Our bike into work yesterday was such a nightmare! Unless you live in Denver, you probably haven’t heard about all the floods and rainstorms we’ve been getting lately…but it’s crazy! Typically, by the time July rolls around, we’re looking at forest fires and fire bans because everything is so dry and hot. We even use xeriscaping at work most of the time because Denver is just known for its lack of water. This year, however, that is definitely not the case! For the past two weeks, huge thunderstorms have been rolling in during the afternoon/evening. I’m not talking about just a little rain either–I’m talking fullscale thunder, lightning, hail, the works! And, because we don’t live in the PNW, none of us mountain-loving folk really know how to drive and/or function in the rain…so we do stupid things.
Such as this:
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Or this:
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Give us a blizzard or icy mountain roads any day, but a flash flood?! Hell no!
Anyway, so dad and I didn’t think anything about biking to work yesterday. We usually take main streets for 2/3 of the trip, and the last 1/3 is on one of the many paved bike trails that navigate through the city. We never even thought that we would have any problems cause of the rain….until we came upon this portion of the trail:
Nice trail for a road bike, right? Now, this portion isn’t usually paved, so don’t freak out thinking that the water washed away the pavement. It is usually a hard, packed gravel though that I can ride my skinny tires through without any problems. Obviously, that wasn’t the case yesterday! Not only could I not ride through but I also couldn’t even walk through it in my biking shoes. I had to dismount, pick up my bike, and bushwhack it through some flattened shrubs over to the side. Fail.
Fail #2 came right about the time we got to the first overpass that the trail winds underneath:
Yup, we sure weren’t riding under there! For most of the underpasses, we were able to ride the road over the top. However, there isn’t a safe alternative that goes over I-25, one of the main interstates in Colorado, so dad and I had to hold our breath, cross our fingers, and pedal like crazy while we rode with rush-hour morning traffic as they all tried to merge onto the biggest interstate in the state. Awesome….or not.
And now I know why I’ve never even THOUGHT about being a bike messenger. Again, hell no!