Saturday, July 27, 2019

Holy moly! What a @$%^ day!

View from Chukanut
So here's the thing about bicycle touring: you can have both the absolutely best day AND worst day ever, all at the same time. The way it works is this: nobody transports you to the start of a spectacularly scenic route or challenging climb. Nobody picks you up and whisks you away to your hotel when the road surface deteriorates, or you hit huge traffic, or you have to cross a bridge riding on the sidewalk against traffic going 60 mph. You handle all that crap on your own.  It's actually part of the appeal of touring; solving those problems and getting where you need to be is a source a great satisfaction and accomplishment. Doing it yourself is what touring is all about, after all. But . . . some days you can get just a little too much of all that.
Mt Baker, we think

Thus, we began our day with a sweet ride through the Skagit Valley. We had an incredible ride up and over Chukanut to Bellingham. We enjoyed coffee and the best pastries I have had (outside of France) in the cutest little coffee shop right there on the main drag. We passed through one charming, vibrant little coastal town after another. We even stopped for fresh cherries at the last intersection before the border. The weather was fine, winds were favorable. We were making good time and this day, like yesterday, was on track to be one of the great days on a bike you remember forever.
One of touring's sweet rewards

And then, following our crossing into Canada, we began a four hour descent through the cycling world's seven levels of hell, and the day became one of those you will always remember, but for different reasons. First, we lost our guidance system (map got funky due to our data plan issues); got lost (multiple times); got hangry (I told Roger I had to stop to eat something but it was really about him); got hot (nothing to do about that but dump water on ourselves).
Your route might be off-road
 Traffic was CRAZY (we were in city driving at rush hour for 35 miles); we had a deadline (we were planning to meet an old fried for dinner); and THERE ARE HILLS EVERYWHERE (oh Lord, not another one to climb!)

I mean, with 7+ hours in the saddle, and within 10 km of the end, you do not want to face a 10% grade on a 200 foot climb. If you are riding in the Tour de France, I understand that comes with the job. But c'mon - is there no way around this hill? Apparently not. Vancouver is built on the rocky hills and ridges left by the glaciers.  It's all up and down.
Photo does NOT do it justice. We walked this one.

By the way, did I mention that we also had to contend with the data conversion from meters to miles? Because of course, once we were able to get a map and route refresh (thank God for McDonald's and their universal WiFi system!), all the route keys were in kilometers. But my Garmin was running miles, so I had to do the math to figure where our next turn would be. If we missed something and got off course, it tried to recalculate the route, which it couldn't seem to do because of the data plan, and thus everything froze up, and we had to find another McDonald's. (Fortunately there seems to be one every few miles up here.)

We did at last make it in to our hotel, after 88.3 miles and about 7 1/2 hours. That's more than we thought it would be, and way harder than we'd anticipated. Our dinner with Elliott and his daughter was great, and we were happy to have a nice bed to sleep in. Most importantly, we knew that we had nothing to do the next day! Roger said, "I don't know how I can ride that bike in another day!" But of course we will. A day spent resting and refueling, and we'll be fine.
Done!

Mount Vernon to North Vancouver, 88.3 miles

3647 feet climbing, 11.7 mph

Thursday, July 25, 2019

What a great day!

How could a day that begins like this be bad?
We headed out from Gaye and Ben's house about 7:40 this morning. It was crisp, and cool, and the weather today just couldn't have been more spectacular. Until after our lunch break, it was super - and even then, when it began to get warm, it was still cool as we passed through the shade. Just a perfect day on the bike.

A big part of our day was on two spectacular bike trails.  In Seattle, we rode the Burke Gilman trail from the University all around to the north side of Lake Washington and beyond. It was busy with cyclists, walkers, runners and commuters - a fine example of the adage: if you build it, they will come. What a fabulous public amenity. I considered one of the interesting ironies of our age: what would once have been a terrible impact on one's home value (i.e., a train running through your back yard) is now transformed into a great property value booster: proximity to a 15 mile trans-city bike path linking you to everything!  All the neighborhoods we rode through looked interesting and appealing to me, whether modest or spectacular. Shops and cafes were everywhere. Even in a city where winter weather can be cold and rainy, cycling connects communities. It was exciting to see.

