Loop #20...and a little Wild Turkey!

Joy here...It's that time of the year again:  the time when the leaves begin to change colour; the time when students return to the classrooms; and that time of the year when initiations and binge drinking take over universities and colleges the Western world over.  From college dorm rooms in the US to cheezy university pubs in the UK to "le binge drinking" making its way into Paris clubs, students everywhere are starting to drink to excess.  Students drink themselves into a kind of stupor that makes them doubt what they see as their eyes seem to fail them.

Have I been drinking?  That looks like the view from
a plane ride, not a bike ride!

Maybe my friends and I - Cili Padi, Power Penna, and SK (also known as the "Sashinator") - who met up for a Sunday morning ride had been partaking in the spirit of drunken undergrads everywhere, because I would have sworn that we were riding through the clouds today...maybe there was something a little stronger than water in my bottle this morning.

I mean, as we rode forwards in the humid and foggy day, wisps of haze shimmered up from the asphalt before us in twirling eddies of fog and cloud as if we were riding our bikes through an ongoing ghostly ballet that swirled and twirled all around us.

Or maybe that's the booze talking.

I mean what else can explain our ride up and out of the normal world of the park where we've been making progress by doing loops and loops throughout this summer?  What else can explain our vision impairment as we could barely see in front of our eyes?  What else can explain the smoke machine-like fog that hung heavily around us as if we were at a late night club?

"Ossifer, are you sshure I can see Ottawa from here?"

Clearly, we must have been sampling some booze.  Maybe we were like the students out there everywhere who think that brain cells are somehow expendable and that keenness of vision and intellect are things to be sacrificed at the almighty altar of blurriness, for blurry we were.

Blurry was the world around us, and blurry was our ride to the top of the Champlain Lookout.

And just like drunken students who can't see straight, but who seem to be having one heck of a good time, we were having a great time as well.  We were laughing and talking; we were telling stories, and we were having a blast.  Like drunken girls we giggled our way through the bike ride, even making jokes about boys!

Looks like a smoke machine at a dance club, doesn't it?

Just like students who, after too much tippling lose their balance and can't walk a straight line, as we rode away from the Champlain Lookout (after seeing nothing more than a bank of clouds), Power Penna pushed down on her pedal only to find that she wasn't fully clipped in, which resulted in her "lady bits" making  very close friends with the top tube of her bike - ouch!

And she wasn't the only tipsy one...Cili Padi tipped over on her bike today too!  So just like drunkards whose balance is, shall we say questionable, I might question what Cili Padi was drinking today!

Notice the bruised elbow and scraped knee as evidence
of the fall.

So all I can say is that even though I don't recall boozing it up, clearly the spirit of boozing must have been in the air this morning.

And if I'm going to carry this extended trope of boozing and biking to its ultimate (silly) conclusion, then I have to be clear:  if the "sisterhood" were going to be indulging in some pre-ride boozing, then I have a feeling that we'd choose something hard core.  No fruity coolers for these rock-hard ladies of the bike.  No thank you.  I imagine us looking lean and mean with a bottle of Wild Turkey shared amongst us, with each of us looking around with a snarl on our faces as we swig back bourbon straight from the bottle, before wiping our mouths with the back of our hands and passing the bottle on.  I mean, in my imagined version of us, we're a hard group of lean, mean women you wouldn't want to mess with. We don't even make a face as we reach for our second swig of the hard stuff, and if it burns our throats on the way down, we don't even notice (or even better...if we notice the burn, we like it!).

And as we rode out of the park, with its fog and haze, we began to ride back into reality.  We rode into the ever-growing sunlight and the ever-increasing clarity of a Sunday morning.  The fog began to recede, and my motif of a drunken ride has worn itself out.

Or has it?

Just as the Sashinator and I were powering out of the last wisps of fog, out of the shadows of the trees at the side of the road three somethings appeared.  In the split second before these somethings ran out onto the road in front of us, we slammed our brakes and tried to let our rattled brains compute what we just saw.  Were those peacocks?  Was that a dinosaur?  And as the crisis passed and we rode on beyond the beast who darted quickly in front of us as his brothers stayed at the side of the road, we burst out laughing and said, almost in unison, "I think that was a WILD TURKEY!"

So maybe we were drinking afterall!

Over and out,
Joy