Gunnar Sport - Commuting to work and take the long way home

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Gunnar Sport

My Gunnar Sport is a great bike to ride to work on. It's fast, has a smooth ride and is equipped with the right stuff for commuting to work. 

It was foggy and a little damp this morning. The weather forecast was one of those when you just couldn't tell if it was a good day to ride to work or not. I went ahead and took my chances, since the Gunnar Sport has fenders on it. Once I started riding in I knew I had made the right choice. Everything seems a little better when I arrive at work on a bicycle.

The bag on the front of the Gunnar Sport is just right to hold my lunch and a couple of  other items.

It turned out to be a beautiful day. When I left work I was enjoying my ride home so much I decided to add a few miles and take the long way home. I turned off into the neighborhood I lived in when I was in elementary school. That was back in the 1960s. In those days most of the children in the neighborhood either walked or rode bicycles to school. I always choose to ride my bike to school. I took the same route that I used to take when I rode home from school. The hills seems much easier than they used to. Of course, I was riding a bicycle with 20 different gears instead of only 1 gear. As I rode through the old neighborhood specific memories of riding bicycles on those same roads came back to me. One of the rides I remember was a day when I was seven years old and I felt like I could ride anywhere with no hands on the handlebars. I passed by a corner I remember turning without any hands that day. It all seemed like it was only yesterday. 

I stopped as I passed by the house I lived in from 1963 through 1972. This house has two driveways. One on the upper level of the yard and one on the other end of the yard that went to the basement. The driveway in the picture below is the one I learned to ride a bicycle on without any training wheels. That was labor day 1964. I was riding a short distance back and forth between my parents on one of my older sisters's 16 inch solid tired bicycle. One parent would get me started and I would ride to the other parent who would catch me. I remember the feeling as I knew I had it mastered and rode past my father and keep on going. I knew riding a bike was something I loved to do. Since then I have ridden a bike every chance I have had. Riding a bicycle still gives me the same feeling of freedom.

I was enjoying my ride so much I decided to take a spin out through the country side and ended up adding an addition 15 miles to my commute. This made my ride home a total of 25 miles. Every once and awhile it's just nice to take the long way home. 

 Rodger Hodgson (Supertramp) - Take the long way home.