Remotely Chipotle

Today, lunching at Chipotle Grill, sitting out on the porch… I bathe in suburban splendor. I am surrounded by a busy parking lot in a strip mall itself surrounded by traffic-choked roads and I am sure that 80% of the people in the cars work within 2 miles. Not that I walked… I’m just as guilty myself but it made me wish fondly for the pedestrian areas in Europe, in which even the small towns have festive plazas bigger than anything similar in the entire city of Atlanta. And before any dittoheads start start telling me to emigrate, believe me, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else but the US… it’s just this automobile prison we’ve built for our fat asses is stifling! And we’re so used to our cozy, air-conditioned, XM radio-bombarded, cup-holder-festooned personal spaces that actually interacting with the environment has become strange. There are at least 20 other tables on this porch and it is an absolutely perfect day and my cow orker and I share the outside dining area with no one. It’s almost as if they add these just to put on trendy, urban airs knowing that rarely will anyone use them.

But I am ranting… and need to get another beer.

There… that’s better.

Now, where was I? Oh yeah… so I’m telling this guy how some friends and I got lost mountain biking in Amicalola. We parked our cars at the top of the falls and hit the trail with about 4 guys (Mark, Keith, Ashim, and myself) and 2 dogs (Andy and Sasha). We ride around for a while… not a great trail nor even good but when it got even worse, we realized we were lost. But given that we had rode a lot of downhill, damn if we were going to go back.

We kept up our backcountry wandering and, at one point, came out on Springer Mountain, right at the start of the Appalachian trail. About half a mile down a fast hill from there, I realized I had left my helmet behind. Again… damn if I’m going back!

We emerged on some paved roads… still with no idea where we were and, in front of a house with a kennel full of what must have been around thirty Jack Russell terriers, all bouncing, barking, and kinetic in a blur of canine Brownian motion, we hailed down a passing Camaro and got directions to a main road.

We were all pretty exhausted, each having ridden further than we ever had before and the dogs were in sad shape. We got to the main road and realized we were now in the area of another mountain bike trail, Bull Mountain, which was 8 miles along mountain highway back to our cars!

Ashim and Keith stayed with the dogs who’s paws were bleeding and Mark and I began the up and down road trek back to Amicalola. When we got there, it was almost too dark too see and I begged a ride up the hill to my Jeep from a couple at the Visitors Center… a hill I would not have been able to make. I was feeling ill so Mark drove us back to pick up the rest of the crew and return them to their car.

Unfortunately, I did not bring the top along with the Jeep… nor did I include a parka… something I realized I was in desperate need of on the long, cooold drive home. We stopped at a Burger King at some point and I puked in the bathroom… from exhaustion, I presume.

We ended up getting home around 10 and relaxed a little, overcome by the day’s ordeal. Someone rang up saying there was a big party at the Black Hole and we stayed out until 5 in the morning.