Day 0: Home

I share some thoughts before setting off on my coast to coast bicycle trip from Maine to Washington State. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

It's the night before I leave to ride cross-country, and I'm just walking in the neighborhood so I can talk on my phone. One of the things I've been thinking about, kind of feeling the anxiety and anticipation grow for the trip, um, is how complicated it all feels before it's begun, in contrast to how simple it seems to become once you're riding the bike or going on a big hike or a pilgrimage or something of the sort. Um, I've been picking up a lot of anxiety from my parents where I've been living the last nine months. They're obviously concerned about you know the dangers of being on the road and the vulnerabilities you are as a cyclist over such a long duration of time and you know levels of exhaustion and uh just the exposure to cars as well as your own ability to make mistakes. And I think you know that's a really natural concern for a lot of different people to share, but certainly my parents, and uh, I know that those concerns and dangers are real. Um I see it reflected in a lot of different places in life right now, and um and yet those perspectives are kind of held from a position of very little experience of what the actual moment-to-moment uh bike life is like, and just try to remind myself like you know, tomorrow you just have to ride your bike. It's okay. Sometimes it hurts, or sometimes the road is busy and you take a break, or you know, sometimes it feels like it's a long way to go before you get water or food or whatever you need, but um all it is is a sequence of moments in which you make the best decision you can and remember your values and why you choose to do something like this, even when it's hard or lonely or really exhausting. So I feel excited and thankful and grateful for the time and the resources to be able to go, and um yeah, just trying to get everything done and try to be in the right kind of open-hearted space to smile big when I see people and have encounters um with a level of serendipity that makes life really fun when you're doing an experience like that. Um my plan is to ride from Maine where I live. Uh tomorrow we'll go to Freeport, Maine, which is where I went to school growing up, and is the closest, kind of just most homey section of the coast to me, and then ride back home, spend the night tomorrow, and take off west uh Tuesday morning, the 4th of August, um heading towards Washington State. I hope to see a lot of friends along the way. I have a ton of friends on the West Coast, all up and down the west coast, and this is an opportunity where I can see many, if not all, of them. Um so I'll go to Washington, and if there's still energy in my legs and a willingness to go south, then I'll might try to ride to California. Um I kind of imagine that it'll take me about two months to go cross country. Maybe it'll be faster, uh, but that might be missing the opportunity to be present in the experience as long as possible. So, August and September heading west, and hopefully the end of September, and only the beginning of October going south to avoid um most of the rain and cold that will certainly be present from San Francisco and above. Yeah. Yay bikes! I'll let you know how I feel tomorrow after I've ridden the first day.

unknown 4:38

Bye.