If I remember correctly, it took me twelve hours of driving almost exclusively south to get from NJ to NC a week-and-a-half ago.  But I’ve begun to doubt my memory, my sense of direction, and, yes, even maps in recent days.  It would  seem that I in fact drove diametrically in the opposite direction and ended up somewhere in Maine or Canada if the weather is any indicator.  When I dared to move south of the Mason-Dixon line, I was promised balmy winters in which you would only refrain from going to the beach out of courtesy to those states with less fortunate climates.  Well so much for that.

Yes, it has been uncharacteristically cold in Wilmington and that, along with a parade of mechanical issues on the part of my bike, has contributed to the fact that, until this week, I hadn’t really seriously rode my bike in two or three weeks, not at all in the last two or so.  Another contributing factor has been a steady decline in my biking with my recent increase in employment.  It’s an exhaustion thing.

But this is precisely why with all of these excuses stacked against me I was so happy yesterday to finally get back on my bike, my newly repaired bike, complete with a new set of more road-friendly tires.  I was even more pleased to find that far from being the horrible experience I thought it would be, riding around in 35-degree weather was actually exhilarating.  Plus, cold weather and intense wind are pretty welcome when you would normally be drowning in your own sweat.

And what with all this exhilaration and rebirth as a cyclist going on, I thought I’d be adventurous and explore a route I had never traveled before (yet another aggravating circumstance in the case of my cyclist’s ennui may have been my boredom with the same old Wilmington routes again and again).

Well my adventuring got me a little lost in some far northern territory of Wilmington to which I had never even journeyed in a car, but I thought I could make a loop rather than doubling back on my path.  I did ultimately make a loop, but it involved riding back along Market Street, which is a long stretch of commercial strip with few shoulders and even fewer sidewalks.  To up the ante, the sun was setting, and I was worried about how cold it would get sans sol.  But hey, I was feeling adventurous, right?  Of course, I could always call Rachel to come pick me up, but then, what kind of cyclist would I be?

In the end I made it home with only two close encounters, one with a logging truck and another with a douche bag in a pickup.  When I got home and checked the new bike computer my dad got me for my birthday, I saw I had ridden 19.6 miles in 1:30:29 and burned 905 calories.  Not too bad.  And I didn’t even feel like a walking corpse.

Later, as I was enjoying the strange phenomenon in which the shower felt simultaneously cold on my wind-burned face and hot on my chilly torso, I starting thinking about how disproportionately proud I am of things like this (proud enough to blog about it, apparently).  I realized I was incredibility more satisfied with this 19 mile mistake than I was with the seemingly excruciating 22-mile excursion to Fort Fischer Beach a few months previously.

And that of course got me thinking of all the tiny things of which I’m inappropriately proud and all the supposedly monumental stuff of which I’m not.  Some of these tiny achievements include: making new shelves for the bathroom cabinet, repairing a tire on the road for the first time, devising a way to mount a spice rack in our pantry, finally finding geocaches that have thwarted my efforts multiple times, speaking to the occasional German who doesn’t immediately ask if English would be easier for me, and making a structurally re-enforced pair of antlers for Rachel’s Halloween costume that withstood vigorous partying.

And then there’s the big stuff that I should be quite proud of but just seems par for the course for me, like my college degree.  Inevitably, at every Eagle Scout ceremony, someone will cite a bunch of likely outdated Eagle-related statistics, one of which always is: 2 in 100 scouts will value his Eagle Scout award over his college diploma.  To say that is true of me is something of a qualified statement.  I probably value my college degree more in practicality, in that it can get me a job, but I probably value my Eagle Scout status more simply by virtue of the fact that I value the experiences I had in Scouts so much more than those in school.

So what does it all mean?  I think I was meant to be a carpenter.