Ride and Seek Challenge -- September 2014

Bike riding is fun in and of itself, but in an effort to make it even more fun, we have decided to play along with a Facebook page entitled "Bicycle Ride and Seek."  It's a fun monthly scavenger hunt of 12 items to look for while riding your bike.  When you find one of the items on the list, you take a picture of the item with your bike included in the photo and post it to the Facebook page, along with how many miles you rode. There is nothing to win.  The purpose is simply to have fun and encourage you to get out on your bike more often.  It's fun to feel like a kid again doing a scavenger hunt.  It's also camaraderie among the other participants and it's interesting seeing the creativity in the photos that are posted and how people interpret the list of items to search for.   Most importantly, it's just one more way for my sweetie and I to spend time together and enjoy ourselves!

Here is September's list:

Song title with the letter "A" -- 5 mile ride

To make it more fun for the group on the Facebook page, we don't post the song title we were intending; instead, everyone tries to figure it out and post a link to the YouTube video with their guess. 

I had people guess both "Kansas City" and "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" for this one. Both excellent guesses, and actually both ones that I liked better than my original intention, which was "Royals" by Lorde.

 

Refrigerators. End of a 5.75 mile ride

Cows -- same 5.75 mile ride

 Church steeple -- same 7 mile ride

Roadkill. Same 7 mile ride.  

(I really wanted to conscientiously object on this one because I think its gross and nasty and kind of sad.) But here you go.

Moon -- same 7 mile ride.

Exit sign -- same 7 mile ride.

TWOFER!!!! Fire hydrant AND broken window. 

Same 7 mile ride.

Before we found the twofer, we found a couple other fire hydrants. 

 I just liked the way the shadow of the wheel fell in this picture.

And blue (because somebody likes the St. Louis Blues.)

Roadkill -- 5.5 mile ride

Totally trumping my roadkill entry of the night before: It's on the road -- and it will kill you. 

See what I did there? Booyah. :)

Labor. 15 mile ride.

My legs felt the labor of those 15 miles, too. LOL

Another two-fer! Fire hydrant/refrigerator -- 7.5 mile ride. 

Train engines. 10 mile ride.

Please duly admire the determination it took to procure this picture. We have been trying all month to time our bike rides for when a train goes through town, with no success. Tonight, I was just pulling my bike out of the garage to start my evening ride when I heard the whistle of a train heading into town. My house is 5 blocks from the nearest crossing. That was literally 5 blocks of flat out top speed from a completely cold start.Three blocks to go, whistle is getting louder. Two blocks still to go and I see the lights come on and the arms start to go down. Ugh! Faster! I made it to my spot, vaulted off my bike, slammed the kickstand down, fumbled my camera out of the zipper case, fumbled to get the camera on. And nailed it! I'm pretty sure the last time I have ridden at that speed, Silver Spoons was still on TV and Ricky Schroeder was my crush of the month. I will let you Google that for the date if you must. I'm kind of proud of this picture. Fist pump.

  

 Something purchased at convenience store in front of store -- 

5 mile ride. 

Good thing I knew the lady pumping gas when I sat down beside her on the ground by the gas pump to get this shot. It's always weird explaining what we're doing, though...... 

 

And that's mission completed, folks.  

We found all 12!