It was just as fun as I hoped it would be. Luckily, no one crashed the bride at the "Don't Crash the Bride Ride", and it was a really fun, not overly serious wedding. It made me so happy to see Sarah and Josh finally tie the knot, as they are both such great people and go so well together. Witnessing the kind of relationship they had with each other was a big part of what gave me the courage to look for that kind of love for myself.
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| The leisurely contingent of the "Don't Crash the Bride Ride" Photo Credit: Erin Baumgardt |
I was also glad to see all of my other friends in person again, since I'd been missing my Indiana people really badly in the past few weeks. It's hard being away and feeling like it's just a matter of time before people forget you when your relationship dwindles to Facebook-only. Plus, I've been pretty busy at my new job and social media time has been greatly reduced. I know it's partially my own fault, as I don't pick up the phone and send "How you doing?" texts enough, but I feel the good parts of my life back in Indiana slipping away. Being able to reconnect with a bunch of different people over the weekend made me feel a lot better about things, although I still need to work on staying in touch and maybe even making some friends in State College.
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| Got to hang out with my favorite puppy, Lo. Yes, my hair is also purple. |
The other big part of the trip for me was getting to ride BCSP again having spent three months riding the East Coast Gnar. It was especially interesting because BCSP was trending as the highest rated trail system in the country on the MTB Project a couple of weeks ago. Of course, since Raystown is the highest rated trail system in Pennsylvania, I knew such judgements couldn't really be trusted. When I left Indiana, I was so sad to be taken away from BCSP, but upon my return, I wondered if it was really as great as I remembered and were the hard parts as hard with my new-found gnar skills.
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| #hesitationpointselfie |
The answer is that, yes, having seen both ends of the spectrum of what Pennsylvania has to offer, Brown County is a really good trail system. You can go fast, but it's got enough stuff going on that it is not boring like Raystown. The "hard" parts are kind of funny, though, as it's weird riding trails that were designed to be hard as opposed to trails that just are hard naturally. That being said, I wasn't much more skilled on Walnut than I was before I moved. I'll monster truck over all the the rocks when there's room to fall, but my confidence is still not that great when I risk tipping over the side of a bench cut trail if I fail. We rode half of Schooner Trace, but it was just like I remembered it: just a lot of really purpose-built super hard obstacles on which you will fall off the side if you don't make it over smoothly. So I may have hated Rothrock the first time I rode it and couldn't believe I was trading Brown County for it at first, but now I would definitely take John Wert over Schooner any day.
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