Hi folks,

The sad work of cycling literature you are about to read is the first journal I've originally published for CycleBlaze.  All of the other ones here were first posted on a website called Crazyguyonabike.  Perhaps you've heard of it.  Over the last 2.5 years, I have also been been placing those journals, one at a time, onto Cycleblaze because I liked the idea of having them on both sites.  Instead of taking advantage of the digital transfer option that most CGOAB exiles were using, I decided to re-type them, word-for-word.  I actually had a lot of fun doing it that way, but it looks like I won't be doing it any more.  Two nights ago I suddenly got the Crazyguy Boot.

Man, I lost a lot of written words that I rashly decided not to download.  I also feel like I lost quite a few friends over there.  It's okay though,  because I feel a new sense of liberation.  And to celebrate, I decided I will take the next few days to tell the story of my very first bike tour.  

Don't worry, I'm not going to try to relate the details of a 16-year-old trip based on nothing but my unreliable memory.  Oh no, I have documentation -- it's a printed version of the journal I kept with pen & notebook while on the road.  Until now, nobody on earth has ever read it (except for me) and there is good reason for that.  Almost everything about this tour was just too embarrassing to share with anybody else.

I rode a mountain bike with knobby tires, for god's sake.  I wore a T-shirt, cargo shorts and hiking shoes.  (The same ones every day.)  The gear I carried -- and how I carried it -- was very odd by cycle touring standards.  So was my diet.  I took pictures with a camera that used film. [1] It didn't take place in an exotic location and it was only four-days long.  Throughout the journal I referred to what I was doing as "a bike trip."  At the time I didn't know bicycle TOURING was even a thing, which might seem strange for a guy who had been a pretty serious bike rider for most of his life.  I had also been a wilderness backpacking enthusiast and I  considered this trip to be sort of a backpacking trip . . . only on a bike.  Yeah, a self-styled combination of my two favorite outdoor activities.

"I certainly can't post something like this on any serious cycle touring website with a sophisticated cycle touring readership," I thought.  So it sat in a box with all my other travel journals for the last 15 years.

UNTIL TODAY!  I sat up in my bed this morning and decided, "what the hell?  There are plenty of examples of my touring naivete (and outright incompetence) in my other on-line journals, so why not just put my first-tour out there for everybody to marvel at, to scorn, to ridicule?"

On the other hand, maybe somebody might look back at his or her own first-time tour and remember how it was conducted in the same clueless fashion.  Whatever the reason, I hope you continue to the next page.

Heart

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[1]  Film was a magical roll of plastic onto which an old fashioned camera could project images.  That roll of plastic could then be brought to the drug store to be processed into a batch of 24 pictures.  It was a pretty cool system, but not as cool as the new picture-taking technology.  It is that technology that allowed me to take pictures of the drug store pictures  WITH MY PHONE!  Those pictures of pictures are what you'll be seeing in the next few pages.