2016 Gratitude: Eszter Horanyi

We conclude our series of posts expressing gratitude for moments and experiences from 2016. Salsa sponsored rider Eszter Horanyi takes us across the finish line. -Kid

Grateful For It All

Last January first, I started one of those trendy Picture-a-Day projects on Instagram at @ezthenomad. I did it for a handful of reasons. Mostly because I wanted to make a point of finding at least one moment in each day that was special, or unique, or memorable. I wanted to document it so that at the end of the year, I could look back and see, day by day, moment by moment, how I spent this revolution around the sun.

Given my 360 photos as of this writing, one would think that when given the assignment of choosing a moment that I was grateful for, that was somehow related to riding bikes, it would be easy to scroll back through my Instagram feed (which is mostly about riding bikes) and choose one.

But I couldn’t. I loved them all.

From riding and running around the local trails in Tucson at the start of the year.

To finding a stray dog, discovering that she’d been abandoned, and eventually relocating her to her new home with my parents in Colorado where she is spoiled rotten.

I loved racing 24 Hours in Old Pueblo with my good friend Alexis after a week with the stomach flu and seeing all of my friends from around the west come and converge on the 24-hour town.

May was spent in Moab riding bikes. Of our four weeks camping out at Willow Springs road, we only spent five nights alone. The rest were in the company of friends as people cycled in and out during everyone’s springtime pilgrimage to the desert.

I took my dad on his first tour around the White Rim in three days, Scott hauling all of the water we needed in a BOB trailer.

The summer was spent in Colorado, running and riding in the high peaks.

The summer was ended with a week-long tour with Kurt Refsneider and Scott that involved bikepacking to and running for me (riding for them) eight of the 14,000ft peaks in the area.

Then the leaves changed, and we said good-bye to the peaks and headed to the desert.

I convinced Kait Boyle to run a Rim-to-Rim of the Grand Canyon with me under the light of the full moon in October. This has nothing to do with riding bikes, but Kait is also a Salsa sponsored rider, and multi-sport friends are the best kinds.

And then we headed off for two months in New Zealand to bikepack, hike, and see a new place.

Looking back through all of these moments, documented photo by photo, day by day, I find it impossible to write about a single moment or even three of them, that I was grateful for.

I was grateful for it all. The bikes, the places, the people. Truly grateful.