Looper Snakes and Bang Bang Sauce

I knew it was coming. There is nothing worse than getting that message from your rivals friends about their awesome big miles, hardcore ride when you are eating a biscuit sandwich somewhere in Panama City Beach. Those boys, Mystery and Bushy, they unloaded on me from driveway to driveway. I like to think it took both of them, and their collective scheming effort to break me down, but the truth is I was in a desperate state minutes after we departed and it only hurt worse from there.

I didn't get dropped or anything, it just hurt really bad to keep up.

What are you going to do though? When you sit in the castle forever, lording it up in the manor of champions, you get curious about what goes on down in the village at night and you slip away, not realizing you have locked yourself out of the kingdom, your keys lost somewhere like your dental floss and nasal spray.

At some point on the far-flung pine flats of the Twilight trail, Bushy deep in a trance of agony, me right on his wheel, he locked up the brakes to avoid a mirage of a Diamondback Rattlesnake. In a state of hypoxic delirium he feared the common exposed scrub oak root and caused me to take immediate action. I veered off the trail and laid the bike down softly in the forgiving sand, narrowly avoiding disaster. A quick pain inventory revealed no major injuries and we were back to rolling at my aerobic threshold seconds later. I felt a slight itch in my bibs, and attributed it to sand and pine needles and continued my death grip on Bushy's wheel.

Only when I returned to the safety of the van, and the adrenalin faded did I assess the continued sting and itch to reveal a near invisible carpet of prickly pear spines embedded in my fatty sidemeat.

The insult, the injury, we have been here before no?

Juancho