Road Blogger

Have you ever tried to explain bicycle gears to a novice? Most people learn to use the gears intuitively. Earlier I tried to explain how they worked to my friend. Though her credentialed pedigree had Magna and Summa in it, she wasn’t quite getting my cryptic explanation. She crinkled her nose and said “I still don’t get it?” Chuckling, I threw out explanations of “driver and the driven and eliminated gear ratio among other things and continued with a different train of thought and said “gears move the bike a lesser or greater distance with one turn of the pedal.” As we rode faster, farther and longer, the intuitive nature of bicycling did their own teaching as she shared “so the front gears are the big brutes and the back gears do the fine tuning.”

We quickly forgot about the how the bicycle works and continued our ride. Bicycling down Kearny Villa Road in San Diego, the jet’s cylindrical after burners are flaming a white hot blue and trimmed by orange. Overhead you feel the power of these fighter jets flying in for a landing. The noise you hear has gone faster than the speed of sound. They land on the tarmac long and straight and surrounded by rolling hills of Chaparral, typically barren except Highway 15 and Miramar Marine Corp Air Station. I felt like “Maverick” in the movie “Top Gun” as I pedaled down the same road on this pretty day. There is some cloud cover that the sun pokes through and creates beautiful background shades on the clouds. There are few cars on the road and we’re enjoying the solitude. My reflections are about my brother and father, personal in nature-veterans who are no longer with us. I didn’t plan to honor Veterans on this day, it just happened.