Bad girls, bad girls, whatcha' gonna do?

Well, I am tired of lying around, but mostly I am just plain tired.
After camping for the week, I came back just in time to practice for two days and perform in our annual Fourth of July musical I Hear America Singing. I absolutely love the show because I love the history of our country. I even choke up a bit now and again during the show. We take for granted the freedoms we enjoy today, and we don't even know it.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about today.
I learned something last week about myself.
I learned that I dig being a biker chick. I love riding around town. I love the wind in my face. I love being a little bit different, and dare I say it? It makes me feel a little bit like a bad girl. I always wanted to be a bad girl, but if you grew up like I did, you didn't dare. You didn't disobey or even sass, lest you find your mouth in another county. In fact, I got on someone else's kid yesterday for sassing her Daddy. I told her it was disrespectful to me for her to speak to him that way in front of me.
But I digress.
I also learned that, while I dig riding about town with my bad self, I don't dig distance riding at all, thank you very much. I rode my bike to camp because I had to come back home during the week. We can't afford the gas on the truck we use to pull the camper enough to make the trip twice, so in the interest of conserving gas, I took my motorcycle to get back and forth. It was an uneventful ride down. The sun was shining, and the clouds were often enough to keep me from cooking. (Yes, I wore SPF 70 sunscreen.) It was all-in-all a pretty nice ride. A little long, but not too much. Then I came home a different way. I heard there was a faster route, and decided to come home that way. But the day was different. First, the wind was variable, and that was difficult to handle. Once I would get comfortable with the angle of the wind, and start to relax a bit, the wind would shift, and I'd have to get used to it again. But the hardest part was the speed. It was entirely too fast for my comfort. You know that exhilarating rush you get in the thirty seconds to two minutes of a roller coaster? Well, multiply that times three hours. Not fun, I tell you. For the first hour and a half, I spent all my time talking to God about how I wasn't afraid to die, but that I really didn't want to do it right in front of my sister. (She was driving behind me.) And that I would rather die altogether than be a vegetable. I didn't want to put my family through that. My grip on the throttle was so tight that my thumb and first two fingers would go to sleep. I had to engage my throttle lock and flex my hand every few minutes to regain feeling in them. That's how tense I was.
Now, I know that I have a famous history of being rather melodramatic, but I was honestly terrified. There were several times I wanted to pull over and call Shawn to tell him I couldn't do it. But I got myself into this mess, so I was going to get out of it by myself. So I prayed and braved myself through it.
Later that night, after a nap and a bite to eat, I went to practice, where a friend told me she and a whole list of people had been praying for my safety. She was so worried about me that she had friends join her in prayer on my behalf. Thanks, T! I love you, too!
And before you ask, I drove Shawn's little Aveo back to camp the next day. My ear drums were bruised after the ride, but that's a story for another day.