I asked 2 men twice my age to be my bike friends

In 2017, at 31, I New York moved to rural Spain to teach English for a year. On the way to school on the first day, I spotted a slim and enticing path wrapping through Dehesa, a landscape of hilly hills, brown grass and lone cork and oaks. I loved the mountain biking, but the previous summer, I was prosecuted by dogs during a solo stroll, and I had fallen badly. I was too afraid to explore this landscape alone.

I bought a used bike and started to travel to school, an hour in every direction. I have never seen a dog, but the noise of barking – often imagined – regularly sent me in panic.

One morning, I saw two men in the late 1950s or early 1960s, arrested next to the road, Examine their bikes.

“Need help?” I said.

“Thank you, we just put the channel back,” said one of them.

I had a crazy idea. “Are you cycling on the trails here?”

The answer was yes. They were residents and bicycle de Dehesa every weekend.

I swallowed. “Do you think I can come with you one day?”

A foreign half of their age, I had skeptical looks, but we exchanged figures. I soon had second thoughts. We had nothing in common, and the three of us were, clumsy and miserable. I should Find people my age. But they called, and my desire for the path won.

They gave me a test, and I went

Pedro and Angel took me in four hours of the river to a valley stacked with rocks, to a shaded oak route, and finally, to what looked like a fort of massive stone slabs flowed in the earth. It was a tomb of 4000 years old, or dolmen. While we were getting around drinking water and we feel satisfied with ourselves, it was not at all annoying.

Without saying much of it, we have become inseparable, three children invaded by the vegetation that flows Riot through a landscape of fairy tale. We turned around a Roman reservoir, climbed in an Arab castle in the 9th century, flamboyant through fields of wild flowers in the spring. I was wondering why the rides were generally shorter than the first, and my friends admitted laughing, that it was a trial by fire. But I had succeeded.

From that moment, we were a trio

Large and wide, Pedro was a solid and disciplined rider with constant behavior to correspond. Angel, on the other hand, was a firecracker, small and noisy, cursed constantly and joking. Pedro kept Angel En Marche and Angel triggered the playful side of Pedro. (“How do these Churros treat you now, Angelito,” Pedro muded like Angel, cursed, fought on a steep hill.)

My integration was not completely smooth. At the start of the trip, I thought Angel Me Bébé. I asked him to treat me like another boyfriend, not her daughter. At my shock, he listened. I came to believe that men, especially those of my father, could not listen, even less change.

One day, we were cycling in front of a farm, and three dogs that bark came to the fence. I almost jumped from my bike. When I explained why, Angel and Pedro went up on each side of me after the dogs. (True to his promise, Angel made fun of me as if I was one of the guys.) During subsequent rides, they escorted me in front of cattle in pasture and even two massive wild boars. Over time, my body did not collapse at the sight of an animal. Something apart from my calves and my lungs was become stronger.

During a thunderstorm one day, while we won in a rail tunnel, Pedro remained on his bike, grabbing the wall to balance. His knees were killed, he said, and would be replaced that summer. I couldn’t believe it; I passed each ride eating their dust.

Summer has come. Just before Pedro surgery, I suggested that we prevented a price that Pedro has watched: the highest hill in the region. After an exhausting climb in an apparently endless switchback, we were hugging and enjoying the view. Going down, I shouted like a wolf, freer than I had been for years.

I left Spain, but we stay in touch

In August, just before leaving, Angel and I took the trails at midnight to avoid heat. With the full moon bathing the Dehesa, we barely needed our headlights on our way to the dolmen. Angel told me that he and Pedro could not believe the coincidence that had connected them with me: the foreign woman whom they now considered a real friend.

“These are the things that make life worth it,” he said. “And you cannot buy or plan them.”

I accepted. Their friendship – like the trees that influence, the stars, the old stone – was a gift, not something that I could have taken by force of will. I felt humiliated.

After leaving the city, I did something that I had always wanted to be courageous enough to do: a Two -week solo walk through the countryside. I have no doubt that courage came from my friends.

Since his departure from Spain, I have stayed in touch with Pedro and Angel. I usually manage to dine with them and their women once a year. We always laugh at our unexpected friendship. Pedro now has two new knees, so I joked the Camino de Santiago, an adventure of the list of buckets for the three of us. Who knows, maybe we will.