Opinion: Road Trip

Most of us are quite proud of our local trails and will happily ramble on and on about how great they are to an out of towner if we're asked about them, but, no matter how great the local goods are, there's something about packing up and hitting the road to sample some new-to-you singletrack that gets the blood flowing like a first date with a girl that's obviously out of your league. After all, you don't know what's going to happen, do you? It could be a total bust, or it could make for the kind of memories that you end up telling your friends about for years to come. Come to think of it, that might be the case even if all of your effort is for not, which is what makes the unfamiliar such a great reason to take a few chances. I'm talking about road tripping, by the way, not going on a date. As amazing as your local trails are, I bet you know all the sneaky little lines, bonus gaps and where every root and rock sit, all things that can make for some great fun, no doubt about it, but when you can ride your trails like how you walk from the bedroom to the kitchen for a glass of water in the middle of the night without turning on the lights, it's obviously time for a change. And no, I'm not talking about moving the furniture around and seeing if you can navigate through cleanly at 3am after a night at the pub, but rather about packing up your bike and gear, filling up the gas tank, and hitting the road for some unfamiliar goodness and fresh challenges.

They say that familiarity breeds contempt and I can certainly vouch for that fact. And while I could be speaking about women yet again, I'm actually talking about singletrack and how, after riding the same trails for years and years on end, you maybe start to lose a little respect for them. You know what I'm talking about: you relax a little too much, maybe get a little off line here and there, and the next thing you know you're twenty feet away from your bike with your visor pushed down over your face and one shoe on. We've all been there, and we all know that we got what we deserved for not paying attention, which is a pretty clear sign that it's time to mix things up a bit. A trail that you've never ridden, on the other hand, commands your attention like a pissed off army drill sergeant who doesn't like your face. You're a sick bastard if you like getting up at 5am to do pushups while being yelled at by a guy in fatigues but every mountain biker on the planet likes to ride new trails, with the excitement of not knowing what's coming up, of not being entirely sure of the traction, of not knowing if you can clean that tricky climb or descent that you're seeing for the first time all seemingly able to inject new life into a hobby that you might have been doing for a few decades now. It's easy to get a little too content when you're riding the same trails day after day, but making the effort see and ride new terrain is essential to keeping stoke levels high and the challenges fresh.



Being on the road for even a short length of time can also be a great reminder that things aren't always going to go smooth, and it's when plans go south that the best memories are created, even if it doesn't feel like it at the time. Maybe the starter on your truck decided it no longer wanted to do its job. Perhaps it rained for a week straight despite the forecast calling for sunny weather. Even worse, you might have badly injured yourself on just the second day of riding after a twenty hour drive in the search for dry trails and warm temps. I've ticked all of those off my road trip list, as I'm sure many of you have as well, and I'll admit that I got a bit bummed out at the time. Now, years removed from those events, I look back with a different perspective and realize that those were the best of times. A proper road trip should take out all of the useless things in life that you can do without, even if it's only for a few days, and make the trip itself priority number one. Your e-mails, the phone bill, and the boss who has it out for you won't matter one bit when you're doing a road trip correctly, which is the beauty road trip, isn't it? They're escape from the mundane, and sometimes a bit of vehicle trouble, shitty weather, or poorly timed injuries is the cost of fleeing a humdrum existence.

The great thing about hitting the road with your bike is that it doesn't have to be some grand adventure that takes you away for weeks or even months on end, and you don't need to go to some exotic location to feel like you've gotten away. Loading your bike up for just a big day trip to a new location is enough to get those cylinders firing again, and while it can be easy to come up with pretty reasonable excuses as to why you can'y make it happen, you'll nearly always feel better if you put aside the to-do list, pack up your gear, and hit the road.

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