I had a shorter ride today, only two hours with some one minute intervals. I rode out to my favorite stretch to do my intervals- one of the few places around here that is truly flat: along the Chagrin River. It is beautiful too with lots of trees and it snakes alongside the river. It is just on the outskirts of the Cleveland suburbs and has sprawling estates and enormous houses. The end of my ride is the little town of Gates Mills, where the rich of the rich live. The stretch of road is only about 3K, but if I head back and forth along it, I can get in some good intervals, starting in Gates and heading south only to loop back to Gates again.
Gates Mills is an interesting little town, best described as “quaint”. All the houses are nearly identical, see above. It is beautifully lush with everything around a brilliant shade of green only suitable for a crayola box or for the chemically preserved lawns of Agusta. Not a blade of grass goes untended, each one being nipped carefully by hired hands so as to form a nearly perfect burberry carpet of green framed with wooden picket fences and perfect geraniums/impatience. The city must have ordinances that restrict how the town looks and feels, since it is so painfully Stepford and uniform. As far as I can deduce, the ordinance is that all homes must be painted white, with black trim. And, that all owners must be white: no black trim. Yards must be tended, but occupants are forbidden to work beyond lifting a delicately manicured finger to sign a pay-stub. It also seems that residents must belong to either the local Hunt Club, Polo Club or both. (The former is one of my favorite places to steal cool water- on my rides, there are VERY few places to fill up bottles and with the heat and humidity, I go through a lot of bottles. Along the tennis courts [upscale Hunt Clubs have more to offer the elite than merely the prestige of membership and the honor of chasing and killing red foxes], they have cool water jugs and I eagerly help myself to bottles every time I pass by. I keep waiting for me to be shooed out with a broom as a dangerous and reckless vagrant).
Gates Mills is also a very big equestrian town. Being that the center of town boasts the Hunt Club, it is no surprise that beautiful sleek horses are frequently seen in the nicest of stables. The horses really are gorgeous- they are long and lanky with rippling muscles gleaning beneath their iridescent coats. You see them all over, trotting or cantering with flawless gates around stadiums filled with jumps of various proportions and with a besotted rider nestled atop. I find the juxtaposition of the often plump-bottomed riders sitting astride these most beautiful of equestrian athletes an amusing one: perhaps it is for the good exercise that these animals are so well “conditioned”. The only horses more lovely are in Woodside California or in the Amish country (amazing creatures, spectacular and well tended but for entirely different reasons).
That is my ride. It is a gorgeous area, one to which I most certainly do not belong and never wish to. But I can certainly say that I always enjoy the ride through there and the funny looks that I either actually receive or only receive in my imagination from the passersby who call that strange and sterile place “home”.
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