Heartbeat

Kamala: The spinning of the pedals is the heartbeat of the road. We're drawn to it and feel guilty if we don't do it. The slowly-passing landscapes seep into our souls. Years later when traveling a route by a gas-fueled motor, we remember the details, like where we sat, where we changed a flat, where we saw sheep, and oh yes, that hill (up or down). The trips take us back to a simple life where we can no longer hide from the elements but work with it as we experience each tier of our hierarchy of needs. Shelter behind a wall that shields us from the wind while we eat lunch becomes sanctuary. Our muscles are our engine that powers us forward. The earth passes beneath our wheels. Mountains become hills then transition to flat plains. Life issues are debriefed through therapeutic conversation.  All bicycle touring trips are odysseys. Just like that of Odysseus, our epic adventures include pleasure, villains, traps, challenges, and struggles.

A little over half of this year's 700-mile two-wheeled journey was over roads we've pedaled before. The last part was new. The old hilly foes of Alamosa and Nogal Canyons shrunk to reality and posed no new challenge. We let the wind's influence be our guide this trip. We were coming home sooner but the wind had different ideas. When we could only muster 3 mph we both said, “Forget this!” We turned around and decided to see where it led us. Magically, we were blown to our trail's end in Amarillo to Charley's cousin's home where we visited Oklahoma farm memories, family histories, and his 99-year old aunt. We transitioned to a mini-van and brought us and our gear home to plan our next two-wheeled adventure.

Hope you enjoy the video.

Bicycle touring and making predictions

Charley: Life is unpredictable. Most of us know that at our core, but then there is something in most of us that strives to make sense out of all this chaos buzzing around us and thus make the world a little more under our control and therefore more predictable.
You would think that we'd learn the futility of placing too much importance on predictions, but no. It's not just that our predictions flop and fizzle, It's that sometimes we get it right and, at least subconsciously, pat ourselves on the back for being so damn smart. And, like Pavlov's dogs salivating at the bell but getting no food, we just smile and go on making decisions based on our own or expert predictions.
Now as a bicycle tourist I make no claim to being better at this prediction fantasy, nor immune from making them, only in recognizing the folly in them. As we pedal through unknown territory we lay out the maps, we listen to the weather, we ask questions of locals and consult the Google Gods. All, to our sometimes sorrow, we've learned are fallible. Still there is the day, week, distance ahead, so we pull what information we can scrape up and consult what experts are available and predict the day's ride. Now I know that sounds quite reasonable when one is considering things such as; Will it rain? Headwinds or tailwinds? What's the you terrain like? A place to camp? Is there a bike shop? However, Tarot cards, flipping a coin, or reading sheep entrails would probably work equally well. I've already decided that on our next tour I'm going to carry a copy of the I Ching and refer to it's hexagrams on all important decisions. Hey, I might even become an economist.
"An expert is a person who has made all of the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." N Bohr