Fruita

Like many of the friends I've made, I knew about you, Fruita, long before I met you. I knew you like I know the other planets orbiting our sun: neighbors, yet strangers. Finally, we've met. I have your telephone number, and I'm going to memorize it, or at the very least, etch it into my arm.

Here:

To be honest, I don't like travel pieces that are ubiquitous in mountain biking magazines. I'll probably never be able to ride most of the trails that are being written about, and the point of each of these articles is always the same. There aren't many ways to say, "Riding bikes in this unfamiliar place helped me to transcend what is normally my life." However, having been to Fruita, and having transcended what is normally my life, one of those travel pieces is exactly what I want to write. 

You've likely already been to Fruita. You've likely read several travel pieces about Fruita. There's nothing I can say about Fruita that you don't already know, but I am doomed to write this travel piece because there was so much about Fruita that I didn't know, such as it will make a person not want to go back to what they had formally considered to be "living."

It's weird that the cashier at the Walgreens in Fruita isn't any more efficient than the cashier at the Walgreens in Denver, who splits her time between her cell phone and her job eighty/twenty. In Fruita, however, I don't mind standing in line while the cashier asks the locals about their rashes, and asks the tourists if they have rashes, and if they've named them. I had so much fun in a stupid Walgreens that I almost purchased on impulse a Justin Timberlake CD. 

The riding was about as good as it gets, but more difficult to navigate than the trails were the unanswerable questions that kept falling out of the unzipped backpack of my brain. If I dislike traffic and long lines at the cheese store, why do I live in a place with heavy traffic and long lines? Why have I chosen to breathe smog in a place where silence is a metaphor? I don't know. Here are some pictures.

Rebecca does something her mom wouldn't like.

If you can ride this without smiling, you might not be a good person.

If only there were a biscuit kitchen right there, it would be paradise.