Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The time has come
For me to go. So long everyone. Thanks to everyone who has helped to push me out the door. Special shout to Nina BeeDeeKay - my employer, friend, surrogate mother, and ride at 4:30 tomorrow morning to SFO. Big up. Above and beyond. Wait...are you SURE you want to do this? To Wheel Girl bicycle shop on San Pablo between Performance and REI for fantastic advice and an unbreakable aversion to taking my money. (?) Elizabeth pointed out a lot of possibilities for me and gave me a better sense of what to pay attention to on the bike. Plus I kept having to go back so I got a good fill of Stone House olive oil tasting as I blew around town taking care of every last minute thing. Jesse's parents for turning me on to warmshowers.org. I'm sure I'll be singing your praises from a stranger's bathtub someday soon. To everybody who has bought me drinks this week - it has been a well-lubricated send-off.
I will miss
All of you.
I won't miss
The rest of em.
I will miss
Burritos
I won't miss
The taste of smog in my mouth. How can the Bay Area that supposedly has one of the most "conscious," "progressive," "gullible" populations in the country have so many people driving everywhere? When you ride along in traffic and you're scraping the soot off yer tongue with yer teeth you really start to wonder when people are going to stop driving. It's already too late anyways I suppose. (And Priuses are cars.)
I will miss
All the crazies that brave the bullshit and ride cause they wouldn't have it any other way.
I will miss
The comforts of home. Watching a movie in bed before falling asleep - Thanks to Marty for telling me his Netflix password. Ghostbusters was awesome.
I won't miss
Easy access to all my vices, which includes watching Ghostbusters for maybe the fourth time in my life when I'm definitely going to die someday.
I will miss
Being on stage.
It's now 12:30 am and I'm leaving the house at 4:30. Should I just stay up?
Check out my pack job and pics of my first loaded ride up onto Grizzly Peak...People kept assuming I was touring and asking me if I knew where I was going.
I will miss
All of you.
I won't miss
The rest of em.
I will miss
Burritos
I won't miss
The taste of smog in my mouth. How can the Bay Area that supposedly has one of the most "conscious," "progressive," "gullible" populations in the country have so many people driving everywhere? When you ride along in traffic and you're scraping the soot off yer tongue with yer teeth you really start to wonder when people are going to stop driving. It's already too late anyways I suppose. (And Priuses are cars.)
I will miss
All the crazies that brave the bullshit and ride cause they wouldn't have it any other way.
I will miss
The comforts of home. Watching a movie in bed before falling asleep - Thanks to Marty for telling me his Netflix password. Ghostbusters was awesome.
I won't miss
Easy access to all my vices, which includes watching Ghostbusters for maybe the fourth time in my life when I'm definitely going to die someday.
I will miss
Being on stage.
It's now 12:30 am and I'm leaving the house at 4:30. Should I just stay up?
Check out my pack job and pics of my first loaded ride up onto Grizzly Peak...People kept assuming I was touring and asking me if I knew where I was going.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
I never thought I'd be doing this
Creating a blog, that is. The bike tour around Europe - I've been ready and willing from the first time it was mentioned. Well, that's not really true. I had argued with Liza for many weeks that we should bike across our own damn country. And as far as "ready" goes - I didn't know the first thing about what fully-loaded bike touring would entail. And at this point, I probably still don't.
I'm less than a week from my flight to Spain and a little under two weeks from the first pedal pushes out the door of Liza's childhood home on the Plana in southeastern Spain alongside the Mediterranean. Our plan is an eight week trip from Spain to Norway - through the Pyrenees into France passing the Tour de France outside Barcelona, stopping at an eco village outside Limoges, riding along the coast of France then cutting back west to Paris where I was born 27 years ago and where my foreskin still resides in a flower pot in my godmother's window (or so I'm told), north-west into Belgium and the Netherlands where bicycles have their own roads completely apart from cars, Germany and Denmark (which we may wind up riding trains through), ferrying across to Sweden, wrapping around to Norway and then finding our way home to the Plana by a mix of bike and train, stopping to visit my cousin in Lyon on the way. Our route is undetermined outside that general course. We will be bush camping most of the way when there isn't someone to visit or a friendly stranger offering us a bed to sleep in.
