Beach Cruiser and Another Friday Folly

This whole summer I told myself I had to retire my old 10 speed bike that I had since middle school. Well last week I had the perfect reason to finally buy myself a beach cruiser.



My friend was coming into town and I knew that we would want to ride our bikes to the beach rather than driving down and paying to park. Living at the beach, I thought a beach cruiser would be more appropriate than a mountain bike.

 I'd like to think of it as a form a transportation, rather than a work out. But either way, you still get a great work out just cruising, not realizing how far you actually go. It's also a great cross training activity that is less impact on your knees. I think I rode this past weekend more than I did all summer. One thing to look for when choosing a bike is make sure you have a comfy seat!


While I was having fun picking out a new bike, Meranda and mom were having a biking adventure of their own.  ~L


It has been an entire week since My Bike Wipeout last Friday.  I was injured a little more than what I thought, sore shoulders, a bruised ankle, and a super sore right knee. Walking up steps was even painful, so I limited my activity this week. I foam rolled A LOT, and then on Thursday I walked some hills in my neighborhood and did a short bike ride.  I figured the bike riding was good for working my tight leg muscles, so Friday my mom and I ventured our on our long ride.  The good thing is that our ride was a success!  We completed all 14 miles without any injuries, but just barely.
I wouldn't call this ride another Friday Fitness Fail, but I will say it was definitely a Friday Folly!


We rode to our destination with no problem.  On the way back, we thought we would take a short cut.  By doing this we could avoid a few hills and inclines. So we take a right hand turn off of the road we were on and ride for a bit.  We then come to this sign.

My mom assures me that we will be fine. She knows this road and it's nothing we can't get around with our bikes. Besides, there are houses down this road, so it can't be that bad.
So just barely avoiding a wipe out herself, my mom takes her bike around the Road Closure sign and then I follow.  We ride like normal for a while and then we come to this.

Well this explains why the road was closed!  There are trees down right across this road.

We stare at this mess for a while and debate if we should turn around.  We look to see if we could ride around it, but it doesn't look as if we can.  So we do the only logical thing we can,  we decide we can lift our bikes over this mess!   Before we do that though, we need to break down as many tree branches as we can.  This is where wearing our bike helmets actually came in handy!  there definitely were a couple of stray branches out there and some sharp ones too.  Not to mention we had to crawl through this mess ourselves.  I crawled through first so I could receive the bikes as my mom handed them over.  For as much time as it took us to get across this barrier, we could have very easily made it back on the "original" route, but we were determined to get past this.  It was like a game now!

We finally managed!  this is how much we cleared out.
 You can see the hole we made to pass our bikes through!


It was smooth sailing the rest of the way!  This was probably not the best bike route we've ever taken, but it sure was fun and definitely had us laughing!
 
We ended up with a total mileage of 14 for the day and no injuries. Our ride was a success, unlike last week's Friday Fitness Fail.
 
I love these fitness adventures with my mom. There is never a dull moment around here, especially on Fridays.  I can't wait to see what we get into next Friday!   ~M
 
Have a good weekend everyone!
 

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