A Well-Rewarded Bike Ride

I signed up for a 30 mile bike ride with the Washington Women Outdoors (WWO) for this past Saturday. I knew we would have lots of stops, so I decided to pull a Stephanie stunt and bring some knitting. The original plan was for me to have my paniers on the bike, but when I packed everything up the night before, I didn't bother to ensure the bike rack was intact. So, Sat morning when I was trying to put everything together and found pieces missing, I had to improvise. I was inspired by a fellow biker who used her pack for what it was designed for...carrying water. But, seriously, what's a little dehydration if it means having your knitting along for the ride, right? So, a small piece of the Afghan got to ride 30 miles with me this weekend. I had a lot of fun snapping pictures whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Here it is visiting a quaint little hotel in Oxford, MD. This was our first stop and, other than lunch, our longest. I would have been able to get a lot more knitting done, but I had to spend the bulk of the stop scrubbing chain grease off my hands since less than a mile into our trip my chain not only popped off the bike, but came off with enough force to kink up.

I worked on it for about five minutes without any success at all and was beginning to get depressed, thinking my ride was over when my hero, Ann (President of WWO) pulled up and was able to help me get my chain back on. She's an all-round mechanic and hero to many. This is her fixing another one of the rider's bikes.

After this stop, we got on the ferry to cross over to St. Michaels, MD. Here's the yarn enjoying a nice boat ride and the only breeze of the day. We rode another 5 miles to St. Michaels. A very quaint little town with clock bells that played the Star Spangled Banner, O Beautiful, and who knows what else. Lot's of cute little shops all over the place, but no yarn shops. So, no real reason to stress my feet (since I was wearing bike cleats)walking around window shopping.

Besides, by this time, the yarn was getting hungry after all that exercise. So we took it to lunch at a nice little place on the water. This is Amy holding the yarn. She was our leader for this trip and a self-proclaimed non-sewer. Not knowing any other way to hold two sticks, she opted for the vampire-warding-cross-grip. The yarn was enraptured by her charms and it took a lot of sweet talk to convince it to get back into the improvised yarn-carrier. After lunch, I parted ways with the group since I was in a bit of a hurry. After all, it was closing in on 2PM and I knew there was a yarn shop in Easton, MD (complements of The Traveling Knitter's Sourcebook)

So, I hightailed it back to the car and rewarded my biking efforts with a stop at a great little shop where I found an abundance of Wool in the Woods, one of my favorite fibers, and two very nice women to help me decide what to knit up out of the yarn I bought (Sprout--a green and yellow Cotton/Rayon hand-dyed blend). I will be trying to tackle a hand-written pattern by Gail, one of the two women, who designed the top I want to make herself and had simply scribbled down how she did it in her notebook. Luckily, she also gave me plenty of contact information, since when I sat down to read over it last night, I was completely befuddled!