On Gossamer Wings

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. Christopher Morley
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The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. Christopher Morley
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/c/christophe385537.html?src=t_bicycle

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. Christopher Morley.

Time doesn't fly. It slips past while one is changing diapers, pressing clothes and driving to work. It is the whisper more felt than heard, while paying bills or standing on the sidelines at marching band competitions, swim meets and drinking beer on beaches along the Gulf of Mexico. Time is marked not on a calendar, but by events - graduations, dances, weddings...funerals. It is gone, without ever having been palpably present.

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of Bikecentennial, a ride conceived by two couples from Montana. Their vision - that thousands of cyclists spend the Bicentennial summer riding across the country, filling small towns and country roads. To that end they created an enterprise of breathtaking expanse, a series of bike inns and campgrounds spanning the country via a predetermined route they had explored, and mapped.

I was barely twenty-one when I forwarded about a hundred dollars, earned as a security guard at Xerox Corporation, to be registered as a participant. Others did the same, many signing onto groups led by experienced bike campers. Ever the introvert, I was an "Independent" - free to ride the route at my own pace, seeing after my own needs. It mattered little to me that I had never ridden a loaded camping bike to the end of my own driveway, let along 4400 miles from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

I had no idea how things would turn out. I made dozens of mistakes, some fairly significant. In the end... My life would never be the same. Over the course of 2016 I will recount the struggles, hardships and triumphs of my ride across America. With forty years of perspective, I can say that nothing I've done since, with the exception of marriage and having children, has made me feel so vulnerable and so alive.