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!"
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That "Lo and Behold" song is rather appropos because the subject is traveling. Then only other song I can think of that you could use is "We Open in Venice." But one would have to revise the lyrics.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, carry on my wayward bud.