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 […]
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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 […]
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Finding flow on the trail
“The thing to remember when traveling is that the trail is the thing. Travel too fast and you miss all you are traveling for.”
Louis L’Amour
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Rolling the day away
It’s been a bad day at work. A vision-squeezing stressful kind of day. When the headache persists after a cup of tea, comfort food and some venting, one of us somehow summons the motivation to get out. And then, faster than second thoughts, we are out the door with our bikes. Out to the fields, […]
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This is it! A video of the bike trip
One of the aims of our previous trip was to help raise awareness about melanoma skin cancer. In 2003, after a my routine annual check-up with a dermatologist, I found that I had a stage 2 melanoma on my arm. Luckily it was detected and removed at an early stage and I continue to have […]
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Getting inspired by reality: lessons rolling by in Laos
Our experience of Laos seemed very different to what our friends and guide books described just a few years ago. I had imagined pedalling along forested roads with almost no traffic. What I saw instead was cleared land, extensive burning and many trucks and (expensive) cars. To be fair, we also passed many signs for protected areas down side roads away from the main road we were traveling, but overall this was not the still-pristine tropical cyclist’s paradise others before us had described.
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The journey is the reward, the reason, the lesson
My friends Valérie and Gérard recently posted a great quote in a comment on this blog:A journey does not need reasons. Before long, it proves to be reason enough in itself. One thinks that one is going to make a journey, yet soon it is the journey that makes or unmakes you.- Nicolas Bouvier (Translated […]
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A thousand roads, a thousand lives ahead
Following an ice cream van in Kazakhstan, 2012.”Ain’t you thinkin’ what’s it gonna be like when we get there? Ain’t you scared it won’t be nice like we thought?” “No,” she said quickly. “No, I ain’t. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. It’s too much–livin’ too many lives. Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives […]
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