Of A Bike Ride, Going Bananas, Coconut Drinks & Hot Body Connie
I knew it was going to be a long weekend when I entered the rented condo with my girlfriend at the time and the appropriately-nicknamed Hot Body Connie came bouncing toward me in the skimpiest of bikinis and launched herself into my arms.
“You made it!,” she excitedly exclaimed as my girlfriend stood next to me in a kind of who-the-heck-is-this pose. The girlfriend always pretended to be cool and not jealous but she was jealous and I could practically hear it coming out of her ears like steam hissing out of a broken down car’s radiator.
We were in Rosarito, Mexico for what at the time was the annual Rosarito-to-Ensenada bicycle race.
Well, it really wasn’t a race. It was a party. Or at least I thought it was a party. We had a big group of people coming down from the LA Beach Cities and Hot Body Connie had gotten a couple of condos for us. After Connie showed us to our room, my girlfriend proclaimed it as a “no sex” weekend, saying there were too many people running around for us to have any true privacy.
But I knew the truth: she was jealous that Hot Body Connie had jumped in my arms and I had to pay the price for it.
The next morning, the bike ride started out pleasantly enough. It went along the beach with waves crashing and while the road was anything but smooth it sure was scenic. I had visions of stopping every few miles for cerverzas and basically having one big, rolling party. “I could take 50 miles of this,” I thought pleasantly to myself.
But that all quickly changed.
Suddenly the road turned inland. Then it turned uphill.
And when I say uphill, I mean UPHILL. It was at something like a 15% grade and it twisted, so just when you thought you had reached the top, you were dismayed to discover there was another section.
My impatient girlfriend – a cute-as-a-button girl who had stolen my heart and put it away for safe keeping, I must point out – had had enough of the bike ride at this point. Now is the time to point out that I knew ahead of time she would not like it and begged her not to come with me, but she wanted to keep an eye on me (I was fiercely loyal to her and you would have been too, if she were your girlfriend).
“But you’ll be miserable!,” I told her. I was right and I was about to be proven that I was right.
When we finally reached the top of the hill, she stopped and said, “I’m thirsty!”
I went and found her some water.
Then she said, “I’m hungry!!”
I went running around to vendors and found her a couple of bananas.
Then she came in with this: “I’m MISERABLE!!!”
“Ah-HA!!!!” I exclaimed.
“I told you that you would be miserable but you insisted on coming along anyway,” I continued. At this point, we were at the 25-mile mark of the 50-mile ride. “So,” I instructed, “get your ass back on that bike and start pedaling.” It was one of just three times I was ever mad at her in more than a year of dating.
She got on the bike and we pedaled for the next 25 miles without saying a word to each other.
Fortunately there were no more hills. There were no cantinas, either, but there was a big festival at the finish line with a couple thousand other people.
And here a transformation began to occur in both our attitudes. Our friend Grambeaux had driven to meet us at finish line and drove us back to Rosarito. And then, instead of going with the South Bay masses to party and get silly drunk at Papas & Beers, Grambeaux, the girlfriend and I went to a quiet dinner at the Rosarito Beach Hotel.
This was bliss. We had a great meal, we had drinks out of coconut shells and I really, really enjoyed being in a quiet place nearly alone with my girlfriend. I would not have preferred to be in any other place in the world with anyone else in the world.
All’s well that ends well, right? Oh, and I still had Sunday night with her to make up for the missing part of the weekend.
That was bliss, too.
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