Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ck? Wherever, it is undoubtedly in my future—my near future, I hope. I'm looking for-
ward to cycling through a part of the country where the dots on the road map are a little
closer together.
But the long distances of the West, these huge states, especially gigantic Montana,
with its perpetual wind and the extra-large dimensions of its hills, valleys, and wildlife,
have toughened me up. I've been feeling different lately. The moment when the alarm
goes of in the morning and I realize the necessity of abandoning the warmth and safety
of a motel room for the uncertainty and risk of a day on the road is no longer accompan-
ied by a clutch of anxiety.
This time through the West, I've realized some things about who I am now as a cyclist.
On my last trip I slept later, stayed longer in the saddle, and vacuumed up great distances
each day, between seventy and eighty miles on an average. It took me a while to readjust
my appetite this time to feel satisfied that fifty or fifty-five miles is a good day's work.
I've learned to get on the road at daybreak and to cover my miles early so when the
wind and the temperature rise, which they seem to do like clockwork at noon, most of
my work will be done. I've discovered the most efficient way of fueling my body is to
eat a substantial meal early in the evening, at five or six—I've become a blue-plate-spe-
cial guy!—and to subsist on my dinner calories and a small early-morning snack (cereal,
maybe, or a muffin) for the first ten or fifteen miles of the day, and then stop for a big
breakfast.
My hill climbing, honed in the Palouse and in the Rockies, is much improved. It's a
mental thing as much as a physical one. My legs still hurt on a tough climb, but I'm in-
ured enough to the sensation that I can keep pedaling.
Most important, I've grown hugely more confident on my bicycle—more skillful in
steering around road obstacles and on narrow shoulders; more in control of the back
end of the bike, loaded down as it is with my saddlebags; more adept at shifting gears
to maximize pedaling efficiency on flat roads and to maintain momentum going up and
down hills.
Altogether it means that I've at last begun to believe I'm going to finish the journey.
I've traveled far enough to be able not just to look up the road and see the Midwest on
the approaching horizon but to envision the day that I'll cross the George Washington
Bridge.
The story of the trip is beginning to write itself, in other words, with incidents ac-
cruing into chapters, and my pedal-pushing feet, like fingers on a keyboard, recording
experience as it hurtles by. The cyclist-as-novelist thing keeps coming up in my head.
For the longest time you can't see very far in front of you, but you keep pedaling blindly,
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