Family Exorcize

I went out for a bike ride this weekend. During the week, this would not be news, but since I did it on a day during which I tend to find my way via my feet or my hybrid car, this became news. It was a form of family exercise. Not just a cardiopulmonary workout, but logistics as well. Since we chose to ride bikes, another choice was made for us: the dog would stay home.  This meant we had to still had to decide on a number of different actions items, including the route we might take as well as when and where we might take a nutrition break.
It seems simple enough. There are just three of us, after all. But how were we to fit in our priorities of getting to ride across the new span of the Bay Bridge and have lunch at the market at the end of the Berkeley Marina? That could have put us out on the trail for a perilous amount of time, without a sense of how long it might be before our next chance to buy Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. We decided to fuel up first, and as we ate, we planned our next move: Drive to IKEA, and make that our base camp. With any luck, we could be back to the car before the snows began to fly.
As it turns out, we were not anywhere near the only family to have this inspiration. There must have been a half dozen vans and cars with bike racks, all disgorging kids of various sizes and ages while parents sorted out helmets and water bottles among them. Our little family made its preparations and got underway.
The curious thing about the path on which we found ourselves was that it doesn't really go anywhere. You can ride out almost all the way to Treasure Island, and then you have to turn around and come back. This gave us all a sense of being at an amusement park, following the line to its eventual end, then traipsing back along nearly the same path, after having seen what Jungle Cruise skippers might describe as "The Backside of the Bridge."
The trip up was interesting enough, but coming back down from the highest point of the span allowed us all to make the most of gravity and our two wheels. Because we were limited to a narrow lane going up, and another skinny path coming back down, we didn't get much of a chance to talk along the way, but when we were done, and the bikes were strapped once again to the back of the hybrid car, we congratulated ourselves on the effort. We had ridden to the edge of our world and found our way back, and there were still Reese's Peanut Butter Cups waiting when we got back. It was, in the words of my son, "totally worth it."