• I stink at biking uphill. I just do. I really hope I get stronger as the trip continues, but as of right now, if it's more than a 6° grade, I'm walking.
• I bleed easily. Ever see a cut or bruise on your body and wonder where it came from? Imagine that times 20.
• Rain sucks all of your energy away. It seems obvious, but even a little bit of moisture on your body can ruin your day.
• Surface matters. There is a MASSIVE difference between rock, sand, mud, dirt, sandy road, and real road. I spend a lot of my days trying to find a line that maximizes the quality of the road.
• It's impossible to photograph what's going on around me. The pictures give you some kind of idea about what's going on, but they don't compare to seeing it with my eyes.
• When you bike, you're going slow enough to see every little thing on and around the road. This can often be great, surprising, revelatory, or disgusting.
• It's hard to be thoughtful after a day of biking.
• I eat a lot of food. I need a lot of food. I want a lot of food.
• Stretching and rolling my legs really has been helping! I haven't started the day with any serious pain at all, and I definitely consider that a victory. Here's hoping I can keep that up throughout the trip.
• Miles don't correlate at all with exertion or exhaustion. My toughest day was 5/27, when I only did 36.12 miles. And the first 10 miles took 3 hours. And today (5/28), I did 60.43 miles almost without thinking anything about it.
• I've realized that if I take as much ibuprofen as I need to feel good, I'll be destroyed by it by the end of my trip. Today is the first day I start limiting my ibuprofen intake.
• Alia is amazing. I've never once felt hopeless, helpless, troubled, scared (except for that pitch black tunnel), or dead. I hope I don't annoy her too much, but my brain is definitely working differently out here. It's nice to get away from school.
• There is a lot of nature. Another stupid statement, but being out here has made me acutely aware of how many hours I usually spend working in front of a computer monitor, a phone, a television, or some combination of the three.
• The music from Twin Peaks is perfect.
• I'm starting to appreciate the bigness of big Ives differently.
• Microbreweries are starting to pop up everywhere—as are local farm-to-table places. It makes me happy, even if I'm eating fried food.
• Fruit is amazing.
• I need a lot more water than I thought. Right now, I'm drinking about 650ml an hour on the bike.
• I miss Megan and everyone else like crazy. But I'm glad I'm out here. I still haven't learned the thing I set out to learn, but hopefully it comes. I'm starting to notice similarities between this trip and the more traditional "walkabout."
• I've been getting some weird right-brain left-brain stuff happening when on the bike. Like sometimes it's not like I'm on the road, it's like I am the road. Or sometimes I think things like "I better get out and stretch his legs" or "it has 5 miles before I'll let it stop" or "I wonder what Hunter's thinking now." They're fleeting, but weird. I saw a TED talk once about someone who had a stroke and experienced a complete bifurcation between her left and right brain, and the experience she described are kind of familiar to what I'm getting out there.
• Everything breaks. I've been duct taping things I never knew I could and fixing things that I'd never think would break. Oh, and my phone is cracked now :(
• I still don't think of this as a "big" bike trip yet. I think it will become big once we get to Oregon. Hopefully that will happen in the next 3 or 4 days. Until then, stay thirsty compadres.
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