Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
pushing through it to enjoy—and deserve—a cold beer, a good dinner, and a happy
sleep. It's perverse, of course, working harder than you might wish to in order to feel
worthy when you're done—a kind of self-loathing that lays the groundwork for self-es-
teem. If you understand that particular perversion, you might well be a cyclist, or maybe
you should be one.
I knew all that. And still, on Day 2 of a long haul you don't want that to be the lesson.
You don't want the specter of your walking uphill following you on Days 3 and 4, and
you really don't want to wake up in the morning on Days 3 and 4 thinking there's some
uphill walking in your very near future. Every cyclist eventually makes the psychic dis-
covery that you can climb only one hill at a time, but for some reason that's something
that slips your mind a lot, especially at the beginning.
This, I thought, was bad. I still think so. These weren't even especially brutal hills,
and mountains, real mountains, are ahead. By the end of the day, and it was a shorter
day than yesterday, fifty-five miles—I was crippled with exhaustion, my hamstrings sore
and throbbing, my quads seemingly worn to threads, and my ass so truly uncomfortable
that I thought about eating dinner standing up. By the time I got here, to this undistin-
guished motel on an undistinguished commercial strip, I was the picture of a guy who
had bit off more than he could chew, someone who hadn't been careful what he'd wished
for.
The news got better. The motel clerk suggested I try the local brew pub, but it was
a mile away, too long a walk, and I'd had too long a day in the saddle, so I went next
door to the Tequila Grill. It looked tacky; the building that housed it was once a com-
peting motel, now mostly shuttered. I was seated in a booth in what had been the lobby,
and the waitress pointed out the window to the site of the former swimming pool. But
the tortilla chips and salsa were fresh, the chicken fajitas attractively prepared, and the
frozen margaritas perfectly tart. I had three of them. I suppose that's partly responsible
for why I'm too tired to wait and call Jan.
So I'm thinking about my girlfriend and I'm thinking about how I ended up in a
motel in McMinnville, nine time zones away from her, with a sore ass, tired legs, and
four thousand miles to go. I know I'm repeating myself, but why did I want to do this
again? Here's today's answer: a shift in perspective, maybe a lasting one.
When Jan and I went cycling in southern France in the spring, it was my first time
out of the country in several years, and my first time out of New York for more than a
day or two in several months.
Strange word to use,
girlfriend
, at this age, but it has the advantage of intimating the
relationship is youthful and fresh, which this one is. Well, fresh, anyway. In any case it's
