| Cross-Country Ramble 2:
Anticipation Sent: 03/28/96
We leave from the foot of the Ventura Pier the morning after
tomorrow at 10am. Our kids and several friends will be there to see
us off. We've promised them Mimosas.
The house is finally empty, except for a few last things
(mattress to sleep on, cleaning supplies and our bikes and gear). It
sounds like a tomb in here. What with packing and moving all our
belongings to storage, we haven't had time to bike for a week.
Haven't even had much time to think about it.
It's sinking in: we're really going to do this thing. The new
owners of our house take possession April 1. We've told God and
everybody we're going to bike from here to St. Augustine--Florida.
Guess we'll go.
This is either the stupidest thing we've ever gotten ourselves
into--or the best thing we've ever attempted. We're in our 50's.
Retired. My usual exercise over the past 32 years has consisted of
pushing my desk chair around with me in it. My wife Carol has run
three marathons and completed a small triathlon, but that was a few
years back. We've completed four of the seven multi-day tours we've
attempted. Our longest bike trip is 400 miles, ending at the
beautiful tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula of Upper Michigan. So now
we're going 3300 or so.
Thirty years ago, we went to a church dinner. The entertainment
was a slide show of some kids (meaning they were 5 years younger
than we) who biked across the US. A wonderful adventure, we thought,
but those people were some kind of strange people--not at all like
us. Twenty years pass. We have jobs, kids, house, cars, activities.
We're lying in our bean bags one Sunday afternoon watching Wide
World of Sports and we see several guys pedaling across the US
non-stop in the Race Across America. They do it in 8 days,
hallucinating towards the end from sleep deprivation, but still
biking. We go out the next weekend and buy bikes. Real bikes.
Touring bikes. The last time we'd been on bikes was when we were
kids. We learn to ride them in a straight line. We learn to shift
into all 12 gears. We try going up hills. We buy lower gears. We try
going up hills. We buy more gears. Now we have 18. But we still
don't like hills.
We learn to pace ourselves. We start out going what feels like
realllllll slow and then we slow down. Real bikers do 70-110 miles a
day. We'll start out this trip doing 20. We'll build up to 40. We've
decided it's important to think of this adventure as a journey
through America, not as a race to St. Augustine. We'll see ... and
so will you!
Ken
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