So what do you do after taking a trip like this? It was an intense 50 days. Will life be the same once we get back home? I'm not ready to find out, yet. I'm going to take a couple days rest and then start biking up to Kennebunk, Maine to see my sister.
Lee and Gena are celebrating their 5th wedding anniversary on July 2nd, then they're headed back to New York. Dave and Beth are spending the night at Ken's house, then driving back to Ohio. Ken is going back to work tomorrow while Adam will begin looking for a job as soon as he can calm down from the excitement. Dave, Donna and Sarah are going to take a quick drive down to Kentucky to see Dave's brother, Todd and then they'll begin the 1800 mile drive back to Billings.It's all come full circle. The tour had a beginning, a middle and an end. But there's much more than that I think. Most people along the way asked us questions about the physical aspect of doing a tour like this. "Isn't it hard?" "Doesn't your butt hurt?" "Did you get cold/hot/wet?" Those type of things have already started to fade from memory.What remains are the images...a vast field of wheat, waving to the patterns of the wind...strangers waving to us from their tractors as they plowed fields so large, the crop stretched over the horizon...food in Iowa so big it wouldn't fit on a plate unless it was piled six inches high...riding through a blizzard in Montana ...climbing a 9400 foot summit on a bicycle...red winged blackbirds acting as tour guides from Montana through Ohio...racing at close to 50 miles an hour down the face of a mountain.Could we have experienced these things from a car at 60 miles an hour? I don't think so. Part of the experience was the pace. At 15 miles per hour, life is a little slower. There is no buffer between you and the "outside" world.But more than that, there is the basic question, "Have we changed? Are we the same people we were before starting this journey?" That's a tough one.Before it started, I thought the ride would cause some sort of transformation in me. I'm not sure what was supposed to change, but somehow I'd be different after having completed something of this magnitude. Somewhere along the way, there was a realization that nothing big, nothing major, nothing earth shattering was going to change in me. This trip was just part of a process, the process of living, and that's what we do everyday, isn't it?
Bike America Tours
dblair@wtp.net
1-800-738-7271