Author: maria polonchek

We leave for the airport in a few hours and feel like we have a million things to finish up but want to pause for a minute…and breathe. The kids are still in bed, sleeping in on their first day out of school. We’ve been packing for three days and our boxes are loaded in the van. For months, I’ve been painting, cleaning, and organizing the house to rent for the summer. We’re locking up the master bedroom, which is now stuffed with all of our personal belongings.

I’ve shot awake at 6:00 every morning this week in a slight panic…what do we need to do before we go? This morning, it was 4:30. What are we forgetting?

But I also know that we have been working and planning for so long that we must have covered most bases. Chris booked a motel for us to stay in the first night, a short 4.7 miles from the airport. It will feel like 2am when we arrive in the afternoon in Sweden and I’m nervous about how the jet-lag will affect everyone. The day after that, we are planning to go 20 more miles to a campground north of Stockholm.

Chris has been looking more towards what we need for the trip while I’ve been looking at what needs to be done back home while we’re gone. We have two different families renting the house: one in June and one in July. I’ve made arrangements with them, recruited a neighbor to help with our chickens and cat, and lined up cleaners and phone numbers for the renters. We’ve put a hold on our phones and mail and canceled appointments and lessons.

I have oils weeping from inflamed skin on my shoulder and neck, where poison oak got into my shirt collar and under my bra strap. S missed her last two days of school because she couldn’t keep any food or liquid down. It’s been a rough few days, but I somehow have a sense of calm in the middle of it all, like the steady eye in a hurricane.

Every once in a while, Chris and I will pause in the middle of a conversation or when we walk by and look at one another with wide eyes: what are we doing? The sense of anticipation reminds me of when I was pregnant: months of waiting and preparing, feeling nervous, scared, and excited all at once.

The kids, right now, are most excited about the flight. It’s a 12-hour flight, the longest they’ve been on, and they’re intrigued at the idea of spending overnight on a plane. They’ve all told me they love being in airports.

So…Sweden, here we come!

Chris, here:

The bikes are packed, which took way longer and was more complicated than I expected. Each box can’t be over 25kg, so I have them all around 24.  I’ve been messing with mapping software online and downloading apps to my phone so I can figure out where to go when we get there.  I don’t see us covering much ground the first couple days, with Maria having poison oak, S getting over a stomach bug, and just jet lag in general for everyone.

Also, I have to give props to strangers on the internet.  We have to re-use the box for our tandem to fly home and we found a fellow cyclist in Frankfurt who was kind enough to store it for us while we ride around for 6 weeks.  Not only that, but the stranger offered to open up her house to us to stay for the last night of our trip.  I have a feeling we’ll encounter more of this along the way.

So many questions as we wrap up the last details.  How many miles will we ride?  What will Denmark be like?  What did we bring that we probably shouldn’t have?  Will the bikes survive the flight?  It will all work out, though.

L&T,

This is the summer you are twelve. Please understand, going into this letter, that I have been weepy about how time is passing since your first day of middle school in August, when I dropped you off in front of a school with almost 800 students and watched your still small-ish bodies, lugging backpacks that weighed as much as you do, disappear tentatively into the crowd.

I dropped you off, left the parking lot, and cried in a way that I hadn’t since your first day of kindergarten. Do you remember that day, six years ago? We still lived in Kansas. Our whole family (including your baby sister) had to go to the office on the first day of school for tardy slips. You learned at a young age that we weren’t the kind of family who gets “perfect attendance” awards. After we finally got you to your classrooms, your dad and I took the baby to our favorite cafe in Lawrence, Wheatfields, and cried over lattes and apricot scones.

We’re in California now. It’s June, your last week of 6th grade, and I’m still weepy. It comes and goes, triggered by random things: the song “Forever Young” popping up on the radio, the sound of your boy-voices outside, talkin’ trash in between basketball bounces on the driveway, the way you still want your dad or me to lay down with you at bedtime. The way we often don’t, because it’s late and you’re stalling and we are exhausted. Does it seem like we are always tired?

