Friends, if it's an adrenaline rush you seek, I highly recommend cycling out of town in the fog and half-light of early morning along narrow, winding roads, being passed by a parade of large construction vehicles piloted by a team of Neanderthals whose breakfast of Dunkin Donuts coffee and amphetamines is just kicking in. Such was our last day on the road and quite a doozy it was. Pennsylvania sent us off with a parting shot of horrific traffic and a series of six to eight hundred foot climbs that gave us our toughest climbing of the entire trip. We must have climbed, seriously, four to five thousand feet in total in the first forty miles. At this point we detoured from highway 6, south along the Susquehanna River, to meet with Marty in Pittston, PA for our escape rendezvous. We un-ceremoniously loaded our gear in the back of his pickup and made for the home turf of Wayne, NJ and the end of our trip.
At journey's end, from our home in California to New Jersey, we had traveled just over 3000 by bicycle, about 620 by vehicle, 750 miles by train and 120 miles by boat. We repaired two flat tires and went through a set of tires each. There were no mechanical breakdowns worth noting and only a minimal number of physical breakdowns aside from some sore rashy butts, a brief gout attack and my self-inflicted bratwurst poisoning. We were flipped off twice and honked at only four times in anger and uncountable times in encouragement. Along the way we met hundreds of wonderful, helpful people while running into only a few buttheads...too few to matter. We lived on gas station food for what seemed like weeks and Kelly and I have made a solemn oath to never eat another honey roasted peanut for as long as we live. Ditto for Jack's Links Beef Jerky. Unbelievably, we encountered headwinds for only about a day and a half while enjoying numerous days of tailwinds, many of them real screamers.
Now that we’re back, people inevitably ask if there were times we just wanted to quit and go home. Kelly and I never felt that way and although there were days where we were definitely ready to get the day’s riding over with we never even considered packing it in. In fact, the oddest sensation we had was that the trip had been too easy and at some point, two thirds of the way across the country, we wondered how we had gotten so far. I must say that, although some of the scenery was somewhat less than stimulating (think Wisconsin…gosh is that another silo, Wow!) I was never once bored riding through it. There were a lot of hours of just being inside our own heads and I’d like to tell that I came to some profound insights into the meaning of life but I just can’t. The fact is I don’t know what the Hell I was thinking for all that time.
Along the way we learned a few things. We learned that big things can be accomplished with many small steps. We learned that we need way less to be happy, healthy people than we typically have. It is an immutable law of bike touring that, even when there has been almost no traffic, a large truck will pass you on the steepest, narrowest part of any hill. As in life, all the things we worried about; traffic, hills, wind, bugs, tornadoes, plague, pestilence turned out not to be big issues and, with all our efforts at planning, events seldom occur as we wish but they always turn out ok. I learned to cook bratwurst thoroughly and that I hate raccoons. I also learned that my wife, aside from being the most beautiful and sweetest gal in town, is a tough and resilient traveler whose great attitude helped make this a wonderful journey for both of us. This will factor very favorably in her eight-year marriage review coming up next month. (Announcement: for those of your who may be humor-challenged, the preceding statement was a joke). In all, it was a great trip and I heartily recommend it to anyone who has a few months and more than a few dollars to spend. Thanks to all of you who’ve joined us by reading this blog so, until our next adventure, this is Brad and Kelly signing off.
Keep ‘em spinning
No comments:
Post a Comment