We Rode 51 Miles on the High Trestle Trail Between Ankeny & Woodward

My husband Jim and I rode our bicycles 51 miles over two days of Memorial Day weekend 2014. We rode 26 miles the first day, from the Ankeny trail head to the Nite Hawk Bar in Slater, Iowa, and back again to Ankeny. I willed myself to make it back the last few miles. 

The next morning Jim woke me at the crack of dawn, and I got up in a simian crouch, following the bed with my knuckles as I traipsed with difficulty to the bathroom.

We ate at an excellent restaurant, the Cazador Mexican restaurant next to the Day's Inn in Ankeny, where the "small" nachos supreme could have fed a family of four. I ate some and took the rest back to the Day's Inn refrigerator in our room. The two of us ate the rest with the Cazador's home-made chips for lunch on Sunday.

The next morning I demanded to be allowed to "sleep in" until 7:30 a.m. I did, too. I slept through Jim's shower and other activities. When he made coffee, though, I woke up for my cup. He had the foresight to realize that ABC's "This Week" would be on at 8:00 a.m. instead of 9:00 a.m. He got a lot of points for that.  And I was able to walk upright!

We drove to Woodward and rode to Slater and back, putting another 25 miles on our bikes. I willed myself up the last two miles to Woodward. Jim offered to get the car and drive to Madrid but I liked the sound of 51 miles, so I put in the extra miles.

I'd originally wanted another day of riding Sunday but was glad not to get that extra day. It started raining Sunday before I woke up and we drove home to Iowa City in cloudburst after cloudburst. At one point I wondered if we shouldn't just pull off the road and wait out the rain.

Our son Jesse and his girlfriend Rachel checked in on Tigger, our kitty, while we were gone, and for that we were grateful.

Jesse had washed and dried his entire white load while he was here and left his whites unfolded in the laundry room in a portable hamper. I thought his clothes were unwashed and washed them (again, as it turned out) as a favor.

"Noooooo!" he said, when he asked me about his whites, and I told him they were in the washer.

All I could say was, he should have known better than to leave laundry in an unkempt fashion in his overly solicitous, possibly obsessive-compulsive mother's laundry room. It was the first place I headed to with our own dirty laundry. Now our whites and his are mixed. He's resigned to letting me finish washing and dividing the laundry.

He took his wet whites and his clean, dry colors to Rachel's apartment to dry the whites. First he helped me find my High Trestle Trail photos that I'd downloaded to the computer (and went I know not where, but he found them).