Sunday’s 5-hour bike adventure

Got up early, did about 3 hours office work, then took off around 9 AM for the hills on my new mountain bike. I swear, this thing is like a motorcycle, a joy to ride. First stop was a pond of my acquaintance, brimming with recent rains. I stripped down and swam underwater to the water lilies, floated there for a few seconds. Cold, maybe 52-53°. Got out recharged, as always happens: when you get in cold water, your body goes into circulatory overdrive when you get out.

Miners’ lettuce for salad

Got to this impenetrable trail closure. (I’d already had to lift my bike over fallen logs a bunch of times.) Hadn’t been on this trail for years. It used to be clear all the  way down to the paved road. I dragged my bike into the woods on both sides, looking for a way through — no luck.  It’s rare that a decent trail gets closed down like this. Deer, coyotes, etc. will usually make a way around it. I had to backtrack, phew, by now tired. 

From years of training in the 80s-90s, I remembered an alternate route. Otherwise it was going to an extra 10 or so miles, part of it down a trail with flapping nettles. Here’s the entrance, and what used to be a clear  shot turned out to involve hauling my bike through thick brush at times, including poison oak, for a couple of miles.

I was really tired, but felt good. Had a chicken sandwich on home-baked bun, and miners’ lettuce salad.

And now I gotta get to work. The tiny homes book — whew! It is cookin! Everyone is on board. Some new pages from last week are spectacular.

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

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