Fog and a gray white morning seeps into my body before I’m fully awake, drawing me from bed, whispering abandonment of all things save to be on the road. Riding towards work a line from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” — Break the Gossamer Web of Some Dream swept through my head. I’d read that story just a few days earlier and now here it was again. Riding like a dream.
Those rides, dreamlike and dripping with excited expectation that world will be different, the view over the next will will be completely unknown and I’ll enter a world so foreign that I may lose my way.
Those possibilities are why I have no Garmin on the scooter and seldom have a map. How can that knowledge ever match the power of a dream?
Across the northern wilderness and for a precious moment I am lost in a world where providence still lives. And then the web dissolves and I know exactly where I am and where all roads lead — another Vespa ride to work.
Still, how promising a start to a day.
Steve, I learned about owning and riding a bike from your blog. Now I need to learn to adopt the spirit. That one’s going to be the greater challenge.
Beautiful photos with the fog. It looks a liittle eerie!
I can feel the damp chill of the morning air, breath in the sweet smell of road side grasses.
Beautiful post!
David: I think we all bring a different sensibility to the ride and to each their own experience. I suspect you already what your own spirited rides — and I don’t mean testing the Steibel on the local gendarmes!
RichardM: I’m a sucker for fog — it will always get me up and out on the scooter no matter what.
Deb: Nothing quite like a morning ride….
This is awesome!