Home for 100 days

Home Again

As of yesterday, December 3rd, I had been home for 100 days. The 90 days of my 4,500-mile solo trip this summer seemed like a long time, but the 100 days I've been home seems like a short time. In some ways I feel as though I just arrived home. I'm still adjusting to the change, and finding the adjustment difficult. A few times I started writing about my experience being home, but I never finished and published what I wrote. Maybe this time will be different.

I'm riding a lot less. In the first 90 days I was home I rode just less than 500 miles. Another difference between being on the road and being home is the variety of experience. On the road every day meant new places and new people. At home both the places and the people are more the same. Perhaps the most significant difference is that on the road I always knew what I needed to do, and when. While every day included some leisure time in which there was nothing I needed to do, every day included many things that I needed to do now, whether it was setting up or taking down my campsite, finding snacks throughout the day, finding dinner at night, rerouting because of traffic or closed roads, replacing my pump's lost o-ring or my rear tire that was about to disintegrate. The list goes on and on. Now that I home I have some of my time scheduled for giving lessons, but other than that I find there are many things I could do but almost never is it necessary that something be done now.

During my trip I told people, and maybe wrote in my blog, that I thought my trip was more like being in the army than what most people would consider a vacation. Perhaps my readjustment after my trip is something like the readjustment after being in the army.

My iPhone Lost and Found

I recently had an experience that required my immediate attention. When I arrived at the home of a client I realized that my phone had fallen out of my saddle bag. Without hesitation I retraced my ride from home, often riding against traffic (which I never do) so that I might see my phone on the ground. I remembered where I had gone over a substantial bump on my way to my client, and thought that to be a likely place for the phone to have been thrown from my saddle bag. I carefully looked all around that bump but did not find my phone. When I arrived home I used Find My iPhone and saw that my phone's last recorded location was near the bump. I used Find My iPhone to put it in lost mode and to send a message to the phone asking whoever found it to contact me.  I then rode to the phone's last known location and in several stores asked the person working the counter about my phone. Nobody had it. I again checked the ground around the bump, but did not find my phone. When I later checked Find My iPhone I saw that my phone had travelled to Queens. Eventually I received a call from the person who found my phone near the bump, and we arranged a time to meet the next day.

Although I was not glad that my phone had fallen out of my saddle bag, I realized that the need to act immediately to find it gave me a feeling of being alive, in the same way that having to deal with all the problems that occurred on my trip did.

Three Years, Not Three Months

In the last few weeks I've had a sequence of revelations about the significance of the 4,500-mile trip I took this summer. The trip, which started on May 28th of 2019, lasted 90 days, but the planning started on June 27th of 2018, 11 months before I departed. So the 4,500-mile trip occupied me for 14 months. I've said that I didn't train for my 4,500-mile trip because of a crash two months before my departure, but I now see that that's not correct. On May 20th of 2018, one month before I started planning my trip, I rode in the Gran Fondo New York, a 100-mile race for which I had trained throughout the spring of 2018 and for which I had registered in May of 2017. Going back one more year, on May 28th of 2016 I rode to and from West Point (3 days, total 120 miles), my first multi-day trip in more than 40 years. After that I was hooked on the idea of multi-day trips. In July of 2016 I rode to and from Hackettstown, NJ, (3 days, total 110 miles) and in August of 2016 rode to and from Haverstraw, NY, (2 days, total 83 miles). In May of 2017 I again rode to and from Hackettstown (3 days, total 158 miles) and in June of 2017 again rode to and from Haverstraw (2 days, total 110 miles). In June of 2018 I rode to and from Newburgh, NY (2 days, total 159 miles), repeating and extending the route I rode to West Point two years earlier. One week later I rode to and from Norwalk, CT (2 days, total 126 miles), and the next day started planning my 4,500-mile trip. In September of 2018 I rode to and from Beaver Pond Campground (3 days, total 153 miles) to test my new tent and riding with my bike loaded for touring. In October of 2018 I rode to and from Lancaster, PA (4 days, total 310 miles) with my bike again loaded for touring  This ride served as the proof of concept for my 4,500-mile trip. In May of 2019, one week before I departed on my 4,500-mile trip, I again rode to and from Beaver Pond Campground (2 days, total 97 miles), this time with the exact gear I planned to take for the summer.

• 05/28/16 West Point, NY (3 days, total 120 miles)
• 07/02/16 Hackettstown, NJ, (3 days, total 110 miles)
• 08/17/16 Haverstraw, NY, (2 days, total 83 miles)
• 05/27/17 Hackettstown, NJ, (3 days, total 158 miles)
• 05/20/18 Gran Fondo New York (100 miles)
• 06/12/17 Haverstraw, NY, (2 days, total 110 miles)
• 06/18/18 Newburgh, NY (2 days, total 159 miles)
• 06/25/18 Norwalk, CT (2 days, total 126 miles)
• 09/22/18 Beaver Pond Campground (3 days, total 153 miles)
• 10/05/18 Lancaster, PA (4 days, total 310 miles)
• 05/20/19 Beaver Pond Campground (2 days, total 97 miles)

The point of listing the Gran Fondo and all the multi-day trips is that they were all in preparation for my 4,500-mile trip this summer. I got my bike in late 2009, but until May of 2016 I had ridden only in Manhattan, except for once in Brooklyn. I rode 2500 miles in 2017 and 4400 miles in 2018 (I don't know how many miles I rode prior to 2017 because I didn't start recording my riding until July of 2016). My biking took off once I started taking multi-day trips in May of 2016, and I see all of it as preparation for my ride this summer. So while my 4,500-mile trip lasted three months, it was the culmination of three years.

Memory

On my trip this summer I took about 150 photos and videos, many of which I have not published in my blog. The more often I look at them the more I remember them. I have a few questions:

• What would I remember of my trip if I hadn't taken any photos or videos?
• What will I not remember about my trip because of the photos and videos I took?
• Will my memory of the trip eventually consist of only what is shown in the pictures and videos?