Then, we spent about 25 miles on the Snohomish County Centennial trail. It's also a former rail corridor, and it keeps cyclists off the main roads. Great views, perfect surface, lots of pull-outs for picnic tables, parking every few miles. It was full of runners and riders, miles into the county.

Places that invest in trails like these see a benefit. Look at all bikes lined up at this eatery!

And lastly, Seattle has lots of twisty roads through lovely neighborhoods. To keep speeds down, many of the intersections have planters, like the one below. Great idea to both beautify the street, and slow the cars racing through.
Well, I will find that photo later. In the meantime, here's Roger.

Seattle to Mt Vernon, 80.5 miles
Climbing, 2760 ft
Avg speed, 12.1

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

So, how's that working for you?

Hah!  Obviously, not so well.  Here I am, 5 or 6 months later, and I still have not put any of my other stories into place.  But I do think about it, and I am about to get on a bike again, and that seems to be the thing that inspires me, and so here goes  . . .

We are now on stage 7 (or maybe 8) of a multi-activity, multi-state, multi-focused adventure.  Roger and I left home over a week ago to visit with Dana and the girls, driving to Tahoe to see them in a summer theater production.  Then, after just a day's visit, we took the girls with us to Texas to meet their extended family on my side (including a whole passel of cousins.) That leg in itself included driving down to Waco to visit with Mom and Dad - the girls great-grandparents - before spending the better part of a week at my sister's home north of Fort Worth. Flying back to Reno, we returned the girls to their mom and then drove up to Seattle, where I write this.  Tomorrow, we'll head off on the tandem to Vancouver, where we will meet up with Mark Friis for another great Wheeltales tour through the San Juan Islands.  Then, of course, we'll have to get ourselves home again.  We figure to be away for at least three weeks.

Before we left home, I had to gather our biking and camping gear and get it over to Mark to come in the van from Redlands.  With us, we needed clothes for Tahoe, and then the Texas leg of our trip. I had made jam from our plums and apricots, and was carrying that, plus fresh lemons, for my mom and sisters.  Back in Tahoe, I sorted and repacked, moving the rest of our gear and clothing into the bottom of the suitcases so that we'd have what we needed for the bike portion of our trip ready at hand. Now I am stuffing the panniers, hoping to balance the small load of items we have needed all along and therefore couldn't send from home with Mark. 
Clothes and gear on us, packs and panniers ready to load


I am looking forward to getting on the bike tomorrow and pedaling away towards Vancouver, in no small part because once we head off, we are GONE.  Whatever we have with us, we've got. If I have forgotten something, too bad.  And that is one of the really beautiful things about touring. I can't remember if I have ever written about this before, but it's truly a wonderful thing.  You have what you have.  If you need something, you figure it out, but you just can't take it all with you, so you don't.  You get to leave a lot behind.  We don't do that very often in our lives.  Turns out it's very liberating, and I can't recommend it enough.
Put this back in the car - for later!

So here's to leaving *most* of it all behind, and following the open road. I'll write if I can.

Friday, February 8, 2019

A different discipline


Sometimes this stuff keeps me up at night.

I might talk with a bunch of people about ideas, and I'm often composing things in my head during the day when I am around others. But I can't actually write unless I'm on my own. It's hard to concentrate enough to put a sentence together - so I find that I'm not very successful if I'm in a room full of other people. I tried that once or twice during my Makers' group (when my creative friends get together to work on our projects), and it was just a bust. It took me the full four hours to compose one essay, and I don't believe I've ever even gotten back to the blog to post that one. So what is the point of this post? What has kept me up tonight? Well, I want to answer one of the questions that we got frequently during our trip and that we continue to get now that we've completed our journey.

"How did we do it?"
"How did we find the motivation to continue on the trip when we ran into obstacles?" 
"What kind of problems did we run into and how did we keep going for all those months?" 

Maybe that's a couple of questions, but I think it's really just one. And it's one that Roger and I both struggle to answer, because the simplest thing to say is, "we always had a plan B." We knew if we had to, we could ship the bike home. We even joked from time to time about shipping the bike to France, where I could make up the blog by using Internet resources to find and post photos and do research about the places that we would have been riding through had we been back in the States! 

