My Husband Biked Up a Mountain for a Cookie

One year for Father’s Day, my husband decided he wanted to ride his bike to Gold Hill for a cookie.

If you’re unfamiliar with this particular activity, it involves putting on head-to-toe spandex, pedaling uphill for several grueling hours, arriving at the Gold Hill General Store, eating a single cookie, and then riding all the way back down.

Naturally, I pointed out that I also know how to make cookies.

In fact, my husband rarely waits for homemade cookies to actually become cookies—he usually consumes half the bowl of raw cookie dough before it ever sees the inside of an oven.

So availability was not the issue.

The issue was that he wanted that cookie. The cookie at the top of the hill. And apparently, the only acceptable way to acquire that cookie was by riding a bicycle up a mountain.

I suggested a few alternative methods of transportation:

• The car

• A friend

• DoorDash

• Basic common sense

None of these options were given serious consideration.

Because he didn’t just want a cookie. He wanted a bike ride that happened to end with a cookie.

These are very different goals.

This is one of the great, unsolved mysteries of marriage. I spend a lot of my life trying to make things as efficient as humanly possible. My husband, on the other hand, intentionally chooses the harder path simply because it sounds fun.

Which is how he spent Father’s Day climbing a mountain while I spent Father’s Day explaining why climbing the mountain was completely unnecessary.

To be fair, he came home exhausted, slightly sunburned, and incredibly happy.

So maybe he was onto something. Or maybe the cookie was just that good.

We’ll never know.

— Sheila