The gold mine notebook

January 6, 2025

As you’ve seen, for the past several days I’ve been delighting in reexperiencing our first tour of Andalucia after discovering my long-lost journal embedded a few pages into a notebook, masked by entries pertaining to a different tour entirely. Each day I’ve come to so far has brought back context and detail to what was such a consequential adventure for us twenty years ago.

An odd thing happened yesterday though when I cracked the notebook open again to transcribe the next day’s entry and absentmindedly opened it from the other side. I was confused at first and then nonplussed when I realized I was looking at notes from our kayak excursion in Baja in 2000. Curious now to see what else might somehow be buried in this thin notebook, I kept flipping pages until coming out the other end.

Looks like I’d better go fish out some more old photos from storage. I’ve got another old journal to write, possibly two.

The Goldmine Notebook. It’s interesting that it originally contained 70 pages. About ten or fifteen are missing now, and I’ll bet they were for the 2001 trip from Florence to Dubrovnik.

Oddly, it opens to an itinerary for our tour in 2001 from Florence to Dubrovnik, complete with stops listed, mileage, and the number of days spent at each stop. This would be the interesting tour that found us in Orvieto on 9/11/2001. Up in the corner is an odd discontinuity: the contact information for the road angel who escorted us the last miles into Granada when we were lost and dead ended.

And next comes this helpful page I hadn’t really focused on before. It’s rhe itinerary for the Andalucia tour, the one I’ve been transcribing for the last several days. A key detail I overlooked is the word Saturday at the top, which allows me to correct the starting date of the trip. I’ve been off by two days ever since I first posted the tour from memory. Plus, there’s a distance and elevation log, with the elevations obviously gleaned from my cyclometer. Did we really climb 5,700’ on that sweltering ride from Antequera fo Ronda, when I thought I was getting strep throat?

And then starts the Andalucia journal, embedded three pages deep. This is the reason I’d overlooked it all this time.

Unfortunately the journal ends right before we get to Granada. No first hand account of our stay there and of our first, mindblowing visit to the Alhambra. An even bigger loss though is that it ends before we lost our passports and all the adventure that followed. That’s really a shame - I’d love to have any missing details from that.

Starting from the flip side.

The first page, surprisingly enough, is about our sea kayaking tour in Baja in January, 2000. It includes the names of the guides and our fellow travelers and then gives a detailed meal list for our overnight stops.

The next page completes the meal inventory and continues with the start of a wildlife sighting list. I see some lifers in here: the magnificent frigate bird and blue-footed booby for sure, and probably the cactus wren as well.

Finally, the conclusion of the bird list followed by a few notes on the individual days.

And then comes the biggest shocker of all, another missing bike journal! This one’s for the 2002 four of Switzerland, from Innsbruck to Geneva. I didn’t even remember having kept one.

The Swiss journal ends early (of course; most did so back then) with our arrival in Interlaksn and the inability to find a room because the Jungfeau Marathon was on.

And then finally, after a number of blank pages is the start of a four page detailed itemization of every photo taken in the Andalucia tour, listed by location and subject, with the number of shots at each spot. This page lists the contents of a single SD card, identified by storage capacity. So apparently I’d gone digital by then.

And finally there’s this isolated page, with notes relevant to the lost passports: the addresses of the civil guard and national police stations in Jean; the number of the police report filed when we reported the passports as missing; the telephone number and operating hours of the American embassy in Madrid, where we needed to go to get temporary passports so we could fly back home. And the words “Serrano #75”, whatever the hell that means.

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Gregory GarceauI've got several wire-bound notebooks containing words about my travels and other exploits dating back to 1979. That was well before my bike touring days though. I'm not one to brag (haha), but I must say my penmanship is better than yours. Come to think of it, is penmanship even a thing anymore?
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1 week ago

Bruce LellmanTo Gregory GarceauMaybe he was meant to have been a doctor.
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1 week ago

Scott AndersonTo Bruce LellmanYup. Physician, heal thy self. And it would have made mom so happy too. That or an attorney. I don’t think she ever aspired to raise a vagabond cyclist.
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1 week ago