Some people get cranky when they’re hungry. I summon NARG. NARG is an ugly, surly monster. He lacks empathy or logic and excels at blaming. Slumbering most of the time, this Creature From the A-Hole Lagoon climbs out of the depths and controls my being when my stomach grumbles too long. Chelsea created this all-caps creation to […]
It’s easy to be disillusioned with the political process. Corruption in the news, wealthy lobbyists skulking behind every bill, and feeling like my voice doesn’t matter usually adds up to me doing zero. Well, unless you count yearly voting or clicking a couple boxes on a Change.org petition – boom, Three-Second Armchair Activism. Which is why it was […]
The gunshot froze me in my tracks, instantly changing me from fleeing runner to mannequin in tech fiber. A towering rancher in a Stetson yelled “Stop!” in Spanish and English, then, “put your hands up!” He pointed a cannon-sized pistol at me. “It’s ok,” I called, “I’m…” “SIT down in the fucking dirt with your […]
You can’t go home again, wrote Thomas Wolfe. He means we can’t return to “the escapes of time and memory,” those days of youth we reminisce about, a happily tinted past filled with cotton candy and water slides. I think he’s right. After 15 months on the road, we scooped up the van from its […]
Foreigners can stack up like pancakes in tiny Belize, which is less than 70 miles wide. Some hot spots felt like a factory designed to funnel sunburned tourists into attractions; others were remote, serene, and wonderful. We squeezed through caves in water up to our necks (one with full skeleton in it), canoed on rivers […]
Plans can be even better when you break them. A year ago, we were in Santa Cruz, California, planning to head home in February after a simple four month jaunt. Now it’s the last day of 2014, and the picture above is certainly not from our front porch in Portland. First off, thanks to all of […]
I spent last night shivering with a fever in a Mexican border town and can’t really think right now, so pictures will tell the stories from Tulum. I spent my days there learning Spanish, swimming in natural groundwater reservoirs called cenotes, hanging with new buddies, lounging on the beach, snorkeling, biking and running, eating fajitas and […]
My brain hurts. Plus, I can’t stop dreaming in Spanish. I couldn’t be happier about it. I’m in Tulum, Mexico for two weeks of immersion classes en Espanol. Some days, I feel like I’m drowning in words; they rain down from a tropical storm of sentences and grammar. It’s similar to returning to running after […]
Update May 2019: read this recent post to see the bikepacking additions I made to the Fargo for a tour through Spain and Portugal this spring. Check out this post about Fargoing (<–totally a verb) my way across Oregon on the Oregon Outback. I pedaled my Salsa Fargo 4,000 miles through the U.S. in summer […]
A still photo misses the pulse of New York City. It singles out a tender moment or shows the scale of skyscrapers, but the heartbeat and energy flow too fast for a static shot. Nine million people live in NYC, and sometimes it feels as if all of them are in one subway car or crosswalk […]
New York City is a potent, fully-stocked bar. And, in five weeks here, I’ve enjoyed it straight up via rocking musicals on Broadway, on the rocks with a singer strumming tunes in a dark bar, or sipping the club soda of an indie movie night. Other giant cities pack a punch too, but are grape juice compared to NYC’s […]
I wonder how foreign tourists feel in the U.S. on Thanksgiving Day. Do they search for “local” flavor the same way backpackers clamor for an obscure, off the beaten path scene during an overseas festival? Fireworks and tango in Spain; paint-throwing in India. Here, it’s “We need to find a down-home American family cooking turkey, […]
We are abandoned bicycles. If you look, we pop up everywhere in New York City, chained and left behind. Bike vultures pick clean our cruisers and svelte carbon racers. Sometimes just a front a wheel remains locked to a rack; other times, only our skeleton frames, with seat, handlebars and components stripped. Or you might spot […]
Welcome to the final installment (part 4 of 4) of the video series covering our 4,000 mile bike tour in the summer of 2014. If you missed previous episodes, here are parts one, two and three. This video details our travels from upstate New York to the Atlantic Ocean in Portland, Maine. Everyone has an opinion about the […]
This is Part 3 of 4 of the video series documenting our 101 day trip cycling across the the U.S. in the summer of 2014. If you missed Part 2, click here to check it out. This section covers from Indiana to the middle of upstate New York. Three thousand miles into the tour, we are […]
Acadia National Park has a magnetic pull to it. “OH, you HAVE to go to Acadia!” was the first thing many people told us upon discovering we were finishing our bike tour in Maine. And so we did. And they were right, it’s stunning. So are all the parts of Maine that we visited, but Acadia is the […]
This is Part 2 of 4 of the video series documenting our 101 day trip cycling across the the U.S. in the summer of 2014. If you missed Part 1, click here to check it out. This section covers from Spearfish, South Dakota all the way to the Indiana border. Straight through the heart of […]
Two weeks, no touring bikes. My metabolism, inspired by three months of biking, rages on like a hungry teenager. It’s as if my stomach frequently yells, “Hey, we’re starving down here!” I’m striking a balance between eating everything in sight and knowing that I’ll turn into Dakota the Puffy Balloon Kid if I do, which […]
I rarely look back. Forward, onward, tally ho! Always new adventures on the horizon, people to visit, places to see, as they say. Perhaps you’ve picked up on that? Maybe that’s the reason I so enjoyed digging into the videos from our bike tour between hikes in Acadia National Park while we “kicked back” in […]
Ah, numbers. The engineer in me loves this post. For all of you who requested data summing up our bike tour, put your Spock hat on and enjoy. While in no way does a bunch of digits encapsulate the fun, travails, adventure and overall accomplishment of riding 4,000 miles across the States, it is interesting to see it all […]