Anyway, the best friends you’ve made since moving to California are moving back to Michigan. They are also a family with twin boys from the Midwest. You met them in first grade. Even though we and they have moved to different schools since meeting, you’ve kept an important connection and are closer to them than almost any friend you’ve made since. Their parents are like us, both in awe of and disillusioned by this part of the country, a place I heard someone describe recently as being more like a cruise ship than a city: people are always coming and going.

Of course, you and your friends don’t understand how complicated it can be to settle down with strong roots somewhere. I know this because I was twelve once and had to move away from my friends and it felt like the grown-ups were being so selfish. So focused on their lives and oblivious to mine. Now, I understand: it’s complicated. It’s a delicate balance that is impossible to get right. It’s something a person can’t understand until they are entirely responsible for someone else’s life.

We’ve known your friends are moving, but preparing for this bike trip has sort of taken over our lives. The thing is, your dad and I seem to struggle with the kind of life we want to give you. We’ve tried very hard to find our place and make some decisions about the way we want to live. We’ve tried very hard to give you the kind of stability we think is important: a house, a community, dependable income so that you shouldn’t want for basic necessities. (We just don’t think iPhones for 12-year-olds are basic necessities.)

But even though we want this life for our kids, it doesn’t seem to be the life we want for ourselves. We try really hard, I swear we do, but we both have a strong desire for exploration, novelty, and adventure. That’s where this bike trip comes in. This year will be sort of a compromise, to live one way during the school season–with routine, structure, stability–and one way during the summer, a way that feels more natural to us.

Understand that we love having children, we love being a family. But there are different ways family life can work–after I became a mother, I learned that this is the difference between experience and institution–and we struggle with living the way typical American family life works. We want to see what other ways look like.

What does all this have to do with your friends moving?

Over the weekend, we celebrated one last night with our friends and one of the twins decided, at the last minute, to spend the night. This was supposed to be our last weekend for packing, cleaning, and planning for the bike trip, but we tossed the schedule out the window, as we are known to do, and spent time with people we love. The morning after the sleepover, I made you all chocolate chip pancakes, banana muffins, and bacon that I burnt so badly we had to open the doors and windows. I gave you all a mini-lecture about making the conscious decision to have screen-time on your last morning together.

After breakfast, I drove you all down the mountain to return your friend to his parents. About halfway down, it hit me.

It’s June and you’re twelve and your best friends are moving. Suddenly, everything about that moment, that day, became illuminated in a way that I know will be sharply burned into my memory as long as I live. The way the summer sun flooded the car, the warm air, the way you boys went back-and-forth between talking about the video game you spent most of the morning playing and sitting in silence, staring out the window. What were each of you thinking? About the video game? About swimming pools and BBQ’s? About the next time you might see one another?

A Justin Bieber song was on the radio. The car smelled funny and we thought it was dog poop on someone’s shoe and then discovered a carton of milk that I bought a week ago and never brought in. It was one of the rare times no one fought over who had to sit on the middle hump in the back.

I cried the rest of the way down the mountain, but put on my sunglasses so you wouldn’t know. We met your friend’s mother in the parking lot of a grocery store and I cried in her arms. She and I met as parents of 1st graders, with so many years ahead of us to figure things out before our little kids became big kids who would become middle schoolers. It feels like a chapter is closing and we still haven’t figured much out.

I want you to know that we are doing this trip as a way for your dad and I to keep searching for what is important to us while being able to give what we hope is important to you. I think the single most influential book I’ve read thus far is “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau. I read it my freshman year of college. Of his time in the woods by Walden Pond he wrote,

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

We are going on this trip as a family for a lot of reasons, but the big one, for the grown-ups, is to face the essential facts of our lives. We are leaving our home, jobs, friends, chores, schedules, practices, appointments, commitments, our country, to see what else is out there. The only thing we need with us is you guys and your sister. We just need one another.

But this is us grown-ups. I want you to know, I see you, too. I was twelve once. Back then, I don’t remember wanting to “live deliberately,” because I just was.

Will you remember yesterday like I do? The sun, the song, the smelly car? It’s the summer you are twelve. You’re riding your bikes through another continent because your parents don’t want to “lead lives of quiet desperation,” as Thoreau put it. Your best friends are moving. You’re still some of the smaller kids in your class, but you’re hovering in the twilight between childhood and adolescence, and I never know if you will be laughing or arguing or asking (again) for an iPhone or playing pretend with your little sister. Your moods are always changing.

