It seemed sort of funny at first...

We were on one of the most beautiful stretches of Highway One we had seen yet, a swooping descent followed by a corresponding climb. Bruce, with his wider gear range, was happily spinning away while I pushed harder & pulled ahead. I got to a driveway at the top & pulled over to wait. There were all sorts of signs posted: "Beware of attack chicken!" (ha! Sort of a Monty Python attitude); "The last car that parked here is still missing!" (uh, maybe a bit rough); then on the mailbox, a handwrtten sign: "hate mail." Then I noticed the flag, which reminded me of the Nazi era flag in Germany. I did not stop to take a picture. I guessed Bruce could find me at the next driveway.

The wind today - much better. For the next two days it will be our friend. Bruce found some chain lube for his bike at a motorcycle place in Point Arena with Zen in its name, we had a good lunch in Elk and found our place in Mendocino. We had dinner at the Moosse Cafe at Rosemary's suggestion _ it was very good, we took a short walk in town that included great ice cream, and we are ready to sleep for a lot of hours.

With the tailwinds we plan to do a lot of stopping to look around tomorrow. The wildflowers are blooming riotously. Bruce can't wait to identify some more.

Did I say headwind?

Because that was nothing compared to the crosswinds. The morning was actually quite pleasant. We drove to Tomales and started riding at about 9. The coast is always spectacular & it was especially clear yesterday. But after lunch in Jenner the wind got pretty strong. A couple of descents with crosswinds were very scary, especially if a car passed just as the wind pushed me roughly aside. I told Bruce that it reminded me of roller coasters, which I do NOT like, but here I could not reassure myself that it was not really dangerous. Still, we made it to Sea Ranch with nothing worse than tired legs.

54.5 miles, 1925 calories burned, thanks to the wind, an average pace of 20 mph

A couple of things

-What if I don't like beer?  Can I still be a cyclist? 

The two books I just re-read about cross country bicycle trips seemed to put a lot of stock in the relief produced by a few beers at the end of a tough day.  But I hate the stuff.

-What if North Dakota is still flooded?

I called to make a reservation today & was told by a very pleasant woman that the water was approaching her as we spoke, and that the road we'd take to get out her way was being raised a few feet so as to keep it out of the lake.  And it would not be done for a couple of years.  Oh.  Better that we know now than when we have ridden 50 or 60 miles only to find a Road Closed sign.

Off to Sea Ranch and Mendocino tomorrow.  Hope the wind dies down.  60+  miles with a 30mph headwind would be...well, I just hope we don't have to find out.

What started this, anyway?

I am 59.  The first time I ever got on a road bike, I was 51.  I'd been diagnosed with a brain tumor, which was surgically removed shortly after the diagnosis, a few years earlier, in 1998.  That experience got me thinking about all sorts of things, one of which was getting back in shape.  The road bike was part of the series of choices that got me to where I am: on the verge of a 4000 mile bike ride.

My company offers a sabbatical program.  People who have been here for 15 years take a three month vacation to explore whatever they have always dreamed of spending some time on.  About twenty years ago, one guy chose to use his time on a cross-country bike ride.  At the time, I thought that was one of the odder choices I had ever heard.  But although it sounded ridiculously hard (in those days, a 5 mile ride would have seemed very, very long to me), I did not really have any sense of the scale of his trip.  Now that I have been riding for a few years, I have done 25 days of 100 miles or so; I have ridden about 6000 miles per year for about 4 years; I went without a car for about a year and a half.  I've ridden from San Francisco to Los Angeles twice, from San Francisco to San Diego once, I've done a ride in the Dolomites in Italy, a ride along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina,  a ride up Haleakala on Maui.  I have discovered in myself a real love of cycling, but I am beginning to have a more accurate picture of just what it will take to ride 4000 miles, to be living out of 15 pounds of luggage for three months, to sleep in unfamiliar places every night. (No, we're not camping - I figure a grandmother should not have to sleep on the ground after riding 70 miles.  Or ever, actually.)  It won't be really clear, though, until we've been out there for a while.

And I continue to move back and forth between anxiety and happy anticipation.

So far, so early, so soon?

For years, I thought I remembered the line from a poem or story I'd heard as a child.  It went, "So far, so fast, so soon?"  I couldn't remember exactly what it was from, but with our big bike adventure moving closer so quickly, I thought of it almost every day.  Well, today I finally looked it up, and I had it a bit wrong.  It's really, "So far, so early, so soon?" which is even better.  Because if there's one thing I'm not, it's fast


It's from Carl Sandburg's "Rootabaga Stories."  They're among the public domain books placed online by The Project Gutenberg.  I started to read the story, and I can't wait to keep reading.  But for now, I see that the story is exactly what I want to launch this, my story.  Here are some bits from the first section:

"It is too much to be too long anywhere," said the tough old man, Gimme the Ax.

And Please Gimme and Ax Me No Questions, the tough son and tough daughter of Gimme the Ax, answered their father, "It is too much to be too long anywhere."

So they sold everything they had, pigs, pastures, pepper pickers, pitchforks, everything except their ragbags and a few extras.

When their neighbors saw them selling everything they had, the different neighbors said, "They are going to Kansas, to Kokomo, to Canada, to Kankakee, to Kalamazoo, to Kamchatka, to the Chattahoochee."

One little sniffer with his eyes half shut and a mitten on his nose laughed in his hat five ways and said, "They are going to the moon, and when they get there they will find everything is the same as it always was."

All the spot cash money he got for selling everything, pigs, pastures, pepper pickers, pitchforks, Gimme the Ax put in a ragbag and slung on his back like a rag picker going home.

Then he took Please Gimme, his oldest and youngest and only son, and Ax Me No Questions, his oldest and youngest and only daughter, and went to the railroad station.

The ticket agent was sitting at the window, selling railroad tickets the same as always.

"Do you wish a ticket to go away and come back, or do you wish a ticket to go away and never come back?" the ticket agent asked wiping sleep out of his eyes.

"We wish a ticket to ride where the railroad tracks run off into the sky and never come back - send us far as the railroad rails go and then forty ways farther yet," was the reply of Gimme the Ax.

"So far? So early? So soon?" asked the ticket agent...

I guess heading off to ride our bicycles across the country sounds simple by comparison. Lots of people do it.  (But more people don't.) Older people do it. (But that book I just read was about a 49-year-old who did it, and her age was a big element in the inspiration it was supposed to provide. And we're 59.)

All sorts of thoughts bubble up to the surface of my mind now that we are scarcely more than a month away from the trip.  I have been dreaming of this adventure for a few years now; it always seemed simple - until we started making the specific plans.  Now we realize how far it is between towns in some areas; now we have a better idea of how narrow a range of weather conditions we deal with here in the San Francisco area; now we think every time we ride about how many miles we've completed, and how nice it will be to get home to our comfortable kitchen, bath and bed.

Fortunately, they are not the only thoughts.  We are also getting pretty excited about all the great places we'll see, and see in some detail at our pace.  We've got a Galaxy where we can stay in touch, read our e-books, keep this blog up so we'll have all the memories recorded, and even look up the birds we see.  Did you know there's an app that allows you to load the Sibley field guide onto the Galaxy, and that it's even better than the physical book?  It lets you listen to the calls & songs!

Excitement, and a bit of nervousness.  Probably a reasonable assortment of feelings as we head off for three months and 4000 miles.

This weekend we will do our first four day training ride.  I'll see how it is to enter this on the Galaxy - blog training along with bike training.