By now you all know that we give names to everything. Our Coach is “Arcturus,” the Honda Civic is “Little Blue,” and our recumbent tandem bicycle is ‘Path.” It is named after a fictional dragon in Ann McCaffry’s “Dragon Riders of Pern” series. In Ann McCaffry’s series “Path” is somewhat ‘proddy’ and causes her rider, Mirrim, to be ‘out of sorts.’

Well our Path has also been a little proddy recently. In fact in early October on a wonderful day of riding the Banks to Vernonia linear trail, Path suffered a catastrophic tire failure on the front and bucked and buckled and left us all in a heap. The new brake pad had scuffed through the sidewall of the tire. We were seven miles up in the boonies. We had a couple scrapes but no real injuries. I was able to ‘boot’ Path’s tire and whittle the offending corner off of the brake pad. We gingerly rode back to where Little Blue was waiting.

We are still waiting for a replacement tire, but after several short rides we have finally assured ourselves that Path is behaving, and today we went on a new kind of adventure. We rode our standard 15 mile loop around the Hillsboro Airport. Toward the end we decided to try linking up with Max, the light rail here in the Portland Metro area. We rode all the way into downtown Hillsboro and then loaded Path on Max. Path had to hang from a hook by the front tire with his tail dragging on the deck. I have to apologize, I didn’t get a photo of this unusual arrangement. Not counting the Max link, we still did an eighteen mile ride.

As you may have guessed, we are still in Hillsboro. We are getting a bad case of moss on our backs and the webs are beginning to grow between our toes again. I know we told you we were about to leave last week. We really were going to leave today. Now we are really-really going to leave on Tuesday.

Gary and Judy from Hillsboro.