the games we play

Many people ask us what we talk about all day on our bikes when we cycle 95 miles...for days in a row. Much of what we do is take in the sights. Conversation can be irrelevant when facing such beauty. And then we spend time sharing thoughts on how the sights make us feel.

But for real, we spend hours side by side cycling along highways and have found some fun games to entertain.

One game is the rhyming game. One of us will say a sentence like, "Did you see those birds fly by?" And we both instinctively know that it's a battle of wits to see who can come up with more one-liners that rhyme.

Another game is "could you live there?" This constant conversation piece allows us to pick a home--a mansion built on the cliff overlooking the ocean or a dilapidated home on a lake--to see if the other could live in it. We discover some interesting things about one another and where we see ourselves several years down the road. The options aren't always so obvious and so we embark on a discussion about where we could live and why.

My favorite of recent is the large rig horn blowing game. Taking me back to my childhood, this game requires adrian and I to make a motion with one hand- like we are tugging on the air horn pulley- as big rigs pass by to see if we can get them to honk. We keep track of how many semis pull their horn for us and how many don't. To date, we are at 2-0 record.

As we leave smith river today and pass cresent city, we will climb something like 3000 feet or more. I know we will have plenty of time to add another "W" to that count.And I will probably also be able to tell you the likelihood of adrian and I moving to the Redwoods sometime in our future.