This is the summer you are twelve.

If the first shakedown was about testing our equipment and some basic logistics (Can the five of us carry everything we need for six weeks on bikes?), the second was about testing our mental resolve. (Will Maria wish she’d married someone more interested in luxury travel than self-supported bike touring?)

We returned to our original shakedown plan, leaving right from our driveway to campgrounds near our home. By now, we already knew what to pack and how to pack it, so this part was a breeze.

This was the plan for our 3-day Memorial Weekend:

Day 1: Home to Memorial Park (in Loma Mar CA), 21.6 miles

Day 2: Memorial Park to Half Moon Bay State Beach, 29.3 miles

Day 3: Half Moon Bay State Beach to Home 19.1 miles (Chris only)

Chris would get the van, drive back to Half Moon Bay, and pick us up.

Here’s what we didn’t fully realize: how much climbing would be involved. I mean, we understood there would be elevation changes, but knowing the numbers isn’t the same as feeling the numbers, especially on bikes loaded with panniers loaded with clothes and camping equipment. Here’s the climbing we did:

Day 1: 1476 ft

Day 2: 1424 ft

Day 3: (Chris only) 2211 ft

In addition to being under-prepared for climbing on the tandem, I went into the shakedown having to confront what may be my two biggest fears about our big trip: 1) sharing the road with traffic and 2) whether a herniated disc in my lower back (one that had me bed-ridden for weeks a year ago) will become a problem.

Our route had us taking a stretch of Highway 1, one of the most beautiful and scary roads in the country. We live in an area that both cyclists and motorists love for the roads and, unfortunately, are reminded on a regular basis that when the two collide, the cyclists will always lose. This fear I have of sharing the road with cars is one of the reasons I wanted to do our tour in European countries known for bike-friendliness.

The other scare we had for this shakedown was that my back injury, which had been feeling fine for months, started acting up, which means it was inflamed and causing pain through the lower left side of my body. I’ve learned through trial-and-error over the past year that movement is better for it than rest, but certain movement is better than others. Would cycling and camping make it worse? Just in case, I strapped my yoga mat onto a bike.

Our first stop, 6 miles in, was to the famous Alice’s Restaurant. Even though it’s right by our house and we’ve been there a million times, it was a whole new thing to be on our bikes. As soon as we parked them out front, people came up to talk to us: Who were we? What were we doing? Where were we going? It was the first of many times during the weekend that I realized doing old things in a new way offered a bright perspective.

After lunch we went onto Memorial Park and faced the hardest climb of the weekend, on a quiet, beautiful road with few cars. After checking into the Visitor Center for a hike-in site in the back country, we faced the most surprising and fun part of the adventure: a stream we had to cross to get to the campsites.

Pros: pretty, quiet, big campsites nestled among the redwoods. Cons: millions of mosquitoes the size of moths. Chris rode 2.5 miles back to the camp store for bug spray.

The next morning, we took off for Half Moon Bay State Beach, by way of Pescadero, a tiny town we love for the restaurant Duarte’s, known up and down the coast for their local seafood and produce, artichoke soup, and Olallieberry Pie. We spent many of the miles heading there (on another beautiful and quiet road) talking about what we were going to eat.

Alas, when we got to Pescardero, we were surprised to see cars lined up and down its streets and flags hoisted at the one stoplight in town. They were celebrating a local holiday and people crowded onto the sidewalks. When we got to Duarte’s, the hostess told us to check back in an hour to then get a wait time. The artichoke soup was not happening.

I noticed how the ups and downs during the days felt more extreme than ups and downs normally feel. When we saw beauty or felt elation or relief, it was amazing.  When we got irritated or realized we had another climb when we were just starting to recover, it was maddening. Chris kept reminding us: there are going to be highs and lows. We just have to ride them out. (No pun intended?)

My lowest lows occurred on Highway 1. Even though almost every car that passed slowed down and gave us room, I still wondered if the next would be the one that wasn’t paying attention. Even though statistics say a person is more likely to die in a car crash than on a bike (which never occurs to us even though we do it every day, because everyone else is doing it every day…) I wondered if we were being wildly risky, if every person passing us was shaking their heads at our irresponsibility.

