Month: July 2021

It’s nearly August, and in academic world where I work, that means the beginning of the end of summer. I’m not ready to concede my favorite season.

Meanwhile, not to belabor the point, but my head remains somewhere out on the adventure road between Albuquerque and Long Beach. (If you see it, please take caution to drive around.) I mean, I spent more than two months out there pedaling most the day in the open air on my coast-to-coast bike quest, and I haven’t yet succeeded in making the mental and emotional transition to home. The road is addictive.

So, amid my thirst for extended adventure, and in an effort to accentuate the meaning of summer’s final month, here’s my idea:

August Adventure Every Day.

That is, 31 days of adventure, August 1 to August 31, one per day. I am committing to engaging in some kind of adventure every single day for the entire month.

Starting Sunday, August 1, with a mild adventure of kayaking in Provincetown, I will embark on some kind of adventure every single day. Following each adventure, I’ll write a brief synopsis of the experience here, with pictures.

Mostly these will be physical/mental challenges, but not always. A few examples on the adventure calendar: 1) biking up the 3 peaks with roads in the Valley (Mt. Tom, Mt. Sugarloaf and Mt. Holyoke) in one day; 2) night hike the 7 Sisters; 3) write a short story; 4) give blood.

Adventure can mean several different things. For some, rising up out of bed every day is an adventure. Others need adrenaline. In order to qualify as adventure, an activity must contain four components:

1. Unknown outcome. Some sort of risk. There needs to be something on the line, and something to be gained.
2. Movement. Adventure should include going from one place to another, such as by walking, running, hiking, biking, boating, driving or swimming. Or it could mean mentally traveling, such as via video.
3. It should be out of the ordinary. Adventure isn’t something you do every day, or something most people do every day.
4. Challenge. Something to overcome, physically or mentally, that delivers a feeling of reward, or a literal reward, for pushing through and achieving the goal.

I hope you’ll come along with me for Adventure Month. If anyone feels inspired to join me in August Adventure Month, let me know, the more the merrier.

I’ve been missing adventure.

It’s been nearly two weeks since I finished my xUS bike trip, followed by an 11-day road trip return, with a whimsical stop in Las Vegas (117 degrees, but dry!),

wonderful hiking with spectacular views in southwestern Utah,

stops to visit family and friends in Denver and Kansas City (this is my childhood friend, Dan Cannon, from grade school days in Iowa City, IA; we hadn’t seen each other in 35 years!),

a key stop at the Woodford Reserve distillery outside Louisville,

and too much riding in a car.

Thank you to all who have followed along here, I hope you’ll stay with me; more adventures and ruminations to come!

Re-entry to “normal” life after a big adventure is never easy. If the adventure takes place over a long time period, it means it has become a way of life. It has to in order to be successful.

Riding a bike, say, for 6-8 hours a day for 68 days requires that activity to become habit, to be internalized and built in physically, mentally and emotionally. You go to sleep with the next day’s ride on your mind, you wake up with the mindset to execute it, you stretch and slather on sun screen with anticipation for it. You don’t allow yourself to consider not doing it.

After the day’s ride, you assess how it went, any mistakes you made, what you could do better tomorrow. You stretch again, and begin thinking about the next day’s ride. In other words, the ride is on your mind most of the day.

Re-entry requires mentally putting on the brakes, re-ordering priorities, returning to former habits and giving up some of the positive ones you’d acquired on the adventure road.

But there’s a fine line between healthy rest and atrophy. Returning home provides a welcome respite from the strain of daily exertion. The trick is to enable rejuvenation without losing the attributes that were gained from overcoming challenge every day. Give the body and mind rest, but not too much.

Every successful adventure includes a change of perspective. You learn a lot about yourself when you set off into the unknown, push through pain and discomfort, dig deep for energy to continue, and gain distance from the comforts of home.

That perspective is valuable and telling. You discover what parts of your life are most important to you, and which ones are not contributing to your fulfillment. Ideally, you make changes upon your return based on that earned perspective, to accentuate more of what you need for well-being, and minimize or eradicate that which is superfluous.

