Bikes, Bears, and Beauty, oh my!

Last week I decided to ride my bike to work. This isn’t really unusual for me, but it had been a while.

When I lived in Georgia, there was a period of time I rode my bike to work on a regular basis. City commuting on a bike is stressful to say the least. Crossing exit and on ramps, close encounters with college kids on their iPhones, people that could care less how close their SUV gets to you on your bike, oh and the broken glass….beer bottles everywhere.

But to ride a bike to work in Vermont is like living on a different planet all together.

I live on a mountain, it’s gorgeous, but it’s a mountain, which means riding down a mountain for half of my ride to work. Sounds kind of ideal, right? Cruising for most of the ride…well, flying down a gravel road at 7am is kind of intense, you build up a lot of momentum which can make it hard to stop, but man oh man are the views spectacular. It’s a special stretch of road, there are points you can see clear across to the Adirondacks in New York, never any other cars, and just me and the mountain….surrounded by forest and wildlife.

The second half of my ride is just as beautiful. One thing to note about Vermont is that there are no billboards, none, I haven’t seen one in my entire time here. It’s amazing to be outside and just be outside, and not be inundated with advertising. But, I digress on one of my ‘why I love Vermont’ tangents….

Here’s the view from where the mountain meets the road, the end of my downhill journey and onto mostly flat valley.

This is how I know I am halfway between work and home, when I reach the mountain shaped like a turtle shell.

The rest of the ride into town is simple, and rural. Old farm houses and barns dot the landscape with the spaces in between filled with corn fields and baby Christmas trees.

While there isn’t a lot of car traffic to worry about, this stretch is apparently notorious for bears. I’ve been told bears like to cross the roads to munch on the corn in the fields. The corn here is just starting to tassle so I don’t know that bears will be venturing down just yet, but on this ride, I kept imagining bears meandering down the mountain on my left to shuffle through the growing corn to my right.

I’m a lucky gal if I do say so myself.

I’m looking forward to my next bike ride into town. It’s quite different from the time we lived on a different mountain and I hiked 2 hours to work one morning when it was 17 degrees outside. 🙂

Hey, in Vermont, you’re crazy if you aren’t outside any chance you get.