As much as I believe that I can’t let what other people think dictate the way I live, I still have my insecure moments. Chris and I made sure we were all tucked into a straight, tight line and the boys were better at climbing than me, but I was so relieved when we made it to Half Moon Bay.

The night before had been warm but full of mosquitoes. The next night was bug-free, but cool and windy, right next to the beach. There were three other sets of cyclists doing what we were doing and the kids made friends with our neighbors, two couples who had ridden from San Francisco and realized they hadn’t had s’mores in almost ten years as the kids made some for them. We gathered around a shared fire pit, had a little wine, and went to bed without carefully storing our food. We realized this the next morning, when it was evident that raccoons had taken our trail mix and breakfast.

Here’s the crazy thing about Day 3: even though the day before had me exhausted from climbing, scared of traffic, and thinking, at one point, I just can’t do this, I woke up the next morning thinking, My God, I could get on my bike again and ride some more. 

The kids and I didn’t need to ride more, as we packed up camp while Chris climbed over 2000 feet to get home, got the van, drove back down, and picked us up. The climbing we did over the weekend is more than any we’ll have to do for at least our first several weeks through Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, so I feel good knowing if we can do Northern California, we can do almost anything.

Another Very Good Sign: I woke up Day 3 with my back feeling better than it did the day we left. I’d conquered my two biggest fears and we all returned home feeling altogether less worn-out than we had after our first shakedown. We made note of the few very-last things to get and stopped for celebratory ice cream on our way out of town.

Because this: riding makes you hungry.

Overnight

It’s a good thing we’re well into May and the sun is setting after 8pm, because we certainly got a late start to the day. After leaving our bikes on the trail and carrying our panniers into camp the last 1/4 mile, the kids and I set up tents and food while Chris went back to the parking lot to fill up a 6 liter dromedary bag with water. One of our tests: will a 6L bag of water and our 8-10 cycling water bottles be enough for a night and morning?

When we were deciding what types of tents to bring and how many, we originally thought we’d split the five of us between a 3-person and a 2-person, tents we already own. L, however, loves his independence and specifically requested a 1-person-tent he could carry himself. Chris found one at a great price and this was L’s first night with it.

I wasn’t sure how the reality of being in a tent by himself would compare with his idea, but L knew what he wanted. He loved it. He loved being able to carry his own gear by himself; he loved setting it up and breaking it down (“No one even had to ask me,” he pointed out several times); he loved the ownership he had, setting up and organizing his things in his own space.

For dinner, we made chili using the backpacking stove I bought over a decade ago, an MSR Whisperlite International, and discovered that it needs to be cleaned out or replaced because it wouldn’t hold a steady flame. T was using the 2-person backpacking tent I bought around the same time as the stove and it also looked a little worse for the wear. We decided we want to replace the old tent and get a 1-person for T, too.

So far, repairs and/or replacements needed: stove (repair) and T’s tent (replace).

Upgrades we’re glad we made: the 6L dromedary bag and this pot, in the biggest size available.

The kids were disappointed that camping didn’t automatically mean a campfire (not allowed in hike-in spots) and ate cold, hard ‘smores.  While they were outside laughing about chipping their teeth on the hard chocolate, I was already in my sleeping bag for the night: not because I was tired, but because it was so cold that only way I was comfortable was being in my down bag, rated for 20-degrees, wearing wool socks, running tights, and a down jacket.

It was around this time I had a short-lived pity-party, when I felt myself sink into a gloomy place, wondering, Why are we doing this? Why aren’t we going to spend a week in a condo on the beach this summer, like normal people?

We slept…just OK… for the night. Chris says he read recently that a person never really fully falls asleep their first night in a new place and I’m wondering if the tent will stop feeling like a new place even if it’s always in a new location.

But at one point, in the middle of the night, Chris stuck his head out the zippered door, got my attention, and we realized how big the moon was hanging in the canyon on an invisible string and the stars burned bright and clear around it, with just a fine strip of fog settled in the valley below us. When is the last time I saw the night sky like that?

