November 11, 2021
Thoughts of Home
Same Same but Different
"People usually ask, what was the best part. I'm asking, what did you learn?" says our friend Katherine. We've been home 5 days and have a gathering of 8 friends. We are all eating around the dinner table and have a great get together reconnecting with friends.
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Patrick says, " I know I don't like Urban cycling, that I want the reward of remoteness and scenery." Rachel says, "I know I need to do fewer distance of miles each day than when I was younger." We are both happy to have done the Northern Tier coast to coast ride to see our country by bike. We found that this was more difficult than in some of our more remote rides mainly due to finding accommodations. Hotels and Motels are expensive, many campgrounds don't allow tent camping, and stealth camping is not easy in the Northeast. North Dakota was the best for camping in city parks. We stayed with 50 warmshowers hosts, three stays we also took two rest days. Overall, we took fewer rest days than on previous trips, a total of 18 out of 131 days.
This time we are returning to our home with not much to do except clean. The last tour of 2.5 years we had packed up everything returning to an empty house. We are working on reconnecting with more friends, reclaiming the garden and cuddling with our cats, Ocho and Tashi. The reality that Yedi is gone hits us now that we are home. It's good to be home.
We end this journal with an excerpt from an article Rachel wrote several years ago:
Our favorite quote explains the beauty of bicycle touring perfectly:
Go fast enough to get there, but slow enough to see.
Jimmy Buffet
Traveling by bike is the ultimate freedom. On a bike, you become part of the scenery; the landscape is not framed by a window. Slowly, you see snapshots of people’s daily lives and can interact with them. The day gets down to basics of where to: eat, find water, and sleep… then chores like laundry every few days.
The excitement of travel and knowing that home is there to return to, allows us to be fully immersed in where we are in the moment. The advent of the internet, social media, and Skype has changed this in some ways. We now have instant contact with our neighbors and family—there is always a tiny thread that keeps us connected. The key is to see where you are and not compare it to where you were. “This isn’t any better than that, only different.”
Each time that we have ended a trip, we are left with wanting to do more. People ask, “Do you get homesick?” The counter to being homesick is what happens when you do go home after a long tour — the travel bug or, worse, culture shock. When you first take off on an extended tour, it takes a few months to shift realities: from the feeling you are only on vacation, to where being on the road becomes your new reality. The reverse happens once the tour ends: one may long to be on the road again, but the cure to the travel bug is to see your own backyard through the eyes of the traveler.
We often think travel means going far away to exotic places and we miss what is in our own backyards. Link: A New Way Of Seeing | Guest Adventures (scottstoll.com)
And for now, let the planning begin for the next tour in 2022: Riding the Great Divide Route. Thank you all for following along and for all the folks we met along the way.
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3 years ago
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3 years ago
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My cell is #541-543-9908 jmanotti@uoregon.edu
Thank you. John and Lisa
3 years ago
Our # is 208/344-6801.
Patrick and Rachel
3 years ago
If we have your email, we can send you the pdfs of the Rail to Trails we used.
Racpat
3 years ago
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3 years ago
Racpat
3 years ago