A Bicycle Built for Two

I did a lot of bike riding with my friends when I was growing up.  Our neighborhood was quiet, and we usually rode on the sidewalk when we pedaled to the library or the drugstore.  One year I even biked to school although I must have done it wearing a dress because girls weren't allowed to wear pants to school then. Talk about  the Dark Ages!

After Paul and I were married, my grandparents gave me a bike for my birthday with tassels on the handlebars and an ooga-ooga horn – further evidence that grandparents really know what kids want, even grown up kids.  Columbus, Ohio offered lots of flat biking routes, but I still had trouble keeping up with Paul.  One day we were riding out around the Darby Dan horse farms, and I kept falling further and further behind. Paul was getting annoyed, until he realized I had been riding on a flat back tire for several miles.  Well, anyone could have told him that he wasn’t getting a bike mechanic when he married me.

As the boys got older, we gave up biking for other activities.  Anyway, being on separate bikes was a strain because we never rode at the same pace.  Paul couldn’t understand why I couldn’t keep up and I couldn’t understand why he had to ride so fast.  Finally, our friends introduced us to the perfect solution –a tandem bike! 

With a tandem, nobody has to worry about keeping up and you always have somebody nearby to talk to.  You can also divide up the work.  Paul’s jobs are shifting gears and steering to avoid cars, other bikes and road kill.  He is also in charge of the brakes. Don't tell my mother but a bike like ours can do 50 miles an hour on the downhill.  However, if it does that while I’m on the back, Paul knows he’ll have to find another biking partner.  My main job is to read the map and watch for road signs, something I am okay but not great at, especially without my reading glasses.  Jobs that I do well include waving to passing cars, handing Paul the lip sunscreen and scratching his back.  I also have to straighten out the guys who yell from their front porches, “She’s not pedaling.”

My favorite job on the bike is riding shotgun in case dogs chase us. (If you’ve read my post “Going to the Dogs,” you’ll understand this.)  Today most dogs are inside electric fences; and the ones barking, snarling and yelping are in pens or chained up.  Every so often, however, a loose one decides to come after our bike, so I have to be ready with my squirt gun.  Most of the chasing is done by those little yappers who don’t realize that something with two-inch-long legs is not a match for a tandem bike. They’re no problem.  Bigger, more savvy dogs, who leap unexpectedly out of high grass and can run as fast as the bike, are more of a challenge.  Fortunately, a spritz of squirt gun water on the end of a dog’s nose has the same effect it would have had on the Wicked Witch of the West. The dog stops, gives me a look of moral outrage, and, by the time it realizes it’s not melting, we're out of range.

We have had many wonderful rides on our tandem.  A good bike ride begins with a plan about lunch.  The ideal bike route has a lunch stop about two-thirds of the way through with an easy, downhill coast back to the car afterward.  A bad day on the bike is one where you’ve ridden 30 miles to a special lunch stop in lovely, secluded countryside only to find out that the restaurant is closed, there is nothing else anywhere nearby and all you have with you is disgusting stuff like Gatorade and Energy goop.

With our friends we have developed favorite day rides on quiet country roads in Indiana and Ohio, all with a lunch stop, of course.  The Vatican Ride is spectacular, despite a few tough hills. It includes the towns of St. Peter and St. Leon,  the grotto at St. Mary’s of the Rock, and a picnic lunch in the Franciscan sisters’ garden at Michaela Farm in Oldenberg.  At other times, we cruise past cornfields, farms and old one-room schoolhouses in the area bordered by Harrison, Oxford and Brookville,  with lunch at Brookville Lake or the Oxford bakery.  The ride that meets all our criteria for an ideal bike route is a loop from Sunman to Batesville, with lunch overlooking the vineyards at Ertel Winery (32 miles to the winery, 5 easy ones back to the car) and landmarks like an old country store/restaurant, a backyard airstrip called JFK Flyway and a Shetland pony farm.

Organized rides for large crowds of bikers can be fun, and we’ve tried several of those.  One of the first organized rides we took was The Chili Ride meandering around country roads north of Cincinnati and ending with guess what for lunch.  The Horsy Hundred around Georgetown and Lexington, Kentucky’s horse country got a 10 for scenery but a 1 for food – peanut butter sandwiches, which Paul hates, bananas, which I hate and uninspired snacks like Nutri-Grain bars.  Hello? Where's the CHOCOLATE??  I mean, what’s the point of that kind of a ride?  Since then, we’ve organized our own Horsy Hundred with friends (photo above) – we’ve kept the scenery but you can bet we aren’t eating peanut butter and bananas. 

The best organized ride we've found is Bloomington’s Hilly Hundred, two fifty-mile days through farms and forest land when the leaves are changing color – it was a highlight of our fall for many years.  The Hilly Hundred lives up to its name, which is why we’ve been retired from it for a few years, but here’s what made even a sluggard biker like me willing to tackle fifty miles of hills – the rest stops.  Each day’s route had three rest stops featuring live music from blue grass to solo guitar to accordion to Woodstock-style rock. Those stops also offered outstanding food – cider and donuts, fried chicken, pasta salad, ice cream, apples and absolute cookie nirvana –the biggest selection I’ve seen since I burglarized my college sorority house cookie closet. It doesn’t get any better than that, even if you are a little saddle sore.

We’ve also taken longer biking vacations, each of which had its highs and lows.  Our week biking on the

C & O Canal towpath in Maryland and Virginia featured leafy trails along  the Potomac, bed and breakfasts in Civil War era towns and a leisurely ride around the Antietam battlefield.  That trip also featured riding around a bend to find the towpath had disappeared under three feet of water and having the trailer that held our clothes and gear nearly fall into the canal.  During our week biking the Finger Lakes, the highs included eating fresh peaches from a roadside stand, staying in quaint, 1950's  towns and passing picturesque Amish farms. The low, which was due either to faulty directions (my opinion) or a navigator error (Paul’s opinion), occurred when we missed the turn into a lunch stop and had to ride down a long hill in heavy traffic just as a thunderstorm hit.  It wasn’t pretty.

The bike vacation we return to again and again is in Door County, Wisconsin.  We never get tired of riding past cherry and apple orchards, staying in a Victorian house and on a sheep farm, and enjoying views of Green Bay, Lake Michigan and beautiful Wisconsin barns.  On top of that, the Door County routes have more lunch stops than we can fit into a week, there are ice cream parlors everywhere and you can even get your water bottle filled up with homemade root beer.  We have, occasionally, contended with strong, gusty wind on our Door County rides (and I don’t mean what happens when you have a big bowl of pea soup for lunch.)  Pedaling against a 30 mile an hour wind makes you feel like you’re 90 years old and ready to hang up your bicycle pump.   However, when that kind of wind is at your back, you're another Lance Armstrong.

The warm April weather has allowed us to get back on the bike and start getting our legs and our seats back in shape.  Even though, sometimes Paul has to say to me, “Jill, I need a little help here” and sometimes I find it hard to be helpful, I really love our times on the tandem.  I hope we have many more biking adventures in us.