Last week featured plenty of bicycle riding, and I even managed to get lost in the Pen Lucy and Hillen neighborhoods. I love getting lost, and I love that I seem able to do so no matter how long I ride around a city. You just have to make a different turn and be willing to go up the hill, and I’m easily willing to do those two things. Saturday, though, was all new. My ladyfriend threw her back out almost two months ago, but she’s finally up and moving around again, and we got to break in the double bike rack. I was a nervous wreck about it, because that’s just how I am when things are new and my bike could fall off the car. Fortunately N. is incredibly patient, so she followed the directions and a couple minutes later we were strapping our bikes on the car and a whole new world of dating possibilities emerged. I didn’t know where we were headed; it turned out we were headed to the beach to loll about in the Chesapeake Bay under the watchful cars waiting in line to get over the Bay Bridge. After getting ourselves good and chilly in the water and letting ourselves dry off, we hit the snack bar for a “smoothie” and one of the densest funnel cakes I have ever eaten. Then it was time to find a place to ride. We googled our way around and settled on the Spa Creek Trail, even though it was only a quarter mile long. Hey–she’s got a bad back, and we’re starting small. Maybe five minutes after getting on our bikes we had reached the end of the trail, and N. had her phone out again, checking a map to get us to downtown Annapolis. Oh yeah, that’s better. We made our way there, grateful to not be locked in the car traffic clogging the harbor, and did our tour of overpriced restaurants, a tiny record store, some really terrible history at the statehouse (go read the panel about Roger Taney. Or don’t.), and a really terrible chai tea latte before getting back on the bikes and heading back toward Spa Creek. Turns out the trail continued in the opposite direction we’d ridden, so we did the quarter of a mile in a couple other directions, stopping on a footbridge over Spa Creek where I snapped this picture. It was a tiny glimpse of nature in the middle of a city, surrounded by new construction and an older park, but all of it was just perfectly framed in this tiny spot, and it felt like we’d biked somewhere really special, just three minutes from the parking lot. That’s a park, though–a representation of wildness in the city–and on Saturday, that was just what we needed.