Morning

I woke up on Mother’s Day and remembered how much I love mornings camping. The sun slowly burns off the night’s chill, drying the condensation that’s collected. You have to stumble a little further out to find a spot to pee than you did during the night. And even instant coffee tastes like heaven because nothing is easy camping–like making instant coffee with a broken stove–and the effort makes you appreciate the littlest details.

We had coffee and the kids had hot cocoa and we made eggs and turkey sausage on the broken stove. It probably took 30 minutes to heat water for the drinks and another 30 to cook the eggs. But man, that food was good. And the chili and fritos from the night before. SO. GOOD. Culinary masterpieces. That’s food when you’re camping.

We took a little–tiny–hike up a slope by our campsite and the kids were in pure childhood-freedom-mode, paving new paths in the grass, climbing trees, picking wildflowers. It wasn’t like any Mother’s Day morning we’d had before and I loved it.

Departure

We did it. We survived our first shakedown with a few mishaps and lessons learned, but overall, consider it a success. We know what we need to get and fix for next time. Packing up and getting out was fast and easy.

Notes for next adventure:

• fix stove
• bring trash bag!
• more tent stakes
• pillow for Chris
• slip-on shoes (like birkenstocks) for Maria, T, and S to have near tent
• toothbrush covers

Finally, the nearest restaurant serving lunch and mimosas was a quick 45-minutes away. We walked in, straight from camping, to white tablecloths and cloth napkins, toasted our shakedown, and enjoyed a leisurely meal.

It was Mother’s Day, after all, and I do have certain standards…

Planning

We began our first shakedown by changing our plans.

(BTW: Chris better explained to me why he calls it a shakedown: “It’s like taking a machine and shaking it to find the loose parts.” His grandfather confirmed that this was, indeed, a Navy term that refers to testing a ship before a big voyage and a quick Wikipedia search on my part further substantiated these claims.)

Originally, we were planning to do the bike-in campsite closest to home, at Half Moon Bay State Beach. We were going to bike right out of our house, go 10 miles down a mountain road and another 6 miles on HWY 1 (aka Pacific Coast Highway), to a campsite we’ve ridden by a million times, a 20 minute drive from home.

However, the morning of Shakedown Day, Chris and I were both feeling underwhelmed at the thought of camping so close to home and I decided to look up some other hiker/biker campsites in the surrounding counties for something new.  (Hiker/ biker campsites are different than drive-in campsites by being cheaper, more primitive, and–important in California, where campsites are ALWAYS full–don’t require reservations.)

I found Henry Coe State Park in Santa Clara county offering hiker/biker campsites. I told Chris it was less than an hour drive away (which turned out to be wrong…more on that later) and it was one of the biggest parks in the state, one Chris had previously heard was ranked in the Top Ten, so we decided to go for it.

Destination: Henry W. Coe State Park. This was decided at 10am, with a 1:00pm departure time. Campsite ETA: 4:00pm

Packing

We had everyone lay out their stuff–sleeping bags, sleeping pads, camping pillows, clothes, shoes, camping accessories–on the living room floor, with Chris being in charge of the cooking gear and tents in addition to his personal things: our deal, as I am riding the heavier tandem with our 7-yr-old on the back.

For the most part, everyone is assigned a color for this trip, to help keep things straight. Whenever we can get gear in the color (panniers, headlamps, toothbrushes, mugs, clothes), L gets orange, T gets green, S gets blue, and Chris and I seem to default to black and/or gray, with the same yellow panniers.

Our first big question, Will everything we need for the trip fit into the panniers? was answered with a big, YES.

While we didn’t pack all of the clothes we’ll need on the trip, we did pack the bulky extras, like raincoats, thick socks, and our heaviest clothes, and still had room to spare. Chris and I even threw in down coats as a test and confirmed, after the sun went down, that these were necessities.

L was able to fit his specially-requested 1-person-tent in his own panniers, making him an entirely self-sufficient 12-year-old on a bike.

Arrival

This is when things get sketchy. I’ll admit: I missed some important details. When I looked up how long of a drive it would be, I searched for the town nearest the state park, Morgan Hill, less than an hour away. I failed to understand that the park is another 45 minutes from town. By the time we got to Morgan Hill, picked up groceries for dinner and breakfast, and drove another 45 minutes up a mountain road, we got to the Visitor’s Center right when they were closing, at 4:00 pm.

