On the road

I'm en route to the starting line, where we dip our rear tires in the westsiiide ocean. It feels so good to finally be underway. To be done with work, done with packing and planning. I spent so many days planning and training and worrying about equipment and logistics and whether or not I had lost my mind, and a bunch of other things, that it's good to be in motion. You'd be amazed at how many things you need to think about for something like this. You need a sleeping bag, only you need a sleeping bag that weighs 2 pounds instead of 4, that is able to be compressed into a small compact ball, that will keep you warm on chilly 27 degree nights in the higher elevations, as well as 74 degree muggy August nights in NY. You need flashlights, headlamps, waterproof rain gear, waterproof panniers. You need cooking utensils, cooking fuel, plastic forks, plastic bowls. You need bike stuff! Spare tires, spare brake cables, spare everything. Patch kits, pumps, polar ice Extra gum - the best kind! You need biking shorts, you need shorts for after you're done riding, unless it's cold, then you need pants. So I got pants that zip off into shorts, makes sense. You need hot, you need cold. You need up, you need down. You need left and right, short and long, top and bottom. You need it all and you need it small. We want the world and we want it now!


I left yesterday morning, in a rental car. The whole 'end up in Anacortes, Washington with four bags, one bike, yourself and nothing else not even a spare pair of socks or boxers' is more challenging than you may think.

For example, I was marching around without shoes yesterday. I had already packed all my shoes in boxes being sent back home, so I had to borrow some slippers from the people I'm staying with until I was able to buy some Crocs for the trip. The Crocs will be good, comfortable after riding shoes, (my brother guarantees their comfortability, and after all, that's what I'm looking for, right?! Comfortability, what a goal) good for the showers too, because there will be a fungusamongus and lord knows what else in some of these showers. If they even have showers.

It was hard leaving Los Altos. I was staying with some family friends, the Lanes, and they are very special people. If only the world had more Lanes... We had a great two months together and I will miss them. They were beyond gracious hosts, it felt like home, and they became very good friends. As Lloyd Christmas says - I hate goodbyes!


I shipped all my worldly possessions - which I'm narrowing down pretty nicely except for my four bags, one bike and myself - back home to my moms. Thank you to mom for housing my life's possessions as I wander about the country. Without a plane. I misunderstood Southwest's slogan.


I drove 6 hours through 102 degree heat in the Sacramento delta, or whatever it's called, into southern Oregon. I'm staying with good friends in Medford Oregon. I spent the day by the pool, in the sun, relaxing and feeling grateful. For music and ipods, blue skies and wind that gently rustles the leaves on the trees. If these leaves could talk...
And water! Isn't water cool? H2O. It suspends you, refreshes you, cleans you, you can drink it. Hell, since we're made of 60% water, we'd better like it! Now why can't someone just invent water... get out your chemistry sets from when you were 7, grab one H and 2 O's and abracadabra please and thank you open sesame, rumplestiltskin, ikindawannalaya, whammo! Combine them, and let's move forward. Enough about this lack of water nonsense. Water your lawns whenever you'd like. Feel free! Even though if you water your lawn between 8am and 5pm then you're just confused because it evaporates before your very eyes (disclaimer: if you water your lawn between 8 and 5, I am sorry. Please water on, forget I mentioned it. I don't know anything.)

I'm excited about the trip, it's officially begun.

It feels like a spa getaway up here... in fact, we got massages for good measure, just to make it official. I justified that by figuring that my back and shoulders and arms will be going through enough punishment in the next two months hunched over a bike for six hours then sleeping on the ground for eight hours, that they deserved some advanced reward. It's like Pavlov's dogs, only we salivate before we hear the bell. Pretty standard really.


Tomorrow I will drive halfway, to Mount Saint Helens, and camp there. Hopefully it does not explode while I am sleeping. Ummm, sir, we have some bad news for you. While you were sleeping... the volcano erupted! So now you're dead. HOpe you don't mind.

Then Friday morning I'll drive the last couple hours to Anacortes. I'll drop my four bags off at the motel, then I'll drive 20 miles east and drop the rental car off at Burlington (since they didn't have any rental agencies in Anacortes.) Then I'll ride my bike with myself on it 20 miles west to Anacortes. And Saturday morning we will dip our rear tires in the Pacific Ocean and the journey begins.

And while we're at it - how come some caterpillars become annoying moths while others become beautiful butterflies??? Pretty bird, pretty bird. Life ain't fair. We got no food, we got no jobs, OUR PETS HEADS ARE FALLIN OFF!

And when are we going to decide on a universal spelling for cappuccino? People just start throwing a few of each letter in there and shrug their shoulders. Ahhh, here's a few P's, few C's, few more C's, maybe an N or two - looks good! Can someone finalize the spelling and give people the memo? All across the country people are missing letters, including too many letters. It's a mess.
As are the leaky coffee cups! Can't we create seamless paper coffee cups that don't drip out the back? It's 2007, I think it's time.

Bicycle Trip From Sea to Shining Sea

Soooo, this is the route.

http://www.adventurecycling.org/routes/northerntier.cfm

From Anacortes, Washington to Bar Harbor, Maine. Actually we are modifying this route slightly. From Minnesota - instead of going through Iowa, Illinois, Indiana (I don't like states that begin with the letter I - just kidding) and Ohio - we will instead go through Wisconsin, take a ferry across Lake Michigan, ride across Michigan, into Ontario Canada and come back into the US in Niagara Falls. From there we'll join back up with this route to Bar Harbor.

