Jess has been wanting to go on a bicycle ride outside of our community, Palm Meadows. As you recall, Palm Meadows is a gated community with a single, and well manned, gate to the property, and PM is surrounded by a very impressive wall. All of which makes it pretty safe for Jess to ride her bike around and visit friends while inside PM. However, she had voiced some jealousy about my rides outside of PM into the surrounding areas, and wanted to ride outside the wall.
So, a few weeks back I took Jess outside the wall on a short trip through a little village that is snuggled up to the wall on the East side of PM. Jess immensely enjoyed the ride. The road was a bit rough, and we had to portage over some construction. Initially, Jess was a little intimidated due to having to go along the main road for 100 meters or so - we walked our bikes, but she indicated she really enjoyed the ride.
Also, back in January, one of my Sunday rides went to a eucalyptus forest. The ride group was scouting the forest for a possible spot to take our kids out to, and it was a nifty little forest that I was quite sure Jess would enjoy. However, Jess and I went camping with Alex and Preston the weekend of the kids ride, so we missed that opportunity.
I started talking with Alex if he would be interested in just he and I and our kids going on an external ride. Alex liked the idea, and we did a little scouting on Google Earth to figure where we needed to take the kids. I did a little more on the ground scouting one day in an attempt to figure out how to get the car closer to the forest as it is about a 20 km ride, and the chillin's would never make that distance. We had the GPS coordinates from the January ride, and those were easily plotted into Google Earth. So, Alex and I thought we new where we needed to go. And, as a aid, Alex put all this into his GPS.
So, Saturday (March 7) Alex and I took Jess and Preston on a ride. We didn't really find the roads we needed to find, but we got close. After traveling in the car for a bit, we came to a spot that had been sand mined (looks a bit like a moonscape), and we decided to start with that. The GPS was telling us that we were within a half mile of the railway underpass we were looking for; so, using the GPS as a guide, we struck out from the car. So, this is the picture, four folks from Minnesota got out of a perfectly good car on a hot dusty side road that didn't seem to go anyplace useful if we were lost and came from a village we didn't know the name of, and started riding East. BTW, the driver left us there and went to lunch. So, we were kind of alone and on our own to go into the countryside and return to that spot for pickup.
It was quite warm - high 80's, low 90's - and we headed into the sand mined area. The kids really enjoyed that. Jess especially had fun with the roller coaster road left behind by the tractors pulling trailers out of the area. We were looking for a trail through the eucalyptus to get closer to the railway, and after a few false starts a trail emerged. This too was fun for the kids, but by the time we got to the other side of the forest the heat was beginning to take its toll on the kids. We had water, but they were drinking hard, and the water had warmed up very quickly in the heat.
From there we bounced down through a harvested forest, and into some young forest in our search for the underpass. We discovered a large well. The well was 30-40 feet across, and as many feet deep. Steps were embedded into the wall spiraling down to the water, which was deep into the well. As like other wells we have encountered, there was no fence around this big hole in the ground; so, kid safety was keenly on Alex's and mine minds. Bounding over a small road, and off through more sand mined ground we came upon an underpass, but we didn't believe it was the one we were looking for as the GPS was telling us it was another half mile East. And, this could not have been the one we were looking for as a car was not going through the rough road through the underpass.
By now the heat was oppressive, and we needed to get the kids back; so, Jess took the lead and following our old tracks and looking at landmarks, she lead us back to the well. Alex decided to take a short cut through the forest, and we discovered a second well as big as the first. However, the second well was empty. If you fell into it, you would not survive the fall. As this point, the kids were showing signs of being stressed; so, we hurried to the next landmark and took a water break in the shade of a large tree. From there we back tracked to where the car should have been, and sure enough it was there. We asked the driver to stop at the first cold bar he found as we needed a cold Fanta to quench the thirsties.
Our ride took about 90 minutes, and even with the heat, Jess told me later how much she enjoyed it and that she wanted to that again. She did great, and never complained once about the heat or being tired. She did tell me when we about 100m from the care that she couldn't ride on, and she was squinting, which reminded me of a moment in my childhood when I got sun stroked. So, as quickly as I could, knowing I only had 100m to go, got her to the road, off the bike, and in the shade and watered. Jess is quite a trooper in this land, and her courage to try new travels grows with each adventure.
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