If you follow my Twitter / Facebook status, you know that I have been biking a lot recently. Been trying to do at least 20-miles a day for the past month. So when I came to Indiana for a week, I brought the bike with me.

When I was in Middle School I ran cross country and would often run "the block" - Aboite Center Rd. to West Hamilton Rd. to Liberty Mills Rd. to Homestead Rd. It was four miles long and hilly. So since I needed a place to bike, and the Chattahoochee River was 650 miles away, I decided to expand "the block" into the 15 mile "super block."


The hills and wind have been a bit of a killer compared to the flatness and stillness of where I ride in Georgia, but it has been been a good ride.

But one thing I wasn't really expecting was the "trip down memory lane." While peddling for an hour or so up and down the hills of Aboite township, I pass my old high school and friends houses. Places I ran in cross country and ex-girlfriends neighborhoods. Places where I was pulled over for the first times and the church where I first found out about that Jesus guy.

And amidst the Gatorade drinking, hard breathing, car dodging, and legs pumping, I find my thoughts drifting to what I miss in life. What made and makes life great.

The past couple of days when I have turned off of West Hamilton Rd onto US-24, Jason Michael Carrol's Where I Am From comes on the iPod.

I love that song.

Despite what my LA friends assume, everyone in Indiana is not a farmer, and I did not grow up on a farm. I grew up the son of an attorney. I grew up in suburbia. I grew up going to country club dinners and vacationing to the beach for 6-weeks at a time. But I did spend a lot of time in my high school years hanging out in Huntington, IN - which is quite country.

Maybe that is where I got my love of country music. I don't know. But I think country music lyrics are usually pretty true to life and Where I Am From is no different.

I said I'm from the front pew of a wooden white church
The courthouse clock it still don't work
Where a man's word means everything
Where moms and dads were high school flings
Gave their children grandmothers maiden name
Yes it may not sound like much
But its where I'm from

...

Where the quarterback dates the homecoming queen
The truck's a ford and the tractor's green
And Amazing Grace is what we sing
Well there's a county fair every fall
And your friends are there no matter when you call
Yeah It may not sound like much but it's
Where I'm from

All that to say, biking the "super block", and hanging with CJ and Andrea, and seeing Dad and Lisa definitely make me miss where I am from.