Mountain Biking With No Mountains

My sister and I grew up tomboys. In fact my mom would jokingly tell her friends that she had three boys, rather than one son and two daughters. We grew up biking - at first around the neighborhood then down to Durand Park, Irondequoit Bay and the Beach. Which to this day boggles my mind how we climbed the hill on Sweet Fern Road on our fixed gear banana seat bikes. A couple of times we decided it would be a good idea to ride throughout the entire city to go visit Mom at work (when she worked in the worst part of the city).

In high school we both got mountain bikes so we started riding down the single tracks in Durand - completely illegal - but no one ever patrols there. Even if they did we figured it was easier to feign ignorance and ask for forgiveness. The beauty of being young and irresponsible *blink blink* we're sorry officer, we didn't know *blink blink*.

Our trail riding always resulted in one or both of us getting totally wrecked and bloody as well as demolishing our bikes. But what fun we had! When we both went away to college our mountain biking adventures came to a screeching halt. My bike became a commuter to get me to and from school and hers got stowed away in our garage. We tried a couple of times to go for rides on our school breaks but our social lives took over and most times plans to get muddy, bloody and bruised were scratched.

Now (many, many) years later we decided to hit up some single tracks in Florida - near were my sister lives. So in the beginning of May I am going down for four days to ride and kick her a$$ on the trails! That's right, Girly - you're going down! Anyway, we have been trying to decide which parks to hit up since there are piles of them down there (go figure there are no mountains). So the following is a transcript of our text conversation from last night. It made me laugh so I had to post it.

Tam: 'Morris Bridge Park is the other bike park I found in Tampa. It sounds good because it's right by the Hillsborough River where the f-ing gators are. Yikes bitches! Ah sheeit!'

Me: 'Awesome! I love gators! Yeah!'

Tam: 'That's f-ed up! We get eaten it's ur damn fault'

Me: 'It won't matter then will it? :-P'

So if after May 6th there are no more blog entries for this site...well...assume there's an alligator out there with some rad Ari-skinned-shoes.