Today’s ride was short – 13 miles – because today’s ride was actually tonight’s ride.

My riding partner Andrew Duthie and I much prefer day rides. It isn’t the dark we mind so much; Andrew has rigged blinking tail lights onto both our bikes, so we feel safe-ish. It’s the gnats.

We call these GNAT RIDES.

Tonight, Andrew swallowed several calories worth of them. Without shield of sunglasses, the gnats seemed to prefer my eyes, crashing there before finding their way to the great gnat beyond.

GNATS! SO GROSS!

Anyway, we kept it short, and I have just one pic. Here it is:

Know what this is behind me?

This is an old airplane runway.

As far as we can tell (from previous non-gnat rides), we are among a very small handful of people who have figured out you can ride on the old Cornelia Fort Airpark runway in East Nashville.

It’s a little over a mile loop, and it is very flat and very fast. Super long straightaways. Obviously, I mean – you can land a plane there. You can crank a road bike into high gear and feel like those guys with the full-on bike gear. It’s amazing.

I almost hesitate to write about it on the Internet, in kind of the same way I won’t (yet) write about Andrew’s most recent favorite beer bar discovery north of Gallatin Road.

We almost ventured to said beer bar tonight, but it’s cash only and we didn’t plan for that. Plus, we were hungry. So we opted for Fat Bottom, where Andrew had a very nice caprese salad with chicken, and I had chicken tacos with a spicy chipotle sauce. Outside, a smokeless tobacco company was hosting a cornhole tournament. We did not participate.

Then we headed back to Woodland, trying not to be run over in the dark, and returned our bikes to the Duthies’ garage. I said hello to Andrew’s lovely wife, Peg, and goodbye to their chow mix Abby, and then drove home to Franklin where I sat in my driveway listening to The Features and blogging about loving Nashville by bike.

Happy riding, y’all.