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I got back to San Francisco this past Saturday, and have been really caught up in doing things to feel at home again - like stocking up on my favorite foods (and baking!), riding my mountain bike across the city, and especially just being around Camilo - who managed to grow an inch taller than me in the past three months. I love being here, but it’s still kind of weird.

I find myself both compelled and challenged by the idea of trying to end this project (the sense of The Ride itself, and this narrationof it); I feel I should summarize my 11 weeks of adventure into digestible bits but know the most important/meaningful parts of this trip are (typically) complicated and inter-related, and defy tidy summaries. That’s one reason I really enjoyed keeping this blog: it was a way to capture what was happening as the process went along, with the feeling of that time and place, instead of looking back and trying to re-create it.

But here I am, on the other side of nearly 4,400 miles, back in my little pink shack and on the familiar streets of my city. The ride is over (though other roads beckon, already!!) - and I think I need to wrap up my narrative too.

Things People Ask Me

Was I ever afraid?

I was never afraid of people I encountered on the trip; there were some I didn’t necessarily like, but no one was threatening or creepy. Sometimes people drove stupidly but no one seemed to be trying to run me off the road. For a few days in South Dakota I was afraid of getting caught on the prairie in a thunderstorm (it’s the lightning that’s dangerous), but after a while I realized I could take cover under a bale of hay, if it came to that, and it stopped being frightening and became more of a game - especially since I was so lucky at evading the storms.

Didn't I get lonely?

I really didn’t get lonely, which was interesting and slightly surprising. I figured I would be, a little bit, especially after I left the Cycle America group. But even at home I need a good dose of solitude, and I was pretty comfortable on my own - though I ended up talking to myself kind of a lot, and catch myself doing it even here.

Meeting strangers was one of things I looked forward to as I planned the trip, being one of the highlights of traveling (along with the utter joy of moving along a country road and being in all that landscape). I found it much easier than I’d expected to connect with people, including simply striking up conversations with someone sitting next to me at a bar - which isn’t something I tend to do here at home. (Sitting at the bar is an easier way to get to talk to people than being at a table - plus it seems like your food comes faster, which doesn’t make sense but worked out).

Overall it was a great combination of being on my own and having company. Like pretty much every aspect of the trip, it just worked out.What I hadn’t expected, and really loved, was getting to read the comments people wrote on my blog and emails some folks sent me directly. That was so supportive - I found myself almost overwhelmed with appreciation and affection, which is the opposite of lonely.

Plus, once I hit Minnesota in late July, I also had a fair amount of actual company over different stretches: Jon rode with me into St Paul, and came over to camp with me in Wisconsin and again for six nights in New York; I met a couple in Michigan riding the same route I was, and we ended up staying in the same campgrounds for about 10 days, riding separately during the day and meeting up in the evening; I got to spend a couple of evenings with my sister and then a weekend at her house in Ann Arbor; and in the last couple of weeks of the trip I stayed with friends and relations in Albany, Ithaca, Northampton and Hull. That added a whole sense of community and celebration at the end, which I hadn’t planned but was really wonderful.

What surprised me the most?

*Climate change is in full swing, and the weather was wrong everywhere: starting with too much rain in Wyoming, South Dakota and Minnesota (with subsequent flooding - and South Dakota’s plague of frogs); too little rain and too much heat all summer in New York (until I got there, naturally); and of course way too cold here in SF.

*There is a lot of countryside in this vast country - a lot. My 4,400 miles of riding were almost entirely on two-lane country roads, except for intentional forays into places like Rapid City, Minneapolis, Albany and Boston - and even then I was only on busy streets when I got to the center of town. West of the Missouri River some of those roads had a lot of traffic, since there aren’t many roads to choose from, but they still traversed forests and enormous fields of crops and/or wildflowers (my favorite, naturally).

*RV campgrounds turned out to be great places to camp, which I hadn’t expected at all. Usually when I go camping I want the most secluded and under-developed sites possible, but on this trip I really appreciated the showers, laundry rooms and wi-fi that most RV camps provided. Plus they were generally close to stores (and bars!) in small towns, so it was easier to get the things I needed.

*The interstate highway I-90 from Buffalo to Gillette, WY was one of the best roads I got to ride on! There was less traffic than on some of the two-lane roads crossing Montana, the shoulder was enormous and in great condition, and for once the rumble strip was well out of my way and felt like a protective barrier in my favor. (Based on that experience I got on I-90 again in South Dakota, but that kind of sucked and I got off after about 15 miles.)

*East of the continental divide, this country is paved in corn. Most of it looked like proprietary GMO stuff, too - based on the little signs stuck at the ends of the rows. It was really hard to get away from corn syrup in the little what-passes-for-food in the convenience stores I often had to forage in, or even the grocery stores in small towns along the way. Not to mention all the ethanol being produced (those fields had signs too). I knew this, on some level, but to see it for myself was still surprising. In a bad way - knowing that corn is heavily subsidized, to the detriment of supporting smaller farms and more sustainable/organic crops and localized/community distribution.

*There are bike lanes and off-road bike paths all over the country - in the smallest communities and in big cities. I was blown away by the bike paths in and around Minneapolis & St. Paul, but there were great paths in Spokane, Washington; Kellogg, Idaho; Schenectady, NY; and leading into Boston, too. Of course there were also bike lanes that abruptly ended in gravel, and hundreds of miles of roads with no shoulders - but I got used to sharing the road with logging trucks, RVs, and reckless mini-vans. The surprise was how many places have great bike facilities - and how lame San Francisco is compared to Minnesota. Ha!

What were the hardest parts?

