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.