it, bicycling is boring. Or maybe it's just my version of cycling, which is largely confined to a set of trails around my house. It's easy to get lazy when you can roll out the door onto an extensive trail network. I realized this when my old friend Peter (we know each other back to junior high school!) visited recently. Pete's gotten into cycling of late and wanted to do a ride together. When I mentioned riding a trail his reply was, "I don't mountain bike," at which point I had to explain to him the notion of a rail trail. It turns out that where he lives (somewhere in New Jersey) there are no bike trails. All his riding is on the road. Maybe I would find cycling more interesting if I ditched the local trails and went more places.

Anyway, it was great to see Peter - we rarely see each other since we live far apart. We met up at the Rt. 28 parking lot for the W&OD. Unfortunately, I had been hit with sciatica a couple of days prior. I was able to ride OK but didn't really want to push things, which meant we couldn't ride too far. What was really comical was mounting and unmounting the bike. My sciatica limited my ability to lift my leg up and swing it over the bike, so instead I had to lean the bike way over and kind of slide it up under me. Not graceful, but effective.

Anyway, we rode west. A little past Leesburg I started to get some twinges and so we turned around. On the way back we detoured through the historic downtown of Leesburg so he could see it (he was surprised at the Confederate statue, something I'm inured to by now), then stopped at Carolina Brothers for barbeque. Pete had eaten crabs in Maryland the night before, so I figured it was appropriate to give him a taste of another regional food. Which makes me wonder, if I visited him, what are the regional foods of New Jersey?

Along the way we caught up. He was actually in the area because his sister had an art opening at the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. To get a feel for Wendy's art it's worth checking out this video. So I got the latest news about his sisters and his brother, and about Pete's life. He's currently contemplating a move from the world of Wall Street to someplace exotic - Thailand or Vietnam. Apparently these countries have active financial markets and a guy with Wall Street IT experience can get a job there and life high on the hog quite cheaply (Pete's finances took a hit in the economic downturns and because of personal life stuff). We also discussed cannabis as a future growth sector (no pun intended) and what the hot investments in that area are (our mutual friend, journalist Lisa Napoli, has written about this topic so I won't rehash it here). Buy low, sell high!

As a last stop on our outing we had a beer at Old Ox Brewery, which sits adjacent to the W&OD trail near Sterling, where Peter filled me in on the aging management techniques he's using (human growth hormone, DHEA, etc.). Sounds interesting, but maybe a little too far out for someone like me who is already running on replacement parts. Then it was back to the cars where we said a long goodbye - if he does indeed pick up and move to Thailand, who knows when and if I'll ever see him again! But it was good to catch up and take our first bike ride together since the "Breaking Away" era of the 70's.