So yeah, this was one of those times you wish you were still using a video camera to record the rides. Truly a once-in-a-lifetime event. But we’ll get to that shortly.

This morning was unusual for a number of reasons. No, it wasn’t unusual for Kevin to consider begging out of the ride, due to not enough sleep the night before. But I’ve learned, and he resists wanting to learn, that you can generally ride on a pretty small amount of sleep and it really doesn’t get to you until the day after. Kevin’s usually more than a bit annoyed on days like this, because he’s thinking nobody else will be out there, so nobody will miss him.

Not so this morning. We had Colin, who’d normally be teaching school but it’s spring break. And Karen showed up. And, just as we started up the hill, Kevin (ex-pilot) is heading down the hill to meet us. So 5 of us heading up Kings. Well, sort of. Three headed up ahead (Kevin former kid, Karen and Colin) while I very gradually lost ground, and Kevin (ex pilot) was further back still. At the wide-open clearing I saw the Kevin/Colin/Karen for the last time and began circling, waiting for Kevin (ex pilot) for a minute or two. Surprisingly, even though I’d been previously pulling steadily away from him, it was much tougher riding with him the rest of the way up the hill.

Also surprisingly, we came across Kevin (ex kid) about half a mile from the top. Turns out he’d blown apart (“He’s cracked!” as Phil Ligett would say) and was pedaling squares (another Legittism).

Skyline wasn’t particularly noteworthy; it was dry, pretty breezy, and 45 degrees or so. Pretty comfortable stuff. And it would have remained pretty unremarkable if not for a once-in-a-lifetime encounter with a mountain lion. All 5 of us were together, in tight formation, with Kevin (ex kid) in the lead. Maybe a quarter mile south of the Skeggs/Corte Madera parking lot (the smaller on on the coast side), doing maybe 22mph or so. And suddenly a very large (to me anyway!) mountain lion tears across the road, maybe a foot or two in front of Kevin, disappearing as quickly as it appeared. But not so quickly I didn’t notice its huge paws and tail.

Everyone saw it. A good thing, that, because otherwise each of us would have doubted what we’d seen. Years ago there had been a bobcat that darted across Kings, looking like a fast-moving ball of fur. This was nothing like that. Why did it wait until we came through though? Was it possibly targeting Kevin but bailed when it saw the rest of us? I doubt it, but it does make you wonder what would have happened if it had crashed into Kevin. Would it have run away or fought? Worst-case scenario, I think we would have been in pretty good shape, 5 of us, with bikes we could use as weapons as barricades.

Pretty tough to have anything else terribly interesting to talk about after that, but we did come across a flock of turkeys again on West Old LaHonda.

It didn’t seem that pretty at the time. It felt cold, I felt slow, and we were thinking about how our bikes were getting trashed in the muck. It had been a horribly-slow & tough ride up the hill for me; Karen and Kevin were doing a number on me just up through the park, and I was hoping, thinking, maybe I’d find my legs once onto Kings. That happens fairly often. But not today. A short time after being dropped JeffZ came flying by. I was thinking, how long are they going to have to wait for me at the top today?

I did feel a bit better once up on Skyline but I really wasn’t appreciating how pretty it was until I saw the photo I took, the one at the top of this post. It’s not the normal pretty cycling scene; but it captures something a bit different from the norm. Maybe something you don’t appreciate at the time; you’re focusing on it being 36 degrees, it’s wet, you’re on your nice bike, not your rain bike with disc brakes and everything’s getting kind of trashed. But maybe this is the reason why, at the end of the ride, you feel pretty good about having been out there. You weren’t able to process how pretty it was because you were focusing on the wrong things. But it was there, right in front of you, and on some level, it affected you.