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Welcome to Aging Adventurist. I am attempting to do one adventure every day for the month of August, 31 days, 31 adventures, some big, some small, some physical, some mental. I hope you’ll come along, or join me!

Day 3: Tuesday, August 3
Mt. Tom hike, home to summit RT

Mount Tom, in Easthampton and Holyoke, MA, may be overcrowded, not that tall, and sullied with its peak covered in cell and radio towers. Nonetheless, I feel lucky to have it in my back yard. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve climbed this hill and hiked along its spectacular ridge to the tower-crowded summit. For Day 3 of my Adventure-a-Day August, I did a walk out my driveway and up Mt. Tom again, this time for a sunset hike. Nature delivered with a breathtaking multi-staged sunset that underscored my appreciation once more for this landscape overlooking the City of Easthampton.

Adventure: Mt. Tom round trip summit hike
Distance traveled: 11+ miles (6 miles road/trail walking, 5+ miles hiking); 3 hours, 20 mins.
Challenges: A minor climb up 1,200 feet; fast hiking with no stops; and I forgot my headlamp so returned in low light.
Risks: Slipping and falling off the side of the ridge, with 200-300-foot sheer drops.
Difficulty scale 1-10: 4.5
Highlights: Mt. Tom always delivers for me. I’ve used this hike as an early training run many times, it starts the blood flowing with a fast walk to the mountain and a varied walk with a couple of scrambles along the ridge to the summit. Once up on the ridge, the bugs disappear, the wind picks up, and the trail wends between spectacular viewing outcrops. And after 3 hours and 20 minutes of walking and hiking without a break, I felt like I got a decent little workout.

Welcome to Aging Adventurist. I am attempting to do one adventure every day for the month of August, 31 days, 31 adventures, some big, some small, some physical, some mental. I hope you’ll come along, or join me!

Day 2: Monday, August 2
A stroll through Art in the Orchard, Easthampton, MA

For today’s August adventure, I took a local crosstown trip with my mother to Art in the Orchard at Park Hill Farm in Easthampton. This is a highly recommended local activity, a stroll through fruit orchards filled with outsized sculptures by regional artists. The walking is easy and parking is free. Donations accepted, and don’t pass up the chance to buy some fresh fruit on the way out!

Adventure: Walk through Art in the Orchard with my mother
Distance traveled: Drive 3 miles, slow stroll about a quarter mile total
Challenges: Enduring hot sun for an hour plus; making sure everyone is adequately hydrated and fueled for the activity (they weren’t)
Risks: Fainting from heat and hunger; overdosing on great art!
Difficulty scale 1-10: 1
Highlights: This is a perfect family activity. You can take as much time as you want, the orchards are large and spacious, not crowded, and offer big patches of shade. The art is delightfully diverse, interesting, colorful, alluring and intriguing. And the fruit is exquisite and sweet. Not to be missed.

Welcome to Aging Adventurist. I am attempting to do one adventure every day for the month of August, 31 days, 31 adventures, some big, some small, some physical, some mental. I hope you’ll come along, or join me!

Day I: Sunday, August 1
Sea kayaking, Cape Cod

My Day 1 adventure was a 5-mile kayak trip off of Mayo Beach in Wellfleet Bay, Cape Cod. It was an ideal, moderate outing to kick off my month of daily adventures – not too difficult, yet provided some minor thrills, beauty and conversation with seals, like this guy:

Adventure: Sea kayaking, Wellfleet, Cape Cod
Distance traveled: About 5 miles in 2 hours of paddling
Challenges: Navigating a strong incoming tide current/fighting 2-foot waves; traversing open water
Risks: Overturning in open water; drowning, obvs
Difficulty scale 1-10: 3.5
Highlights: Communing with seals in the middle of the bay. Floating in the sea (inlet). Gorgeous views of bay islands, wildlife and the distant shores. Decent shoulder workout when paddling against the tide.

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.