I pump my brakes just to see if they're working at all (they are, but I won't be stopping on any dimes), and my mother's words pop into my mind.

"After all I've been hearing about the Internet, please be careful about who you team up with in England," she wrote.

Ironically, Mom's warning came in an e-mail shortly before I left Texas to go mountain biking in the Black Mountains of South Wales with someone I knew only through the chat room of Go West, an outdoors Web site that I worked for in 1996.

Maybe Mom was right.

<furthur>