*Finding fruits, vegetables, and other real food along the country roads. Many of the named dots on my maps that looked like a town were really just an intersection with a gas station “convenience store” - which is convenient if you want candy, high-fructose-corn-syrup-and-salt products, cigarettes or crappy beer, but not so handy for dinner. I learned to stock up on a couple days’ worth of food whenever I encountered it. (And also learned that chocolate milk is readily available and pretty satisfying as an afternoon snack - but I’m still detoxing from all that corn syrup…)

*Finding places to pee out in the middle of nowhere. It’s easy enough to go in the bushes or behind a tree, but large areas of Wyoming and South Dakota were mostly prairie & grass; and then in Ontario, New York and Massachusetts there were a lot of small housing developments along the roads - I didn’t think it was cool to pee in people’s front yards…

*Avoiding thunder-storms, and worrying about them. After about a week I decided that I wasn’t going to bother checking the weather anymore, I’d just keep my eye on what was actually happening - because expecting a storm was making me more anxious than just dealing with them when they hit. (Though in fact I was so lucky I never did get hit by one when I was out on my bike… still amazed by that.)

*Dealing with my morale when riding for a long time against the wind. I don’t so much mind riding hills but riding against the wind really sucks. Plus it makes no sense that it’s so hard - it’s just AIR for crying out loud! I found that swearing really loudly was mildly amusing but only temporarily satisfying… and listening to music on my iPod was much more effective (with just one ear-bud in, because I promised my sister-in-law Paula that I’d be careful). I could only sing along to every other line (or I’d get too out of breath) but it was still better than swearing.

*Packing up a wet tent on too many mornings. Well, a wet rain fly. It’s against my religion to put away a wet tent: it grows mildew, and loses its waterproof magic, and is a lot heavier to carry, too. But it rained so much, and/or the grass was so dewy, that it couldn’t be avoided. I’m not sure if my tent survived this trip… but it had a long life of adventure before this summer, so it’s not really a tragic end. Just irritating (and I felt guilty about it - usually in conjunction with feeling like I was in a hurry, because it was getting late and I Should Be On the Road Already).

What was it like in the middle of the country (different from SF)?

This might sound like a cliché, but I noticed as soon as I got out of San Francisco: this nation is obsessed with guns. There are gun shops, ammo shops, shooting ranges - and people with pistols on their belts - all over the place, from Washington all the way to Massachusetts. It made me laugh sometimes, but also gives me the creeps. (Though I sort of wished I could have participated in that machine-gun shoot in South Dakota…)

This is also kind of a cliché, but people in Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota really were extremely friendly and helpful. I think a lot of them were on vacation too, which maybe made them jollier, but even discounting the folks I met in campgrounds I found people were very easy to talk to and most of them wanted to offer me something: cold water, a beer, some dessert… (I enjoyed accepting these offers, of course!).

I was a little surprised to find this stopped being the case almost as soon as I hit Minnesota, where people mostly ignored me (and each other). Upstate New York was the most unfriendly (duh - but I wasn’t expecting it) - and in general was blighted and grim, which I think added to the overall feeling. No one was hostile to me there (except in Utica, which was generally a really crappy place to be), it was just… grim.

Has my life changed from being on this trip?

I thought it might, without knowing how - and I probably still don’t understand all the ways I may have changed… but here are the things I already feel are different:

*I’m 50 years old! I’m feeling pretty strong these days, and my strongest feeling is: I don’t have to take crap from anybody! (Not that I do, really, or even have to confront much of it - but this might affect how I do my work. I’m interested in seeing how…)

*Apparently I can do just about anything I set my mind to! That’s pretty fun. I wonder if I can figure out how to have a lot more of these kinds of adventures? I think so…

*I realized I’m not nearly as shy as I thought I was. I can pretty much talk to anybody about something. But at the same time, I really do like peace & quiet and solitude, and I'd rather talk to one person at a time. So I’m still not going to cocktail parties (not that I get invited to many) but I know it’s because I don’t like them, rather than being completely socially incompetent.

*Janis Totty found me! She was my best friend in 9^th grade and someone I think of as my first love, whose family moved away in 1977 and who was lost to me practically ever since… So of course I changed course to go to Northampton to see her. Over 30 years later we still have so much in common, so many parallel tracks in our lives, that we fell right back into being friends again. What a gift…

*I found Jon Duncan! Or we found each other, in a laundromat in Missoula, Montana. (It wasn’t quite that random: our mutual friend Pam got us in touch so I’d have a place to stay when I rode through Minneapolis/St Paul; he just happened to be in Missoula the same time I was, and it was laundry day, etc.) Feels kind of nutty to put this on my bike blog, but it’s true: my life is different now that he’s in it, even if I’m not sure how that’s gonna manifest itself (given that St Paul’s about 2,000 miles away from San Francisco)… But that’s part of the adventure, whether it’s a bike trip or a relationship: you throw yourself into the project and do the best you can as it goes along. This is also the biggest surprise of the summer - just about the last thing I expected to happen. Yay!

How does it feel to be back?

Complicated! I love sleeping in my bed but miss sleeping outside; I am having a blast riding my trusty old mountain bike around the city, but it's also really loud & busy. (And there isn't any corn...) Mostly I feel inefficient and jolly, which is pretty different from my typical multi-tasking focused approach to life/work tasks. I'm enjoying that - a slightly vacationy feeling as I get back to work. I'm also enjoying all my hip & groovy food (organic everything! salad every day, and toast, and peaches and strawberries! Strong coffee & good beer! Etc.). I have a great life - my ride wasn't about escaping that, and it's good to come home to. Although I really am planning some small and medium adventures before winter hits, and a few big ones for next summer... and there's always Minnesota...

Mostly I'm happy to be around Camilo, and to see people I care about - really looking forward to more of that.

So, anybody wanna go for a ride...?