I was twenty-five miles into a midday bike ride. Officially the temperature was in the mid 80s, but it was fully sunny and a time and temperature sign at a church said it was 98 degrees. I was pooped.

I’d turned off the Virginia Capital Trail and down Battlefield Park road toward Ft. Harrison to pedal some miles in the shade. The road was certainly shadier than that section of the Cap-to-Cap trail, but it dipped gradually and I dreaded coming back up it.

It wasn’t shady all the time. And rather than the smooth asphalt of the capital trail, the surface was the tan firm pebbly concoction that the National Park Service favors to make things more picturesque. I imagined that its bumps were causing more friction on my tires and cutting my efficiency.

I reached the first interpretive sign and saw that the road went on a long way. I was thinking it was time to head back. Then, an “old guy” (no more than fifteen years older than me and perhaps younger—who else is out riding a battlefield road midday on Wednesday?) does a double take when he sees my bike and loops back around to chat me up about my 25-year-old steel-frame LeMond Nevada City.

He tell s me, a LeMond was for sale recently in Hampton (my hometown) and he almost went and bought it. One is for sale in Blacksburg and he is probably going to have his daughter who lives there buy it for him. The crossover bike he was riding, he explained, “is like a Porsche. It is too fast for me.” It is carbon, etc., etc., etc. Bottom line: My old steel frame is the thing!

I hear this kind of thing a few time a year whenever an “old guy” who likes bikes sees my bike. I appreciate the appreciation, but I don’t get it. I’ve owned only 2 road bikes in the past 35 years. The first was steel-frame “12-speed” Schwinn World Sport that I rode for 30 years until a very pastoral mechanic at Redemptive Cycles in Birmingham convinced me it was time to “put it out on the back forty” because I had ridden it to death. The second is this LeMond that another guy at Redemptive said was the bike for me when I went in to get something a few weeks later. (I hung up the frame and wheels of the old bike facing our driveway, see below).

Anyway, my new friend sings the praises of this battlefield road. Like me, he had ventured off the Cap-to-Cap to check it out for the first time today. Unlike me, he has already been down it, was coming back, and was full of bike talk, vim, and vigor. He shows me the loop he made on the map, points out where a restaurant was that is now closed and which road is “a country road where they drive fast,” and therefore to be avoided. After he heads off I decide he has convinced go a bit further.

But I’m tired, so after rolling through a couple forts I stop alongside a line of tree-crested fortifications for more water and trail mix. Winter the Bear, my photo prop, sassy self-projection and conversation partner crawls out of my bag to demonstrate her boredom with Civil War earthworks.

We look at Google Maps to figure out how far it is back to the car, and—behold!—we see that there is a Cambodian Buddhist Monastery near by! Energy returns! The game is a foot!

Winter crawled into her bag and I started pedaling toward the monastery, away from the car.

I’m not a big believer in paying careful attention to addresses, and the Buddhist center does not have a sign on the road, so we overshot their address, but were rewarded by a cool bicycle mailbox holder which Winter made the most of.

Retracing our path, we find the barely-marked drive way leading to the Buddhist center and venture down it. At the end we find the center, a typical house festooned with the Buddhist Flag designed by J. R. de Silva and Henry S. Olcott in 1880. Since it is midday on a midweek day in early June, we don’t snoop around but make our way back to the Capital Trail and our way home.

On the way we encounter Varina Church, build in 1926 to provide a new house of worship for a seventeenth-century parish of the Church of England (now the Episcopal Church). It is a great tribute to the the adaptation of the colonial heritage to the circumstances of later centuries.

Winter didn’t pose for a victorious photo when we got back to the car, but she did pose at the monestary. But whether your pose or not, chasing churches is about unexpected discovery and sponteniety. We enjoy it, and hope you do too.