Day 100 of my own daily ride.

Day 100.  In spite of the recent electrical issues, I did manage to ride today.  I felt it very important to ride on my 100th day.  I was very pleased this morning to find that the bike fired up willingly and quickly settled into a relaxed 'potato-potato' idle.  Riding in was a pleasure with the cooler weather and beautiful skies.  The sun shone in the east and the moon in the west.  The beauty of the earth was all around, life evident in the green of the trees and grass. 

My one hundredth day will bring me to 115 hours of riding.  A year ago, just getting the bike was a nebulous, 'it will happen within a year' commitment.  In April, it became a reality.  Now riding is as much a part of me as being a dad, driving, kendo & fencing, taekwondo & hapkio, and many other parts of my life.

In a way, it takes me back to when I cycled literally everwhere and literally everyday.  But it isn't a going back, so much as it is a bringing forward something good, some part of me that was special and had been left behind, to the present.

I remember when I used to love hanging out at the bitcyle shop, always checking out the new bicycles and the new parts that would come in, strategizing the changes that I would make on my own bike.  I would go everyday to the Bicycle Place on University Boulevard (Dorsey and his crew were much more personable than the Schwinn shop across the street) and on the weekends, I would visit Georgetown Cycle Sport, which later became Olney Cycle Sport.  That was a special and magical time, one that I had thought gone.  But here it is again, back and just as special as it had been, though now, instead of the bicycle shops, it is the motorcycle shops.  I don't visit daily, as I simply do not have the time, but I do visit weekly and ride daily once again.  I still bicycle and still love the bicycle shops, but I also now have the wonder of the motorcycle shops, which combines the unique experience of engines and car parts with the charm of bicycles and riding. 
Everyday, I find myself thinking of what I want to do with the motorcycle and plotting out how I will do it.  As with bicycles, the project may go in directions that I hadn't orginaly planned but which present themselves as things unfold.

Also, I have a convention of naming my vehicles.  I christened the motorcycle, "Commet" like the reindeer from The Night Before Christmas.  Commet is proving to be a lot of fun.  I am very much looking forward to the next hundred days!
Rock hard & ride free!