Avalon Fires

[RoosterBoots]

-- Sometimes a trail ride is just a trail ride. And sometimes... --


Idling at the intersection of Renfroe Road, Jerry got the feeling that the smartest thing to do would be to turn around and take CR184 all the way back home. The Chumukla trail was still a few miles west, but Nina wanted to ride Renfroe Road and she wasn’t in the mood to hear him say, “No.”

She wasn’t in the mood to hear him say much of anything at all. The neighbors had thrown a barbeque the previous night and Jerry had decided to show off, so he brought out something that looked like a ball of tape with a fuse in one end.

“What’s that thing?” Nina asked.

“Sparkler bomb,” he told her. Then he pulled out a butane lighter and, before Nina could object, he set fire to the end of the fuse. “Fire in the hole!” he yelled, tossing the sizzling toy into a drainage ditch, where its fuse promptly went out.

Everyone was tense for a few seconds, but the sparkler bomb just sat there, dead. Jerry watched it for a couple of minutes, just to be on the safe side. It was a dud, all right, and now he looked stupid. So he walked into the neighbor’s kitchen and got two plates of pulled pork, one for himself and one for Nina.

She was standing next to the mailbox, gossiping about husbands with two of the other wives. She took the dinner plate with a polite “thank you, baby,” and pointed out that the fork was missing.

“I’ll go get you one,” he offered.

“Get yerself one, too!” she reminded him, sweetly.

The fuse that had almost gone out took this opportunity to draw one more deep breath and exhale sparks into the tightly taped bundle. Two whole boxes of harmless sparklers ignited all at once, exploding with enough force to blast a shallow hole in the muddy bottom of the drainage ditch.

Everybody spilled food. Everybody’s ears rang. Bits of mud landed on the back of Nina’s neck and on top of her plate of pulled pork.

Twelve hours later, she was still moody. She wanted to ride fast, wide open, and Renfroe Road was perfectly suited to her state of mind. It was a straight half-mile of ash-white hard pack with no speed limit and no traffic. Cars couldn’t get past the three-foot high speed bumps crisscrossing the road. But bikes could.



(The rest of the story is HERE.)

[pushrod]

Great stuff RB!

Only time I've ever been on Avalon is when the I-10 bridge was out, and I had to get over to my wife's folks in P'cola.