Liza is already on the Plana relaxing in the sweltering sun, jumping off cliffs into the blue blue water of the Mediterranean, and spending time with her father and some really fantastic friends after a long school year. I can't wait to meet Liza of the Plana. And I am filling the rest of my state-side days getting gear together, preparing our house for the subletters who will be staying here and against the crackheads and 16 year old kids who have lived to fuck with us over the past year, tying up the loose ends of my real life, hoping (or not) that I get to go on as an understudy at Cal Shakes in this last weekend of Romeo and Juliet, working on my French, and learning as much as I can about roadside bike repair.
My hope for the trip - to fully feel the freedom of having everything I need strapped to my bike with my wits as my guide (for better or for worse), to make those special connections with people that happen when you know you'll never see each other again, to find places where there are no people and I can imagine that the world is new and all of humanity's mistakes and magic are yet to be made, to eat tons of food and drink lots of wine, that Liza and I will fall deeper into each other and face all of our challenges together with love, compassion, and wide eyes.
Not sure how much I'll be posting, but I'd like to get on once a week. I'll do my best to post pictures, though this is the first time I've owned a camera in my life. (Thanks, Hubert)
I've named this blog after my mantra for the trip, taken from a Basement Tapes song that to me is about being faceless and anonymous, new but with all of your wisdom, with nothing ahead but possibilities. And a measure of contempt for anyone or anything that ties you down. Might be hard to find that in the lyrics of the song - I think it's more how the song makes me feel when I listen to it.
"Lo and be-hold. Lo and be-hold.
Searching for my Lo and be-hold.
Get me outta here, my dear man!"
I'm less than a week from my flight to Spain and a little under two weeks from the first pedal pushes out the door of Liza's childhood home on the Plana in southeastern Spain alongside the Mediterranean. Our plan is an eight week trip from Spain to Norway - through the Pyrenees into France passing the Tour de France outside Barcelona, stopping at an eco village outside Limoges, riding along the coast of France then cutting back west to Paris where I was born 27 years ago and where my foreskin still resides in a flower pot in my godmother's window (or so I'm told), north-west into Belgium and the Netherlands where bicycles have their own roads completely apart from cars, Germany and Denmark (which we may wind up riding trains through), ferrying across to Sweden, wrapping around to Norway and then finding our way home to the Plana by a mix of bike and train, stopping to visit my cousin in Lyon on the way. Our route is undetermined outside that general course. We will be bush camping most of the way when there isn't someone to visit or a friendly stranger offering us a bed to sleep in.
Liza is already on the Plana relaxing in the sweltering sun, jumping off cliffs into the blue blue water of the Mediterranean, and spending time with her father and some really fantastic friends after a long school year. I can't wait to meet Liza of the Plana. And I am filling the rest of my state-side days getting gear together, preparing our house for the subletters who will be staying here and against the crackheads and 16 year old kids who have lived to fuck with us over the past year, tying up the loose ends of my real life, hoping (or not) that I get to go on as an understudy at Cal Shakes in this last weekend of Romeo and Juliet, working on my French, and learning as much as I can about roadside bike repair.
My hope for the trip - to fully feel the freedom of having everything I need strapped to my bike with my wits as my guide (for better or for worse), to make those special connections with people that happen when you know you'll never see each other again, to find places where there are no people and I can imagine that the world is new and all of humanity's mistakes and magic are yet to be made, to eat tons of food and drink lots of wine, that Liza and I will fall deeper into each other and face all of our challenges together with love, compassion, and wide eyes.
Not sure how much I'll be posting, but I'd like to get on once a week. I'll do my best to post pictures, though this is the first time I've owned a camera in my life. (Thanks, Hubert)
I've named this blog after my mantra for the trip, taken from a Basement Tapes song that to me is about being faceless and anonymous, new but with all of your wisdom, with nothing ahead but possibilities. And a measure of contempt for anyone or anything that ties you down. Might be hard to find that in the lyrics of the song - I think it's more how the song makes me feel when I listen to it.
"Lo and be-hold. Lo and be-hold.
Searching for my Lo and be-hold.
Get me outta here, my dear man!"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
