From today’s ride.  18 miles.  Headwinds like the dickens.

Highlight of todays ride: discovering that the Greenspeed Magnum is fierce enough to tackle sand, allowing me ride on the beach.

Clean-up of the trike after the ride is a mite more than usual, but completely worth it!

Also pretty darn cool, this cairn that someone erected just a ways down from a weatherbeaten piling left over from the pier that used to live there before Hurricane Ike’s fury. The rock & wood structures seemed to belong together, as if they’d always been a pair. Butch & Sundance or Thelma & Louise.

“Galveston, oh Galveston, I still hear your sea winds blowin’.”

This song came out in 1969, when I was 5 years old. I remember dancing to it with my Grampa Parker, who had Parkinson’s. I stood on top of his shoes with my bare feet and held onto his waist with the determination of a cowboy on a bucking bronco ride. Grampa Parker’s torso would twist one way and his hips would torque-swivel and lurch out in another–the jerky swerves he couldn’t control sending both of us this way and that and back again. Glen Campbell sang about those sea winds blowing and, because of my grandfather, I felt as if I were indeed caught up in the wind of Galveston’s Gulf Coast. Lifting me off my feet and swinging me up through the cloud-streaked Texas-big sky, sailing in salty air currents that buffeted me in helter-skelter reels through miles of wide-open blue. Just like the seagulls in the song.

Here’s a great version of Galveston, Oh Galveston.

Though nothing will ever beat Glen Campbell’s original. There’s some great footage of vintage Galveston in this video.