That was never a very real option for us, but it illustrates the degree to which our resources provided us with opportunities. We didn't have to do this trip - it was our choice - and we didn't suffer while we were doing it. In fact, Roger on this last leg just a couple weeks ago made the observation that we really had not had to "rough it," as he put it. This wasn't the first time he'd said that.  It came up frequently on our trip.  And every time this topic came up, I had to laugh. Maybe he had some romanticized notion about the hardships we'd endure as we traveled the country, but I told him multiple times that at the age of 58, I wasn't really interested in sleeping in a ditch! I didn't have any driving desire to experience some incredibly raw and taxing hardship or deprivation just to continue on this journey. That's not why I did it.  I'm old enough, and well enough set in my ways, that I enjoy my creature comforts. I was interested in the trip and I wanted to experience every day as fully as possible, but I don't feel the least bit deprived because we never had to camp on the side of the road!  Although we did have some discussion about whether that might be how we would cross the desert and complete this final push. And I carried an extra water bladder for 6 months in the expectation that I might need to fill it so that I could sleep in the desert off the side of the road. But we'd sent our camping equipment home before reaching Kingman two years ago. We figured to just blast across the long stretch and make it to the hotel in Ludlow - no camping. So there wasn't going to be any sleeping off in the desert the first time around. And the second time around, of course, we knew it would be really, really cold if we tried that, and we weren't planning to do so.

So, when I think about how I would respond to that question, what actually comes to mind is not how I found motivation to ride my bicycle everyday. That was fun and that was why we were there. That's what we set out to do. What actually impresses me the most about my own journey is that I found the discipline to maintain my blog, night after night, for six months. I kept that going because I really couldn't sleep if I didn't put my stories down everyday. It really was kind of a need in me, something that I had to do in order to make room the next day for the new experiences that we were going to have. And since returning home, there have been so many times that I have wanted to tell more of my story, to try and at least keep up with the things that were happening as we tried to get back out there and finish the ride. And yet - months would pass and I wouldn't write a thing!  

The most telling example of this is in the drafting of this particular post.

I had it in mind nearly 2 years ago. I often composed parts of it in my head, without writing them down, and finally one day last August when I was visiting my brother in Texas, I drafted what comes next and sent it to myself. I had a very strong desire to get it into the blog last fall so that I could post some catch-up stories before we actually got out there and finished the last run. And yet - I came home from Greg's house without posting the draft . . . and fall passed, and Christmas came and went, and then the first week of January . . . and I still hadn't gotten that draft posted. 

Yet when we did the ride itself, I managed to record each night of it!  I didn't have the computer - just my phone. But I wrote each evening before going to bed, capturing the events, thoughts and feelings of the dayl  But before that part o the trip - nothing. And since the trip - nothing!  Nearly a month has passed since we got home, and finally here I am, trying to put this to bed. It's 2:30 in the morning. And I'm sitting in the living room dictating this to my phone, with the anticipation that I'll get upstairs at some point tomorrow and flesh it out and find that second part that I wrote at Greg's, and put it all together and post it. But I don't know that I'm actually going to find the discipline to do it and that's ultimately what this post is about. We did this trip which many people view as an amazing accomplishment. They respond to our adventure with a sense of awe about how we mustered our will and found the motivation and determination to carry on. And I'm here to tell you -- taking a big chunk of your life to go do something specific like the bicycle trip we took, is nothing compared to harnessing your discipline to deal with something like this blog in the midst of the life that we all live everyday.

Perhaps it's best to just say it's a different kind of discipline. It requires setting aside the things that fill our lives every day when we are actually working, or caring for a home, or engaged in our communities, looking after children, visiting with family or friends, or taking care of obligations. Even keeping up with friends on social media, or trying to pay attention to the news, or enjoying a program on the television consumes time in our lives every day. We have to prepare meals, we wash our clothes, we clean our houses. If you are off on some great adventure, you don't do many of those things. If you have decided you're going to ride 50 to 60 miles everyday, then that's what you do. But you're not being distracted by committee meetings or sweeping up the kitchen or emptying the dishwasher. You ride those 50 miles because you don't have anything else to do!

