As I’m sure most of you have been to the Caribbean, if not the Dominican Republic, I’ll spare you all the fantastic details of the actual vacation, although what is worthy of note is the 45-minute bike tour in which my lady friend and I participated.
You go to these places, these all-inclusive resorts (and they’re all-inclusive because anything exclusive of the resort really isn’t worth doing or seeing), and when you find out they offer a bike tour, you tend to imagine they’ll hand you some sort of shitty straight-bar or mountain bike with a chain that hasn’t seen a drop of lube in three or four years and that you’ll end up doing one or two laps around the jogging track that encircles the 0.4 mile wide resort grounds.
Close, but no cigar. The bikes weren’t exactly mountain bikes and they weren’t exactly straight-bar bikes either. Under a tarp and chained to a basic bike rack, the tour guide--the same Dominican dude who led the aerobics program at the pool a few hours earlier--went about handing us the most banged-up single-speed cruisers I’ve ever seen in my life. Each chain looked and sounded as if it reached its half-life in terms of maximum rust potential, the tires were inflated just enough to keep the rims from squeaking across the pavement, the handlebars were loose enough so that they swung at least an inch in any direction within the head tube, and the yellow paint jobs had seen better days in 1967. The only thing about the bikes that seemed to work fairly well were the foot brakes but considering how little air the tires had, I doubt we ever reached a max speed higher than 11 or 12 MPH and never really needed brakes at all.
And rather than simply circling the resort, the bike tour took us outside the front gates along the same road the bus had followed to bring us to the resort from the airport two days earlier with scenery including . . . nothing. Nothing at all other than a few palm trees, a small motel that our tour guide casually informed me rented rooms on an hourly rate, some clouds through which the setting sun poked through, some tour busses that passed a hell of a lot closer to cyclists and pedestrians than they do here in NYC, some cows a few pounds too skinny, and dirt.
That was it. That was the bike tour. A full 45 minutes of not all that much. While riding behind Stephanie (that’s my lady friend), I took a few seconds of video with the camera which you can check out below, as well as some pics, but like I said, not a whole lot to see.
And for our next trick . . . I mean vacation, I’m going to attempt to plan a mountain biking tour out in Moab, Utah, so stay tuned for updates on that if anyone’s interested in joining. If so, let me know.
Gracias.
