Blue Eyes

I Have a Strawberry the Size of a Watermelon!

Link POV

I'm waiting for Nick to come pick me up so we can go mountain biking. I finally see him pull up to my house. I kiss Sarah goodbye and walk out to where Nick is.

"Hey Nick!"

"Yo, Link! You ready to go mountain biking?"

"Ready as I'll ever be" I say as I roll my eyes and chuckle. I then grab my bike from my backyard and put it in the back of his truck and we get ready to go.

A little while later, we make it to the mountain, Big Bear, and it's nothing like I'm used to. We're usually mountain biking on the hills around my house. It usually involves a lot of pedaling uphill and it makes you tired. I'm usually pushing my bike up the hills by the end of it. This trip to Big Bear, an actual mountain, I have a feeling will be nothing like it. When we get there, we get our lift ticket. We wait in line. I notice as I'm waiting in line, that I am a little under-dressed. I only have gloves on and my old skateboard helmet. I don't even have biker shorts, I have khaki shorts on, while other people have full body armor. Some people even have neck braces on so they don't break their necks going down. This is making me very nervous.

We have our bikes with us, waiting for the next chair in the ski lift. Then there's a guy who hooks my bike on a hook. Then he takes Nick's bike and hangs it on the next hook. Then Nick and I get on the ski lift and head towards the top of the mountain.

When we get to the top, there's another guy who takes our bikes off the hooks and waits for us to get off the lift. Once we get off the lift, we grab our bikes and get ready to go.

Before we go down I ask the attendant there "Ummmm... w-we're intermediate bicyclists. Uhhhh... how do you recommend we get down the mountain? What-what's a trail we can take as like a beginner/intermediate?"

"Have you ever done this before?"

"Well... ne-never like this."

"There is no way down." Uh oh. "There's no way for you to get down." I guess the only way to get down is by riding my bike on the trail. But it just sounded like he said I wasn't good enough.

I'll show him. I can do this! Even if I'm lacking in equipment, I'll make it down the mountain and I'll make it down in one piece too.

Nick and I start going down the mountain. We start off going only in dirt. We see these huge bank turns. They're so big that I feel like I'm going sideways at some points and I feel like I'm just gonna fall right off my bike. Luckily I don't. We're continuing going through these bank turns and then a third of the way down we come up to this wooden bridge. Nick stops when he gets to it, I stop next to him and we hear a "yip!" One of the guys just passed right by us. Once he was through, Nick told me to go. It was suspended at least thirty feet over the side of the mountain. While riding, I felt like I was one with the trees because I was so high up.

After we get over that bridge, we come to this huge drop. Nick tells me to go first. As I'm going down this drop, I'm picking up a lot of speed. There's another bank turn. This one was made out of cinderblocks as opposed to dirt or wood or mud. I'm able to make the turn..... Barely. It took a lot of fishtailing to get my bike steady after that turn.

After that turn, there's a little bit of an incline. We go up the hill and at this point I'm ahead of Nick. I'm ahead of him but I'm scared for my life. I'm scared that I might fall and hurt myself. I was so scared that I was holding back on my turns. I noticed that on this last turn coming down the mountain. It's either all or nothing. Instead of successfully going into this last bank turn, I hesitate and end up losing my balance. My bike comes right out from under me. The next thing I know I'm sliding on my side in the mud. Just great. Nick comes down after me to see if I'm okay. I say that I'm all good (pic above) and we finish going down the mountain.

Once Nick drops me and my bike off at home, I put my bike away and say hello to Sarah. I haven't seen her all day and I missed her. Soon after I say hello to her, I realize my butt starts to hurt. I tell her and decide to go change and see why it hurts. I go to our bedroom and look in the mirror, I see that I have a welt on the bottom of the right side of my butt. It does not look pretty. It looks like a strawberry the size of a watermelon. I gotta tell Rhett about this on Monday. What am I going to do until then? I guess have Sarah bandage it up for now. This way it won't be so bad when I go see Lilly.