Nightrider

Do-doodle-do, do-doodle-do, do-do-doodle-do (its very hard to phonetically type the Knight rider them music so I'll put this up instead). I have become Michael Knight. Actually no, that would mean I'm the Hoff and eeeewwwwww!!

My wonderful husband has made me a very cool light for night riding (the only draw back being I have to lug 2kgs of SLA battery around with me). I put the "cool" stickers on it. So after yesterday's not getting to the gym fiasco I decided to go riding at Bottlelake after dinner. For those of you who haven't visited Bottlelake, it's not actually a lake, but a sandpit planted with a pine plantation. Said plantation is full of walking, riding, and horsing(?) tracks of varying lengths. Its pretty flat, with lots of fun uppy-downy, jumpy, windy bits. If you want you can take a nice ride out to the beach. The only problem is the sand. It destroys bikes. It's horrid to clean off bikes. So generally I don't take my good bike there anymore. However my Bottlelake bike has magically transformed into my commuter so I was left with 2 choices last night. My lovely precious bike, or my orrible, hard, too big Bauer. I took the good bike (naughty).
So with my very cool new helmet and heavy backpack I headed off into the night. Riding round the forest at night alone is two things. Exciting. And scary. Everything is very different in the dark, even if you know the track like the back of your hand you still feel disoriented and slightly lost the whole time. I was prepared for this from the time I went with Pete, but was feeling confident my new light would conquer all. Most impressed with the amount of light streaming from my head I blasted into the forest and then slowed quite a bit as I discovered that my legs were quite tired from my ride up Kennedy's Bush yesterday and the biking to work, and that the corners seemed much tighter and the trees much closer than in the daylight. It was not far through the forest that I started thinking about the fact that the poor deaf girl, Emma, was found not far from here. Once this thought pushed through the Knight rider theme music my heart rate shot up and my legs spun faster.
It felt like I was going really fast, but I suspect I wasn't really and when it started spitting with rain I decided it was time to take a shortcut. That was a bit freaky too. I'd never ridden down the track I took and had no idea where it went or for how long. That really didn't help my heart rate. It turned out that the shortcut only took out 3 sections so I still had a good ride to get back to the car park. I emerged from the forest just as the rain started falling and got my bike on the back of my car in record time.
It wasn't the best ride I've ever had, but I do know that I want to do more and more night riding. Just with my wonderful 6ft 1" husband with me.