Passion for Bicycling

Sorry for the long break. It was summer and summer is my prime biking time, the two wheel type, the one where your only power is your legs.

I like to bike. I am convinced that it has something to do with the genes passed down from my father. It’s not that I am very good at it. I am neither a very good climber nor am I super fast or anything like that. I just love to be out there on some lonely country road just clicking away at the miles. And that sounds very much like my father for he was a big time biker. I remembered him telling me of races he did where they raced around the entire island. They did not have a SAG wagon (a vehicle following you} so you ate when you could, sleep when you can and just keep going. It sounds like something I would have enjoyed.

But riding for him was mostly from necessity (it was his only means of transportation for much of my young life) and not so much for sport. When we lived in Grove, Bay (Ocho Rios bay) was a long way off and a bicycle made the trip easier and a trip to Lucky Hill was doable in a couple of hours instead of days. Then when we moved to Bay, he was then working at Tower Isle (hotel) or some where out that side and the bicycle was the way he commuted. In fact a major accident in his life was when he was hit from his bike, while on this commute. He was hit in one of those sharp curves just west of White River. He was knocked from the road down a steep rocky ravine and had to be hospitalized. The scars in his forehead that remained through the rest of his life were from this accident.

In our early years I remembered him always having a bike and he was constantly truing it or repacking the little ball bearings into the wheel or bottom bracket. The bike I remembered most was a green Rudge, with fixed wheel, no fenders and no breaks. I remembered it because it was the one I learned to ride on; under the bar (top tube) because I was too small to fit over it! At our house at Grove and when we moved to the house in Ocho Rios Bay he always had a bicycle fork turned upside down and stuck in the ground in the yard. This was his ‘truing’ (a process for making sure your wheel was not wobbly) fork.

Weather it is from association or by genes, I love to bike. It is something I left since childhood but in recent years I have found the sport again and look forward to it each summer weekend. But I am getting ahead of myself. I want to first investigate some more of my heritage by telling about the paternal half of my ancestry so next post I will begin that journey.

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