Moto-cross!

Today, I discovered a whole new sport: Moto-cross. Not MOTORCROSS, as I learned this morning, but MOTOCROSS, a sport where riders of all ages navigate dirt bikes around a hilly, bumpy, jumpy dirt track in a noisy and extremely impressive-looking manner.

It’s a little hard to see, but the next picture shows one of the riders catching some air going over a bulldozed dirt mound on the track. 

Why, you ask, am I foraying into the moto-cross world? Because my family runs several small ski areas in Pennsylvania and New York, where the ski season runs only three months at best, so they’ve been exploring alternate ways to generate income on a snow-free ski area. This was a suggestion from a friend of a bartender’s boyfriend (or something like that), and it’s turned out to be a good one. Tonight is the second practice event—apparently, there will be a race/competition for actual money the first weekend of August, but courses often offer practice events so riders can familiarize themselves with the course.

I asked my eight-year-old nephew, Micah, if he’d like to try moto-cross, since there are quite a few kids his age out on the course on little 50 cc bikes. (At least, I think they’re kids: they could actually be hobgoblins or elves, because they’re completely hidden beneath their protective gear.) “No,” he said. “It looks like fun, but I think it would hurt a lot more if I fell over than when I fall over skiing.”

I don’t know…it looked mighty fun to me. It’s a really nice crowd of people, too, who apparently all know each other, because they all go to the same events and such.

Of course, you know where this is going: yes, I’m thinking what an interesting story premise or situation I might pull out of this sport. Maybe a book about a girl who wants to race or…

Except, of course, I would never DREAM of plotting another book while I have several waiting on my to-rewrite pile…

:) Cheryl