Murpheys Law in Effect

One would think that there is not much better than a wonderful Sunday morning bike ride along the Tennessee River with your family and wonderful friends. But one would be surprised at how wrong that perception is. And today, how terrible wrong it truly was. Lets begin with the obvious. Today, my family and friends who may as well be family, had made plans to go on a bike ride in the beautiful park of Point Mallard. This particular trail takes you along the beautiful Tennessee River and is perfectly shaded and well, just a great trail. We arrived at the trail head and loaded up on water and gatorades, sprayed down with bug spray and sunscreen and began the trip. not 15 seconds into the trip my sister had the first of what would be a series of unfortunate events. Lets just put it this way. Her handlebars were straight, but her front wheel went sideways and she went forward.

I did not get a picture of my sisters over the handlebars tumble from her bike, but the chronicling began shortly after that. After Mr. Steve fixed her bike up and got us back moving, we came across this.


Now, you would think that this would be enough indication that perhaps the storm on Wednesday night that rolled through at took out trees and power lines and left 38,000 without power, may have just caused more trees to be down. But, we continued on, determined to have us a wonderful family bike ride. Everything was ok while we were on the paved greenway. Then we turned into the trailhead that runs next to the river and this is what we were greeted with.


Dad and Steve and Jason all climbed through the debris and broke branches and carved a way for us to get through and pass the bikes over the fallen trees and climb up and over. We thought, hey this 'so bad, we'll just get past this, ride for a couple miles and we'll be good. HA! not so much. We got maybe 30 feet and were faced with this.



Now, any normal person would have said, "Well, we've climbed over two already, perhaps we should just turn around and go back." But no. We are a persevering bunch of people and continued on. We were either hoping for a clear path to eventually wind up, or we had a sick desire to see just how much we could put up. You know, passing 11 bikes over fallen trees twice just wasnt enough. Gluttons for punishment. Yep.

Onward and...under? Over? We continued on.
This just kept getting better and better. Babycakes had the right idea. Sleep. While we toiled and sweated and heaved and hoed, she snoozed.


Once we were over the 4th blockade, wee had some smooth sailing.


That is Mr Steve you see coming up on a little bit of a downed tree, but not too low, we all just ducked under it and kept going.


However, smooth sailing only lasted for about 100 ft. Then, it was this.
The little log.


This was followed by the not so little log.


And this was yet followed by the big log.




This went on for the next hour or so. The guys passing bikes up and over logs.




Finally we reached the first rest point, which should have only taken us roughly 5 minutes to reach. We sat and put our feet into the water to cool down.


Once we reached here and knew that an exit from the trail was just ahead, we opted to abandon all hope for a bike ride. As it was, we'd hiked, scaled, crawled, shimmied, climbed and tumbled enough for one relaxing Sunday. We found the exit from the trail without it being blocked off and passed the trail head on the way back within 45 seconds. All in all, I'd say it was a success!