I have at least half a dozen topics that are part of my story that I haven't written about yet, because I have not developed the discipline to get myself at the keyboard to capture those thoughts, to craft them, to edit myself, to find a photo, and to publish the post. I have a thousand reasons everyday why I don't do it. And if there's anyone reading this post that wonders whether or not they could take a trip like we did, whether or not they could ride a bicycle 10,000 miles - the answer is: sure! Anybody who has the time to spend and the financial resources to be away from their "real life" for a couple of months could do what we did. Because it's the real lives that we live that are so amazing to me.  Taking a 6 month vacation - how could any of us fail at that?! It's how any of us manage to accomplish anything at all given all the demands on our time while we're just doing what we do to "live" is the real mystery.

How did I feel about all this a couple of months ago, when I penned the following at my brother's house?  Read on.

On multiple occasions, both while we were on our journey and afterwards, I've been asked by people, "how did you do that?" Since I am usually standing right in front of the questioner, I can be pretty sure their focus is a question about how we got up every day and rode a bicycle for 50 to 60 miles. I mean, if that's not what they're interested in, they'll correct me as I begin to respond.

So I have been able to reply that we didn't consider it a burden, but rather an opportunity. Throughout our trip I usually experienced a real sense of freedom as well as luxury, perhaps something akin to the freedoms one might have experienced at the age of 20 taking a three-month backpacking trip across Europe. Make no bones about it, Roger and I understood that we were essentially on a six-month vacation. Who gets to do that? So it wasn't all that difficult, once you wrap your head around the idea that you're going to take a long vacation and spend it riding a bicycle, to recognize that everyday you're going to get up and ride your bicycle!

Granted, there were days when we were very tired. There were days when we looked at the weather or the terrain ahead of us and recognized it was going to be a very difficult day. But that's kind of like the joke about fishing. A bad day fishing is better than a good day in the office. If what you enjoy is fishing, then it is the act of fishing, including the challenges of finding the right spot, the right lure, the right casting technique, that turns you on. Those are the things that bring you joy. You also have a lot of joy when you bring in some nice fish, but there are people who fish all day and put the fish back in the water. So it's the accomplishment of having done what you set out to do that brings you the deepest joy and satisfaction.

Moving our bicycle, ourselves, and our stuff around the country for six months felt like that to me. There was comfort in the routine, even as there was recognition that each day would bring something different - some new puzzle to solve, some new crisis to avert, some disaster to remedy. My appreciation for Roger's MacGyver skills grew weekly! There wasn't anything we experienced that he was unable to fix. I myself got very handy with needle and thread, and made repeated repairs to our jerseys, our bags and our equipment. Duct tape and zip ties became our best friends! And so we made it around the country, stopping only when we were forced to by the accident that ended our trip.

We are trying to get back to Kingman to finish our trip. It's more than symbolic. We both feel a deep need to complete this broken circle. It is hard to believe that it will be 2 years soon since our accident. One of the advantages of having shared aspects of our trip through Facebook is that I often get a reminder of our time on the road from those silly "remember this?" postings that Facebook brings back to you. I know from those that we were at Ashokan Family Camp about 2 years ago. Soon we'll be traveling through Tennessee and making for the Natchez Trace. By September we'll be approaching Texas and our visit with friends and family there. And the largest part of October will include our trip back along Old Route 66. Good times for sure! And bittersweet also. I know this because I got to relive all of it last year when the memories were just one year old.

So, what is this different discipline? What do I mean by that? Well, the first discipline is just sticking with the task, in this case a monumental one perhaps, and doing something everyday because it's what you set out to do. But that's the easy part! The harder discipline, it turns out, is managing what happens in your real life. Taking care of all the stuff that needs to be done when you maintain a home, or have a job, interact with friends or raise a family. Anybody, and I'm pretty sure I mean anybody, could take a 6-month vacation and do exactly what they want for half a year. Really, where's the challenge in that?

The challenge comes in just living your life and in that frame of reference, accomplishing anything at all! As an example, examine my own efforts. I have wanted to continue my tale. I have any number of stories to tell about our path back to Kingman over the last two years. To my mind, those stories may be more compelling, may be more inspirational, than the story I could tell about how we played for 6 months. And yet, I have not been able to find the discipline to put myself in front of the computer and capture my thoughts. My days are so full with the mundane activities of life in this time and place that I haven't been able to break through that detritus and do something very simple that I figured out how to do almost every day for 6 months running. With pictures! So I'm struggling to get the wheels turning again. 

