Get your motors runnin....
(We think Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda would have preferred our green helmets to their Captain America helmet....and probably our RadRover 6 Plus bikes to their decked-out Harleys)
We purchased our log cabin in Pine for several reasons. A major one was that we were finding that living in Mesa during the summers was a bit oppressive. We could get outside every day, but only if we did so in the middle of the night. And while we enjoy swimming, cycling, and walking in the dark (actually we REALLY enjoy it), after a few months of doing nothing but that we were getting restless. Also, for the rest of the day we were feeling imprisoned in our home. Simply too hot to be outside for more than the time it took to get to our air conditioned car.
We need to be out in the sunshine. For most of the year in Mesa we can do this--one of the main reasons we moved there.
But the summers, late springs, and early falls? No. It's inside then.
After camping a few times on the Mogollon Rim, and after renting an Airbnb a couple of times close to the rim, we learned enough about the area that we decided we would invest some of our savings (i.e., spend our children's inheritance) on a cabin there.
It is typically 20-25 degrees cooler at the elevation in Pine than it is in Mesa. This means that during the summers we can hike in the mornings, and then sit in the shade of our pine trees on one of our two porches at our cabin. And, as a result, be outside all day.
And it is less than a two-hour drive from Mesa, on a highway with stunning views of the deserts and desert mountains. An easy drive because it is short and beautiful.
Now, as everyone knows, there are always surprises when one purchases a new home. Some good, some not as good.
Our surprises have uniformly been good. One is that it is much quieter than we had imagined. We hardly see neighbors--one reason being that there are a lot of summer cabins that don't seem to be used very often, even in the summer. Another is that there are very few cars on our road--we can sometimes go for hours with none at all. We are in a small area of the town that is basically a dead end. Only one of the roads in our small area is paved, and that's the one that people use, including us. Ours is dirt, which we like.
Another pleasant surprise has been the wildlife. We see elk in our yard every day, and deer, coyotes, javelinas, and raccoons on our street.
It is like we have our own wildlife refuge, and we live in the middle of it.
Another big surprise is that it is the end of October, and we are still quite comfortable at this high elevation. We have not had to bundle up hardly at all in order to hike. This hopefully means we will have many more opportunities to use the cabin than we had anticipated.
The decision to buy a cabin was made in July, when we rented the Airbnb in Strawberry (three miles from Pine) to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. We set an agenda for our anniversary to identify what had worked for us for the past 10 years, and what we needed to do for the next 10 years to build upon that success.
We recognized that some changes had to be made, mostly because of our age. After all, we are now in our 70s. We could no longer take 5-month road trips in our camper--a big loss for us. We also could no longer take 200-mile bike rides, another loss. And our hikes now needed to range from 4 to 5 1/2 miles. No more 8 mile hikes with 1000 foot elevation gain. This meant taking more frequent, shorter hikes.
We identified some important dimensions of our life together: Being outside, being active outside, having variety in our days, trying new things, an absence of television watching, eating at home instead of dining out (except on special occasions), a lack of being involved in social media ( e.g., we have no Facebook, Instagram accounts, etc.), and having our family be our social life. We have no interest in forming new friendships--we are selfish with the limited amount of time we have left in our lives. So, it's us and family.
Our role models:
That old saying is wise, and true: Keep doing what got you there. That was the point of our discussions during our anniversary. What have we been doing that has worked and how can we continue doing what we have been doing given we are getting older?
Answer: A cabin in the mountains.
We also decided that we would like to try mountain biking. We had cycled a lot of miles in the past 10 years (over 23,000 miles), including 15,000 miles on our road bikes and 8,300 miles on our tandem around Leisure World (all but a few miles in the middle of the night).
But we can't do either of those types of cycling in Pine.
There are hundreds of miles of forest roads in the area. A mountain biker's dream. Oddly, to us, we have spent hours and hours on those roads and trails and have only seen one person on a bike. We don't get it.
After we had hiked in the area, we realized that some of the roads we might cycle on with mountain bikes would simply be too steep for our aging bodies, especially our backs and knees. So, we explored electric assist mountain bikes.
We rented a couple of them at a local shop, and loved the experience. We could get up very steep hills, but also continue to cycle ourselves and exercise our legs. They aren't motorcycles.
So, we bought a couple of top-of-the-line Rad Rover 6 Plus.
Some assembly required :)
Vicky got hers done first, and mine is almost done in this photo.
After we finished assembling them we had to figure out how to make them go....and stop.
First thing: We are not interested in speed. These are capable of 45 mph (!?!), but we will likely not ever go over 15 mph. Our goal is not speed, but instead is the exhilaration of riding on Forest Roads, seeing the beauty of the mountains, and exercising our bodies. And doing something fun together.
Then, we had to name our bikes. We have names for all of our vehicles. Our Ford Dually with the camper on it is our Turtle, because we live in it like turtles do in their shells. Our Toyota 4Runner is our desert rat. because it can scurry over harsh desert terrain. Our small teardrop is the Quail, because it always runs behind the 4-Runner like Quail run behind other Quail.
Our Rads are now named:
Dan's: Wile E.
Vicky's: Roadrunner
Dan always cycles behind Vicky so if there is a dangerous driver he will take the hit, not her. So we will look just like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner through the desert.
Like the names?
We took our first rides on them around our neighborhood. Basically we were learning how they work. It's very different from cycling on road bikes or on our tandem.
The next day we headed off toward some trails near our home. The roads were quite rough in spots, but the bikes did well, and we learned how to navigate steep hills and rough terrain. We will need more practice at this.
It was a blast. And we learned quickly, although there will still be a learning curve because there are so many different ways of adjusting the gearing, speed, and amount of electric assist on these bikes.
And the bike is heavy compared to our road bikes--that takes some getting used to.
If one wants to, you could ride for an hour or more with just the electric assist. But our goal is to use them not just for fun but for exercise too, which means pedaling whenever we can. We view it as we are assisting the bikes, not the bikes are assisting us.
We know we going to love getting them up onto the rim for riding.
We just hope we don't end up like Captain America, though. :)
Here is a shot of Vicky on one of our trails. It's hard work navigating heavy cycles like Wile E. and Roadrunner, but the ones we chose (Rad Rover 6+) are clearly excellent machines. We still get a great workout even with the electric assist.
We can recommend the Rad Rover 6Plus without reservation.
