Julie Griffin, Author at This Ride Here

All Posts by Julie Griffin

La Ventana bay 2019 - (c) Julie Griffin 2019

Unsubscribe me: Winter in Mexico

This is the story of how I let go of my cross-continental ambitions and signed up to an inward journey. Before starting our trip near the Arctic shore of Alaska, I imagined days filled with moments of joy generated by riding my bike in new places, and I pictured evenings spent chatting over a cup of […]

Road Trip Souvenirs

– June 17, 2019, by Julie -We had been riding the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route for about one month when in early October it started to snow and it was forecast to keep snowing for the next week as we would climb into even higher mountains. On a cold morning waiting for the ice […]

Biking the Great Divide Route

Dates: September 5th – October 9th 2018 Countries: Canada and USA Distance: 1240 km Number of riding days: 24 Wildlife highlights: elk, moose, black bears, fall colours Link to photos The world’s longest mapped mountain bike route: how could we not want to ride it? Once we set on our minds on it, we were […]

A Ride through Mexico City

Dates: February 28th – March 4th 2019 Country: Mexico Distance: 37 km Number of riding days: 2 Highlights: Street art, people salsa dancing, bike lanes and bike sharing stations, trees, and the food. Link to photosDay 1, Thursday afternoon, first explorations We arrived in Mexico City without much of a plan – we just knew we […]

Sunset on the Alaska Range, seen from our camp on the Denali Highway, July 2018 (Copyright Julie Griffin 2018)

Riding through soundscapes

– March 6th, 2019 by Julie – One of the reasons I left home was to be able to hear myself. My brain often felt like it was in overdrive, but it was in the moments when I wasn’t using it that I felt most alive, happy, and even wise. Those moments were usually when […]

Biking Canyonlands, Utah

Dates: October 27th – 30th 2018 Country: Utah, USA Distance: 156 km Number of riding days: 4 Wildlife highlights: herd of Bighorn Sheep Link to photos Unexpected highs in the depths of Canyonlands – December 7 2018, by Julie – There are few occasions in my life that I can recall having been able to add time […]

What’s in the numbers

– October 8, 2018, by Julie and Adam – Earlier this summer, on a road in northwest Canada, we met three cyclists within a matter of hours of each other: one who has spent the last two and a half years riding north from Argentina, one headed west looking for work a few hundred kilometers away, […]

Julie and Adam, Tajikistan 2012 (c) Jamie McDonald

When synthetic is better than natural

In contrast to conservation where natural tends to be preferred to synthetic, and control of our environmental destiny seems to be further from reach than we would like, synthetic happiness is within reach. Happiness is very trendy these days. I was just sent a whole playlist of happiness talks and in the last two years have […]

A friendly woman who invited us in for tea, Kyrgyzstan 2012

Reflecting on personalities here and there

One thing that can be hard about traveling is the loss of your identity. I had the same feeling when I was 14 and my parents moved our family from California to Switzerland. I didn’t speak French, but I was put into a French public school (we lived near the border) and one of my strongest memories is of the frustration of standing around at recess trying to make new friends and not finding the words that would demonstrate my personality, my wittiness.

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