Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
at least as much to get the hell out. On my Vietnam ride in 1995, I headed alone one day
into the jungle and passed through villages where I'm sure no one had seen a white man
since the end of the war. It was exhilarating and scary.
I felt then the way I feel now, that I'd been lured irresistibly in the direction of a place
that could, with reasonable hyperbole, be called nowhere, and that as soon as I arrived
I wanted to be somewhere again. Not for the first time, I'm wondering: Am I riding to-
ward something or away from something?
Yes, I'm a little homesick. Is it homesickness? Maybe loneliness? Anxiety? Whatever
it is, I've been feeling a little sulky the last few days, less the intrepid traveler and more
the kid at camp who's had enough and wants to go home. I'm battling that more than
headwinds and hills. The question is why. Okay, I lost a friend to cancer a couple of
weeks ago, and I'm sure that's part of it, but this doesn't feel like grief. Rather I'm blam-
ing it on the solo-ness of this adventure and the sense that the fortitude of any relatively
sociable person (like me) is at least partly a function of the nearness and support of, well,
those we want to be near and supported by. We can get along fine for a while on our
own, but without the fuel of a kiss, a scratch behind the ears, a drink and a laugh with
our pals, our self-reliance begins to dissipate like the juice in a cell phone.
I choose that metaphor with some irony because in many ways I've never been more
connected in my life. The last time I rode across the country, in 1993, whatever phone
contact I had with New York was from motels and phone booths. I went for days at a
time without being in contact with friends or family or editors. Now, I have a smart-
phone mounted on my handlebars—having the GPS where I can refer to it is pretty
handy—and texts and calls from friends sound the ringtone two or three times a day.
This morning, taking a break on a particularly quiet stretch of Montana highway, I
fielded a call from Paris. (No finger wagging, please: I don't answer while I'm in motion.)
Then, of course, there are the blog readers who have been remarkably voluble with their
comments, and those following me on Twitter, many of whom are tweeting back. This is
an interactive bike ride, that's for sure. Someone in the office texted me a few days ago
to ask how I like having my own reality show, and for a slow-to-arrive-at-social-media
type like me that doesn't seem entirely like a joke.
Still, I'm waking up in the middle of the night and having a hard time getting back
to sleep. I miss my girlfriend. I miss my neighborhood bar. I miss not having to rise at
dawn and push my body to exhaustion. I miss the life I was leading before I left, the one
that made me ache to take a trip like this in the first place. I wonder if all this simulated
connectivity feeds my hunger for the real thing, making it worse instead of better.
Anyway, one thing has occurred to me; I'm right up against the Rockies now, and the
landscape is pretty intimidating, the roads slicing between mountains and climbing and