My xUS bike trip was a great adventure. It included all the components: challenge, danger, triumph, wonder, discovery, fear. But it’s over, and has yielded to the new adventure of making life changes to achieve better balance and happiness.

In some ways, that is even more difficult. It’s what I’ll be working on until my next adventure out there. Not too long.

Day 68, 1 mile, downtown Long Beach to Alamitos Beach, Long Beach, CA
Day 67, 50 miles, Riverside to Long Beach, CA
Day 66, 46 miles, Beaumont to Riverside via Redlands, CA

Sixty-eight days, 3,500+ miles, 61 days riding, seven days off, 16 states crossed, two oceans touched, one flat tire changed, dozens of new and old friends visited, 5 1/2 bugs swallowed, countless energy bars and bottles of Gatorade consumed. Coast-to-coast xUS bike trip completed, Easthampton, MA, to Long Beach, CA. Day 1, Atlantic Ocean, Long Island Sound:

to Day 68, Pacific Ocean, Long Beach, CA:

Click to view the final map of my route.

In the final days of this glorious adventure, as I emerged from the Mojave Desert, battled the winds of San Jacinto, climbed up over the Mt. Gorgonio pass, and cruised the Santa Ana and San Gabriel River bike trails into Long Beach, a persistent memory kept popping back into my head:

One day back in early June, as I rode the quiet, isolated farm roads in north central Texas, a serious cyclist (you know them when you see them – I’m not one) from Las Vegas rode up next to me, moving much faster than me with no weight on his bike. We rode together for a while and I told him about my plan to continue from here through New Mexico, Arizona and across the Mojave to L.A. After a half hour, we parted ways, but as he pulled away from me, I overheard him – thinking I was out of earshot – exclaim: “Are you nuts?”

It gave me pause, as did others’ admonishments about crossing the desert at this time of year. Who am I, after all, to plan a xUS trip when the longest bike trip I’d ever taken was three days?

And among the many challenges of completing this x-country bike tour – the daily army of traffic along the I-95 corridor and cities, the torturously steep hills of southwestern Virginia, the interminably flat nothingness of western Texas, the ceaseless western winds of New Mexico – crossing the Mojave did prove to be the toughest.

It would be an untruth to say I loved every minute of this trip. Some moments were grueling and painful, others were momentous and triumphant. But it is absolutely true to say I’ve cherished every second of the expedition.

As one hopes with any adventure, I’ve gained perspective and knowledge, about myself and others, that I couldn’t have gotten in any other way. The people I’ve met, the old friends I’ve become reacquainted with, and the innumerable observations I’ve witnessed from the seat of my Trek have been invaluable.

So from my finish line here in Long Beach, this marks the terminus of an adventure, but not the end of the adventure, and certainly not the finality of other adventures to come.

Thank you all for riding along with me on this unforgettable trip and sharing in its success. But I hope you won’t go away because I don’t plan to. I will continue writing about adventure and aging, the adventure of aging and aging with adventure. I invite you to continue riding along with me.

Day 65, 46 miles, Yucca Valley to Beaumont, CA
Day 64, 22 miles, Twentynine Palms to Yucca Valley, CA

Happy 4th of July! It also happens to be my birthday, and I just rode 3,300 miles across the US, so I hope you’ll indulge my brief holiday diversion.

I love this country. I love its diversity and variety, its possibility, and most importantly, its concept: freedom. The big, bold, precedent-setting experiment that our forebears dared to embark on in which the people are free to think and say what they want, and get to weigh in on policies and government representation.

But here’s the thing: I love the world. I’ve traveled around it a couple times, and I’ve seen firsthand that people are fundamentally similar wherever you go: most of us want to live interesting, enriching lives, and the vast majority of us want to care for our loved ones as best we can.

