A Bike Ride, a Hike, Geocaching and Shredding

This morning, Hubby and I headed out for another bike ride. We had planned on a longer ride, but ended up going 7.82 miles total—some of that hiking, most of it biking, and some walking to a couple geocaches. It was a good workout, but shorter than we anticipated. We had fun exploring though, and as usual—I took some pictures.

We finally equipped our bikes so I no longer have to carry a backpack with our gear and water. Each of us has one of these to carry an extra tube for our tires, band aids, and whatever else we want to bring:

And hubby’s bike has a nice little rack on the back so we can carry our water and, today, our lunch.

It makes for a much more comfortable ride for me! We really need to get better bikes but don’t really know where to start. We got these from a friend of mine really cheap when we decided we might like to ride bikes—but it’s turned into something more than that and investing in better bikes might be worth it!

We were able to find one geocache today—although we looked for quite a few that hadn’t been found in a while. Here’s hubby signing the log sheet:

That cache was a pill bottle hidden in a tree stump.

This part of the trail had a lot of farms around. I actually saw my DREAM property. HUGE oak trees, a nice house, and a lake. Awesome. But I didn’t take a picture because that would be stalkerish. But I did take a picture of some cows because this is Iowa and there are cows by our bike trails.

It was a cold ride today! We definitely didn’t dress for it. I wished I would have worn long sleeves. But sometimes that’s better than being hot…

We were disappointed when we got just a few miles down the trail and saw this again:

Once again, due to the floods of 2008. They really were pretty devastating. I guess the bike trails aren’t a priority when many people lost their homes.

But hubby decided we should just go around the gate because he wanted to see the river and that led to quite the expedition! The trail looked like this:

It was GORGEOUS, but all sand and mud and we ended up hiking a good majority of the way. Otherwise, our bikes literally sunk and we’d fall over. But it was worth it because we saw things like this:

And just to show what this trail was like—there were big areas that the water completely washed out, so we had to climb up muddy hills:

Or cross over logs across the trail:

But we finally made it to the river and the bridge that had been pretty much washed out:

We ate our lunch in a Gazebo still decorated for Christmas:

Here we are:

And then we tried to find a couple more caches with no luck. And wouldn’t you know it, it started to get sunny and warmer outside!

And I love this picture that I took when we tried to find a cache on our way home:

I love seeing beauty in the small things. If you take a moment to slow down and just look around you—you can see the most beautiful things!

And then when we got home, I completed Day 2 of the 30 Day Shred! I burned 693 calories today and I’m happy with that! It would have been nice to go on a longer ride, but once we got back to our starting point, we both decided we were cold and tired and would conquer the geocaching portion of another trail on another day. Something to look forward to! One of the best parts about losing weight and getting active is being able to do things like this with my best friend.