British California Pie

Cherry Rhubarb pie

It is never me that starts the whole pie thing.  Usually on one of our long trips, we will be stopped on the trail for some reason and Roy will lick his lips and say something like "Yummm.  Pie!  With ice cream!!"  While I don't think it has any effect on me at the time, I'll notice as I pedal down the trail and the repetition of pedaling, steering and shifting once again become automatic, the idea of a piece of pie begins to take hold in my mind.  If I was to have a piece of pie - what kind would I choose?  My favourite - cherry?  What if they don't have any?  Would apple pie do?  Ice cream on top?  Chocolate?

So that little vocalization of Roy's begins to latch onto my brain cells and is usually buttressed by our third cycling companion.  Two years ago I could hear Richard and Roy up ahead of me excitedly discussing the merits of pie and just how many slices they would each have at the next town.  This year it was Perry enthusiastically extolling the virtues of that delectable dessert.  As I rode through their comments I recalled a passage from Bil Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods":  ...Everyone on the trail dreams of something, usually a sweet, and my sustaining vision had been an outsized slab of pie.  It had occupied my thoughts for days and when the waitress came to take our order I asked her, with beseeching eyes and a hand on her forearm, to bring me the largest piece she could slice without losing her job.  She brought me a vast, viscous, canary-yellow wedge of lemon pie.  It was a monument to food technology, yellow enough to give you a headache, sweet enough to make your eyeballs roll up into your head - everything, in short, you could want in a pie...

The above should put to rest the question that is so frequently asked:  "Why does pie figure so prominently in cycling stories?"