On Sunday, I took Kiddo#2 for a longish bike ride through the Creepy Zone.
We live on Broken Road, a road that at one point stretched through Angelborough end to end but now exists in three chunks. Our part goes from the main strip southward and ends abruptly at the Creepy Zone, where the pavement becomes progressively more broken until it’s nothing but dirt and large rocks. This continues southward through the Swamp as a path too narrow for a car until it abruptly becomes paved again and houses reappear, at which point you’re on the opposite side of Angelborough. At two points during the unpaved portion, someone has gone to great lengths to make sure a car cannot pass. The first is a locked gate. The second obstacle is two boulders places so close that you have to get off your bike and walk it through.
A mountain bike can handle the unpaved portion of Broken Road without any difficulty, and the roads to get back from the opposite side are wide and clean.
At the southern end of Broken Road, a filthy Jeep passed us going the opposite direction. I noticed because the driver was wearing a cowboy hat. No big deal; there’s a farm on the south portion of Broken Road, and I figured he was heading there.
Kiddo#2 and I made a nice circuit of South Angelborough and then decided to double back along Broken Road to head home, rather than taking the busy streets. (Busy being a relative term for Angelborough.) We cut through the railroad tracks and reached where Broken Road joined them, still broken but beyond where a car could reach from the other side. We headed back north past the first barricade and then past the second barricade.
As we were heading back but before we reached the paved part, who passed us but that filthy Jeep! Except he was coming from the North side, and there’s no way he could have jumped two barricades and a culvert in order to get there. Odd, but I tried not to think much of it.
We went home, showered, changed for dinner, and got in the car to take my Patient Husband out for Father’s Day dinner.
And who did we get behind on Broken Road? That mud-covered Jeep again, this time with one of its tires shredded.
My Patient Husband found it creepy, like the guy was checking out the area. I eventually got on Google Maps and looked at the satellite view for any way this guy could have gotten a Jeep from the south end of Broken Road to the north, and there really wasn’t one. But I did find a whole lot of off-roading trails I hadn’t known were there, right in the Creepy Zone. So my guess is that he wanted to go off-roading with the jeep, found he couldn’t get through, doubled back and headed around on the city streets for the paved portion of Broken Road, found the place, and shredded his tire while doing that.
But weird that we met him three times, just at random. Weird and a little creepy.
