Yesterday I had several very unusual, for a trikker, experiences....but yet, you can all have them too.

A graveled lot near me was asphalted a couple days ago. At least an acre. YAY! And I was the first person on it. Well, new asphalt, it's purdy sticky, and I wasn't expecting my usual "cured, dried, burnished asphalt" trikking fun, and no surprise, when I carved on it, yeah, it was sluggish going, but WOW can you carve deep and hard on that new stuff!

Not a pebble, not a twig, marred my carving, and I felt this wonderful relaxation -- I DIDN'T HAVE TO SCAN THE SURFACE CONSTANTLY! I could look around instead of mostly checking out my carve path, and I could put more attention into my proprioception instead of almost all of it in my visual perceptions. Ahhhh -- no fear of having that sudden comeuppance that a carved upon pea-sized stone can deliver. It was a very nice state of pure carving. And it was sooooo quiet....the Trikke being almost silent. (Squeaks and creaks come and go mysteriously for my Trikke, but this time it was just as quiet as a bird gliding through fog.)

So, I closed my eyes, and I just really got into appreciating the carving as it felt within. Here was this nice big safe carving space, so I could do about twenty carves before I had to open my eyes to make sure I wasn't going into the lake (it's a parking lot for a boat-loading ramp.) Blind trikking is an experience all trikkers should try. The wind in your face becomes your speedometer needle. You are much more sensitive to your body's awareness of its center of gravity -- you easily can feel how much you're leaning is compensated for by the centripetal forces that keep you from falling over. When you circle, the wind's direction changes on your face, and noise sources revolve around your head.

Strikingly, I noticed that I had a choice presented to me. You see, when you're on a Trikke, sometimes you are basically just standing still on a moving platform. Oh, you can crouch, lean, punch and kick, but, with eyes closed, if you go into a circling carve and just "hold it like that until the carve's energy is depleted" you get these few moments where you get to actually decide if you will perceive yourself moving or choose instead to see the world as revolving around you. You're just standing statue still, eyes closed, so which shall it be? Your choice.....neat consciousness moment. Try it.

The next morning, it had rained. Bad day for trikking usually, but no!....I had a sticky lot waiting for me. So over I went, and voila!, what did I find? A tar black space filled with ten thousand suns.....each a pancake sized puddle reflecting the morning's rays. The lot is so flat that hardly any puddle joined another. Talk about orbiting among the stars! The bottom of my jeans got soaked as I carved as hard as I could through these puddles and watched my micro-roostertails spritzing behind me. It was glorious. Not a single scary moment.

My mother was blind, and I have done all kinds of volunteer work with blind high school students, so I think I know what I'm talking about here: I think a blind person could really enjoy the Trikke's exhilarations. Wow, what an idea,eh?.....I would just love to see a blind person really crank on a Trikke....why there'd be headlines everywhere about it. All a blind person would need is a "spotter" to tell them when they were coming too close to an edge of the lot they were carving in. Heck, with a necessarily adroit sense of hearing, a blind trikker's spotter probably would only need to be there for traffic concerns, since noise sources would tell the trikker how much distance had been traveled, the sun's warmth would tell direction, etc. It would be so cool.

While experiencing that freedom from fear that the new asphalt gave me, the effortlessness of the free falling was remarkably palpable. Just turn a handlebar a tiny bit and then fall, then turn again, and fall again. It only requires me to slightly move the Trikke and let gravity do the rest. The smoothness of this flawless riding suddenly allowed me to feel like each carve was me swinging on a vine....downwards, gathering speed, upwards towards the next "height," then the "grabbing another vine" directional transfer of my weight, and then down again plunging to even faster speeds. Ask any trikker what Tarzan does; answer: vertical carving using gravity as the propulsion. Ho hum, same ol' same ol'.

I can do a pretty good Tarzan yell. The whole nine yodels.

Yep, I did it. Did it as loudly as I could in a region of space with 10,000 stars. I was so cool!

One last note, today, the puddles were mostly gone, but enough were there to power through fearlessly, and then I looked behind and saw my wet trails on the dried part of the lot. I defy anyone to see a trikker's carving trail as anything but the parabolic curving "trails" of satellites that we see on TV shows which graphically super-impose satellite orbits upon the globe's continents. It is identical. That was such a cherry on top of my orbiting sundae. There behind me was the purest indication of the Trikke's relationship to geometry. Euclid must have an astral Trikke by now. And, NASA, get your astronauts Trikkes so they can get used to weightlessness in a low safe orbit.

I would bet that some math-wiz out there could easily discover in the Trikke's trails the golden ratio of the Fibinocci series. If you carve an circle and just keep it getting tighter and tinier, your inner tire's trail forms a spiral "of sorts" that is some kind of parabolic-sine-wavy-thingamabobber. Anyone want to tackle this?

So be on the lookout for newly paved lots....get there before the cars bring in the pebbles....close your eyes, and pray for rain!

And make sure that you're in good voice and you've practiced your best 10-year-old-boy-swinging-out-over-a-lake-on-a-rope-yell -- you'll want to do it....go ahead....you can be Carol Burnett on wheels.

You can't be Johnny Weissmuller.

I'm Johnny Weissmuller!

Ahh, AHHH, ah, AHHHHHHHHHHHH, ah, ah, AHHHH!

Edg