I'm going to give it my best shot. I'm going to try and go back through the things that have happened in the past year-and-a-half and bring my story up-to-date. I want to try and capture what happened after the glory of the bike ride. Because in the past two years, roughly, Roger and I have had had two bicycle accidents. I fell, and broke my wrist, prompting a later need for surgery to correct carpal tunnel syndrome that flared up in my recuperation. I've had a trigger finger release surgery (and need another one!). Roger has had another bicycle accident of his own. I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and AFib. I began a new career, teaching at the University. All this!  In two years! To be honest, the accumulation of these injuries and illnesses make me question how we ever made it around the country on a bicycle! But we did, and we're going to go out there and finish the trip despite these setbacks. It's just taking so long! And in the middle of those accidents came recuperation, recovery, training to ride again, and finally - joy on a bicycle. That was a long time coming, but it did come back. And I'd like to celebrate that as well as lay out what this part of the journey has been like.

So buckle up. If you're interested in the story, they'll be something more to read. My hope is to clear my mind of all these things that I keep feeling like I have to capture. My hope is to be able to discover that discipline that I was able to exercise during our trip until I manage to tell the rest of the story.


Saturday, January 12, 2019

Day 197, Part 3: There's no place like home

Traveled the country, but hard to find a more stunning sight
While we were visiting with our friends, the rains ended, the rainbow came out, and we were able to change into dry clothes and enjoy a dry but cold ride home.

What a beautiful day it turned out to be. What an excellent adventure it was!

Apple Valley to Redlands, 63 miles


Day 197, Part 2: Escape!

Heading through the pass
Roger made a comment at one point while we were riding through San Bernardino. We really hadn't had anything too much to deal with on this trip, so riding home through a pounding rain was just about par for the course. We had to have something to overcome!

The trip through the Cajon Pass was not quite as awful as I feared it would be. We had a lot of room on the shoulder, and it was not raining when we started down. Plus, trucks are supposed to go 45 miles an hour and they are in the lane adjacent to the shoulder. So we had a little bit of a buffer from the faster moving cars in the main line of traffic. Even so it was dicey, (probably the scariest 30 minutes of our entire trip) and I was extremely relieved when we were able to get off at Cleghorn and conclude our trip on the old portion of Route 66 that winds through the canyon. It's kind of amazing to realize that there's such a beautifully scenic portion of that old route right here in my own backyard!
Old Route 66 through the Cajon Pass

We got rained on a couple of times, but were mostly able to dry out in between the sprinkles until we approached the San Bernardino Airport. Then the sky just opened up on us! We were soaked! The clouds were incredible. We almost never see storms like this here in this part of the world.
Weather's coming

And then we arrived! We had lots of friends who came out to greet us and welcome us home. The newspaper was there to take some pictures and they've published a story in our local paper. It was fun, and wonderful to feel the accomplishment of reaching our town.

Soggy, but safe

But we were not yet home . . .


Day 197, Part 1: McDonald's Ho!

It was comforting when we left this morning to not be in the rain. We pulled out from Anita's house after our goodbyes at about 7:40. Just a few minutes later, at 7:52, the first couple of drops fell on my jacket. But this is the part of the world where a rain forecast might be five hundredths of an inch in an hour, and we made it another hour and a half before having any problem with the drops again.
Anita and Archie

There were even brief moments with sunshine, causing our hopes to rise. But as we got higher up, we ran into the rain. It's just a slight rain falling now at about 3,900 feet. Roger needs to charge his Garmin watch! So we pulled into a Starbucks, where we are watching the weather and hoping for a brief break.
Not looking good

We nearly fell over getting into the parking lot. He came at it with a little bit too much angle, and it was very slick, and it had one of those bumps, and the bike truly did tip over but we both pulled our right legs out and caught it before we fell! Crazy.

Anyway, with the weather being even worse on the other side of the pass, no one is coming to meet us at the McDonalds. So we're spending a little bit more time here, making this our stop. That way we won't have to get off once we are on the interstate. We'll just stay on through the two exits until we can get off at Cleghorn. No McDonald's for us!
Joshua tree