Fertile Ground: River Ride

Although I hate the shorter days this time of year, I absolutely love the weather. And today I had a I love Memphis day.

We decided to take the monkeys downtown for a bike ride and picnic. Warren has taken them riding a few times without me and I've been anxious to join in. Since I was too tired from Saturday's adventures to make it to my 9:00am roller derby practice, I decided to dig my outdoor wheels out of the garage and skate along with the monkeys. Warren, of course, brought his skateboard.

Now, you might assume that we'd ride along the path on Harbor Town or even along Tom Lee Park.

Nope.

We started up on the bluffs in Vance Park and made our way to Union, then up to Main, down to the train station, back to the bluffs at Butler Park, and then back to Vance Park. To say the least, the four of us turned quite a few heads.

Satchel loved riding past Circa and the Orpheum so he could show Jiro all the wonderful places he'd been the night before. I liked skating inside the awesome Jay Etkin Gallery. (Jay has incredible hardwood floors--if it weren't for the columns in the main gallery, it'd be an ideal space to bout! Assuming he moved all the priceless art...) Warren liked hanging out at Bluff City coffee. Actually we all did. Ice coffee, juice, water, and chocolate chip cookies got us all reinvigorated for the rest of our ride.

South Main was a great area to visit on a Sunday afternoon. There was lots to look at, but not lots of traffic.

Skating outside is way different than skating on a rink and it went a long way in building my confidence. I hope to get outside and skate a lot more in the coming weeks.

We ended our ride where we started, at Vance park, and had a quick picnic and photo shoot. Satchel went on and on about how much fun he had and we all had to agree.