Life's a Beach

This is the public beach that is a simple bike ride away from my house.  Feeling exploratory yesterday, I took a tour down to the beach to see how far away it actually was and see if it was plausible that I could ride there, swim, and ride back.  I discovered that not only is it super quick to get there (15 min) the ride there is mostly downhill. Beautiful.  Which begs the question, how have I not done this before now?

Recently I have gained a tremendous amount of confidence in my bike riding.  I used to think places were much farther away then they actually are, and I also underestimated my energy/ability to get to and from a destination.  For whatever reason I believed that my body was going to give out or break or something equally awful that would leave me stranded wherever I set out to be.  Anxiety is really stupid, isn’t it?  All my positive bike rides this summer have allowed me to let go of most of these fears and gain the confidence to go anywhere I want to on my bike.  I am not trained to do a Tour de France or anything, but within safe distance it is pretty much a sure bet that I can get there and back on my own energy.

I wasn’t just fighting anxiety on this one, I was also suffering from a case of not remembering where I am.  Because I live here, I often forget that I live in cottage country.  Near a lake.  People struggle through horrendous traffic on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons to enjoy this, and I often ignore it.  Shameful.  To my credit, the past few summers have been rainy and about eight months of the year is cold or snowy, so it has been relatively easy to forget.  Also, the beach has become more and more privatized over the past few years, so there are only a handful of public access points and even less parking spaces.  There is an increase in ticket-happy by-law officers who have no problem writing $60 tickets for anyone parked in the wrong spot.  We luckily have a parking pass, but it is still a gamble whether there will be a free spot and we only have one pass, so if there are more people who want to swim than seat belts, it is an added complication.  So how happy am I that I figured out that I could ride my bike to beach and not worry about parking?

I did my test ride to beach last night and if the sun keeps shining l might take myself of a trip to the beach this afternoon.  Very excited. :)

Public access point to the beach.

One of the "Township-owned beach areas"

The trail to the beach with my happy bike.

 Art shot of my bike at the beach.  The kick stand just sunk into the sand,
so I had to hold it up.  Hence the close up.