The last ride of summer
Late summer bike rides are tinged with urgent sadness; each one might be the last before wet weather sets in.
It’s a warm, sunny day in September and I'm riding my bike. I enjoy the ride — exploring still-dry trails and stopping for a cuppa – but I’m stalked by the feeling that this could be the last outing of summer. Any day now the rain could arrive and herald autumn floods. Routes that I've enjoyed all season will become impassible until late spring.
This is a familiar story, played out each year. The joy and sadness of these bittersweet rides makes them particularly memorable, locating the end of summer precisely in my mind. I hope that each ride will lead to another, that the warm and dry days will stretch out impossibly into autumn. They never do.