Barking at shovels

Project for 2003

I did a fair bit of biking (some offroad, even) when I was in grad school, but haven't done much lately. (Not that I was ever anything like hardcore -- I just went riding a few times a week.) But I got to talking with a friend (Molly Tomlinson) a couple of months ago, and discovered she'd ridden from Maine to San Francisco in 2001.

After I got over being intimidated, I started thinking: I should do something like that.

I like journeys that take me somewhere. When I went to SE Asia, I made my project to get from Singapore to Hong Kong by land (and I only cheated once). When you get in a plane, you lose all sense of how far you've gone, or how where you are now connects with where you've been. By train or bus or boat or pickup truck, you can see the country rolling by. By bike, even more so. And I think one of the reasons I'd mostly stopped biking (apart from not having any convenient trails anymore) was that re-riding the same old loop and ending up where I started got boring. Doing a road trip by bike, though, has got me cranked.

I don't believe I'm going to dedicate three months to getting to San Francisco, so I've declared Provincetown as my goal. 120 mi, which I guess is two or three days. (Don't really know!) Of course, that's probably not the first step: first Concord, then Nashua or something.

There you have it -- my goal for the summer. Y'all can make fun of me in September if I don't make it.

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