No more unsupervised bike rides ...

8 Jan: It’s been a week and I am missing the riding.  We’re doing the full spruit today to Emmarentia and back. Gulp.  My bail out plan is Louis with his bakkie – he doesn’t know this yet.  I am trying out this Wonder Smoothie Grems has told me about – am seriously dubious about mixing this ingredients with my texture issues : banana, yoghurt, peanut butter, honey, mueslie, chocolate sauce.  Weird. Nice, but weird. So Linda and I get to Mugg & Bean a bit early and meet up with Erik Vermeulen, Bart and another Karen.  Minutes tick by and Ride Master Mark hasn’t arrived yet.  He eventually does and we head off down the road this time to cross the river.  Ok we VERY quickly realize that both Linda and I are out of our depths.   

Um no, I don't think so!

We get as far as the river and change our minds.  No way.  Can’t do this – and the others are far ahead. So we turn around and decide that Bike Park is more our scene – and Linda hasn’t been yet and she needs to get her voucher sorted.  We manage to leave a post on Mark and Eriks facebook pages and head off.  Just then we see Mark and Val riding down –they’ve come to look for us.  So kind of them.  We explain our situation and all’s cool and we head our separate ways.

Caps can't believe I can fall off this 4 bike bridge

Plan B – the bike park is rather muddy but not too bad.  Linda gets her voucher sorted and we’re on our way – yay yay yay.  Green mile, fabulous. Corkscrew, fabulous.  And the best thing is that on the way to the Corkscrew both Linda and I rode through the thick mud (thx Daniel – look ahead, easy gear, keep pedaling, momentum is your friend (thx Clinton) – the 3 guys ahead of us didn’t manage. Woo hoo.  We decide to carry on along the perimeter path – to show Linda the whole place. There’s a bridge by the tunnel that goes under the highway. First time and up Linda goes.  Ok, today I’ll try – no walking.  Easy gear. Pedal lots and up I go – but my foot slipped off the pedal just before I reached the top and I wobbled. Then I had to put my left foot down, but I had run out of bridge and so both me and Hope tumbled over into the ditch below.  I landed on my butt and somersaulted over my back.  My goodness. First Crash.  Not a single injury – no grazes, no bruises. Nothing.  Nothing broken.  Just really shaky. Linda comes to check on me and takes photies as I try to extricate Hope from the ditch.  It was easier to fall into that to get out of.  Right. I push my bike up the top and leave it on the side out of the way.  Linda wants to go again and I’m going to take a photie.

I position myself at the end and off to the left.  Ready. Steady. Linda floors it.  But as her front wheel strikes the first rung on the bridge something goes wrong and she doesn’t go up the bridge. It’s like it dug into and so instead she falls to the side, grazing her arm and leg. She gets up – and is also shaky, with no real harm done. Literally within in 5 min of each other by the same bridge we both have our first ever MTB crashes.  We sit down for a minute to gather ourselves towards ourselves and it’s not long before we’re up and on again.  We did the 2 green routes twice more. The mud twice more (but Linda walked not wanting to add mud into her wounds) and we tried the bridge again – Linda got up it with not a glitch.  I chose to rather walk it. It was a great morning and we learnt a lot.  Especially: don't go riding without adult (by that I mean male) supervision :D