Weekend by the bay

I spent the weekend in Seward with my wife and kids. I didn't ride a bike, and didn't have any deep bike thoughts to write about. Didn't have deep thoughts of any kind, really.

I thought about the quiet little harbor outside our window and the seal swimming around in it. I thought about walking around with my kids. I might have slipped a couple of times and thought about how much I want to go back and ride Lost Lake Trail just outside town, but it wasn't a deep thought. Just lustful. That's a really nice trail. I rode it last summer with Adam and another friend, Pat. I slowed them down but, damn, it was fun.

My son drove us home on Sunday (he's on a learner's permit and needed the highway experience) so I had time to ponder all the motorheads on the highway near Turnagain Pass. It was a beautiful spring day, so the high country was full of the usual parade of big pickups pulling trailers loaded with snowmachines (snowmobiles, to you people who live outside Alaska). There were gas-sucking, avalanche-inducing, noise-making machines all over the place.

One guy's truck was parked just off the road and surrounded by mini snowmachines and dirt bikes. Just doing his part to raise another generation of motorheads, I suppose. Although where he and his crew intended to use dirt bikes in the soft, spring snow is a mystery.

It all made me think of the cartoon above, which I found this past winter on Martino's Bike Lane Diary. And it made me glad I never got the gene that makes so many men love gas-powered machines.