It covers 4,295 miles, we hope to average around 70 miles a day and complete the trip in around 2 months.

It goes over 3 mountain ranges-- the Cascades, the Rockies, and the Adirondacks. It passes through Glacier National Park in Montana. And a whole lotta country roads in between! Take me home.

I am beginning the journey with 6 others. Two of whom will only be with us through Montana. Jim, a schoolteacher from Iowa, is leaving us in Montana to take a different route and Kevin is flying back home out of Missoula due to work/time constraints.

We found each other online (hard to find people that want to live out of bags on bikes for two months while pedaling 4,300 miles - imagine that).

Yvette is from California, James is also from California and an interesting thing about him is that he is 68 YEARS OLD. Awesome. Alexander is a Russian guy from NYC. And I am, well, me. At least I think so.

We'll camp each night, sometimes at campgrounds, sometimes in random fields. Hopefully they will be fields of gold, with little leprauchans prancing about. Everything will be carried in 4 panniers (fancy word for bags that attach to bike racks) - two on the front of the bike and two on the back. Everything needs to fit in these bags. The kitchen, the living room, the dining room, the bathroom, the bedroom - all of it will be in these bags. Weight is a concern, obviously, since pedaling a bike over the Rockies is hard enough without having 50 pounds of nonsense attached.

So, I guess the real question is: why the (#$&#@$(%(#@#* am I doing this???

I'm not sure I have a straightforward answer for that. It's been an idea I've had for awhile. I've been zig-zagging through life, looking for something. I don't even know what it is, but it's hard to find. I think it may be a state of mind. The one word answer would be happiness I suppose, but aren't we all just looking to be happy in whatever way we know how? I do know that I am tired of traffic and mindless radio DJ drivel. I don't care about 0% financing for the first 6 months - no money down! The evening news should be renamed the bad news. What speaks to you - in a way that you understand, in a way that is meaningful to you? I struggle with that.

When you don't have a job you love, when you weren't born with a profession in mind, when you didn't know that you wanted to be a doctor or a firefighter since you were 6 years old - it gets tough. It becomes a game of trial and error - with error generally winning out.

But we have bills! How are we going to pay these bills and buy this food?

What do you want to be when you grow up young man? Why - I don't want to grow up, I'm a toys-r-us kid!

So we all just cruise around this world of ours. In our own little bubbles. I think of cars as bubbles, like the Jetsons! Meet George Jetsonnnn, his boy Elroy. Stop, go. Red light, green light. Gas prices are outrageous these days! We get coffee in the morning, we check our e-mail, we hope for enlightening messages in our inbox. A lot of us watch TV. Some of us feel numb. Confused about our place in this world. This world of war and chaos and hunger and violence and hatred. And Paris Hilton!

There is love out there too, but many times our daily lives have us so busy that love and hate is more of an afterthought. After we finish work and get to the store and pay our bills and race to the doctors appt and find some lunch and wonder what's for dinner and maybe workout and on and on and on. Phew. We're busy. Waiting to exhale.

So I guess what I'm doing is - taking a step back. A deep, conscious breath. Wondering about my place in the world. Why am I doing the things that I'm doing? Sometimes when you're too focused in you can't see the big picture. Many times artists will take a step back from their painting, or they'll even leave it for a few days and come back again, hoping for a fresh perspective. I am interested in simplifying things. I like the idea of two wheels. The perfectness of the circle. The idea of spheres and planets and rotation (apparently the world is not flat anymore! Thank you to Galileo or whatever genius figured that out. Makes you wonder what else we currently know to be fact that is absolutely false! Scary, when supposed facts become fictitious fodder for future generations) and propulsion and waves and the ocean and the ebbs and flows of life and love and the sun and the moon. I am waiting for these mathematical geniuses to figure out this string theory jazz and explain to us how we are all inter-connected by 26 dimensions. That those things we call coincidence and fate are simply just strings at play! Without a safety net to catch you.

Everybody hopes and wonders that what they're doing is correct. Good. You weigh your options and make decisions and hope for the best. Many of us hope for a better tomorrow, while simply enduring today. We'll eat better tomorrow, contact that friend we've lost touch with tomorrow, start working out tomorrow, take that trip or vacation tomorrow, figure out what job would be better than this god-forsaken-no-good-rotten-dead-end-current-job tomorrow, we'll live life to the fullest - but we will do that - tomorrow!

What about today? Ahhhh, hell. Today is too busy.

So, I'm taking back today. Forget that dumb emo band Taking Back Sunday, I am taking back today. At least for a few days. That saying 'live life to the fullest' haunts me sometimes. I think I'd like to dance like nobody's watching, even though I'm a very bad dancer. It's the freedom of the movement that I'm after. The comfortability in one's skin. I promise to remember the sunscreen. I've lived in NYC once, and northern California once. Supposedly that should make me just right! Not too hard, not too soft, not too hot, not too cold -- the middle bear's porridge.

But I'm left feeling awkward.

So here I go, in pursuit of comfortability!

'Uhhhh, but Andy? It doesn't seem like a bike seat for 6 hours a day would be the place to find comfort?'

Ah, touche. Maybe.