We have reason to celebrate this country on this national holiday. But I wish we could also have a World Celebration Day, or something akin to the annual festival I once coordinated at my kids’ elementary school: the One World Festival. (I’m by no means talking about one world government here.) I long to celebrate all people on the planet. It’s not a big planet, and we’ll need to appreciate each other going forward.

Having nearly completed a bike trip across the US, I’ve met a lot of different folks, some with obviously different views from mine, which tend centrist. I’m sorry to say that one of the prevalent themes I’ve encountered is fear. Fear of one another, fear of the “other,” distrust of other’s motives. It’s on the rise and it’s killing us. And it’s particularly American.

This bike trip is not political, and I don’t believe in politicizing friendships and other relationships. But I think some of our political leaders are doing us disfavor by propagating fear, and fostering otherness for the sake of gaining and holding power.

I have many friends, acquaintances, and some family members with different views and outlooks from mine, and I welcome that as long as conversation is respectful and thoughtful. I don’t welcome belief in superiority or privilege of any people over any other people on this planet.

I hope I don’t drive anyone away with this diatribe. My July 4th point is simple: We need each other, we need to work together, Americans, conservative and progressive, all different skin tones, Chinese, Russians, Europeans, Mexicans, Australians, Indians, etc. The level of our fear toward those we don’t know is not warranted. It’s destructive. And not sustainable.

Of course, it’s also possible my brain is rotted from too much exposure in the Mojave. Happy 4th of July, happy Independence Day. Help someone out. Enjoy the day.

Day 63, 111 miles, Parker, AZ, to Twentynine Palms, CA
Day 62, 58 miles, Salome to Parker, AZ
Day 61, 97 miles, Prescott to Salome, AZ
Day 60, 0/work day, Prescott, AZ

If there’s an activity that defines loneliness more accurately than riding a bike through the Mojave at 3:30 a.m., I don’t know what it is.

Lonely, yes, with no cars, no sound, no buildings, no…nothing, really. But also serene, spiritual and beautiful. No cars, no sound, no buildings, etc. I can’t accurately describe the feeling of absolute freedom and peace. Here on Day 63 of my now-68-day xUS bike trip, I wanted the darkness to last longer.

Two minutes out of Parker, AZ, I crossed the Colorado River in the dark, and entered California.

I silently celebrated the welcome to my final state of this trip, and with some trepidation, because I knew before me lie 100 miles of Mojave desert without any breaks for rest, shade, refills, interaction. Just desert all the way to Twentynine Palms. It turned out to be the hardest ride I’ve ever had.

It wasn’t an ideal plan, this Mojave crossing in July, and I wouldn’t recommend it, but there really was no choice. The only way to L.A. from where I am is through the Mojave. The 3:30 a.m. departure was an attempt to beat the heat. When I left Parker, one of the hottest towns I’ve visited, the temperature was 90 degrees, with a high of 115 forecast.

Soon the sun rose behind me and offered a gorgeous panorama.

But I knew that meant the relative cool of the night was soon to end. Temperatures began to rise quickly, and I focused on staying hydrated, fueled and moving forward on California 62 West.

It took about everything I had, today’s ride, especially about 60 miles in, when 62 West entered the Sheephole Valley Wilderness and climbed more than 2,000 feet in the upper-90s heat. At least, with the climb, the temperature dropped a couple degrees.

The Mojave is beautiful in its way, and 62 West offers some interesting attractions, like the Rice (that’s the local name of the road) Shoe Fence, a random assortment of shoes, each pair adorned with a story:

and the Rice desert signpost, which displays notes and stories contributed by passersby:

But of all the notable signs and attractions of today’s difficult desert ride, I’m afraid my favorite was the “Welcome to Twentynine Palms” sign, which I failed to photograph because my phone/camera was too hot. It was 105 when I entered town.

The good news for me is that my 111-mile Mojave crossing was the last long ride of my xUS trip. Long Beach, my final destination, is a mere 160 miles from here, and I have five days to ride it. I’ve gotten a good dose of the desert, and I’m ready to leave it.