Let me emphasize this: WE WERE STARTING THE BIKE TRIP AT 4:00PM. This is, really, hours past the time any sane person has ended for the day. On our actual trip, we should be putting the most miles in before noon!

I also failed to look at any kind of topographical map, not realizing that Henry Coe State Park has crazy elevation changes and rugged trails, suitable for hikers and mountain bikers, not cyclists on touring bikes.

BUT ANYWAY. Here’s what I already know about life: stuff works out. Yes, we got there right before they closed. But they hadn’t closed yet. Yes, they were surprised and amused that we thought we could show up and get a campsite when they were hosting a huge Mothers’ Day Weekend Event, making every possible campsite taken. Except for one. Yes, it’s true that this really was a hike-in spot, not bike-in, as it was an incredibly steep grade on a jeep road, but at least it was the first one on the trail, a mere mile from the Visitor’s Center.

So. This is what we did. We paid for the last remaining parking spot and campsite, loaded the bikes in the parking lot, rode maybe 1/4 of a mile, and pushed the bikes the rest of the way up the jeep road to the campsite trail. Once we got to the trail itself, we left the bikes in the grass and carried our panniers the last 1/4 mile to the site.

And I will say this: It. Was. Beautiful. And, most importantly, somehow no one was upset. We all just went with it. Which may have been the most important thing to know we were capable of.

Coming Up in Part Two:

• Overnight
• Morning
• Departure

Chris and I have wanted to do a self-supported bike tour with our kids from the get-go, but it’s never been the right time. Before we met, we were both interested in these types of adventures: I used to backpack and camp and right before I met him, Chris walked away from a cushy corporate job so that he could pedal himself from Kansas to Oregon. The circle of friends we ran with, who ended up introducing us, were all connected through a bike and outdoor adventure retailer. Having kids didn’t quell our passion for self-supported exploration, but it certainly introduced a new set a logistical challenges.

When the twins, L and T, were around five and our daughter, S, was one, we bought two Co-Motion tandems and a Chariot trailer and planned to go on a US route put together by Adventure Cyclist. We got as far as doing a long weekend on the Katy Trail in Missouri when the opportunity came up for us to move to California. We’d need to put our bike dreams on hold.

Fast forward to this year: the boys are now twelve and our daughter is seven. Our original outfit of the two tandems and a trailer has graduated to three single bikes, for Chris, L, and T, and one tandem for S and I. Chris promised he’ll carry the heaviest gear on his bike while the rest of us get the light stuff…I think he’s telling the truth. He usually does.

And instead of doing a route in the US, in some excited burst of ambition, we decided to go to Europe instead. We looked at cycling routes in Europe and settled on some countries in the northwest: Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and France. Why? They’re flat and bike friendly. I’d say we’re taking the easy route, but “easy” is such a relative term.

On a Saturday morning in February we bought one-way tickets to Stockholm, Sweden for five of us and four bikes. (Yes! On Norwegian Air, you can choose to bring your bike with a simple click on the website!)

We leave June 16th, the day after our kids get out of school, and have approximately six weeks to make it to France. This blog is about recording the ins-and-outs of this adventure, letting our friends and family keep up with the progress, and encouraging others who want to take a road less travelled (at least by bike.)

-maria

Since deciding to do this trip several months ago, we’ve had things happen that have inspired me to create our first blog post. One was getting our passports in the mail. One was booking the plane tickets. Others have been the practice rides we’ve gone on to get some saddle time in as a family.

The thing that finally got fingers to keyboard, though, was meeting Daniel.

Chris was out running errands on a wet night with L&T when he first noticed the bike sitting outside the laundromat. It was a Surly Long Haul Trucker outfitted with Ortlieb panniers (bike bags), almost identical to his own set up. It wasn’t difficult to spot the owner of the bike, who was the only person around not wearing normal clothes.

Chris struck up a conversation with Daniel and found out that he was on day three of a planned 10-week tour from his home in Monterey, CA, to New York. They talked a bit about gear and routes and Chris went on his way.

As he drove away, though, Chris thought about Daniel setting up his tent in the rain.

“Should we go back and offer Daniel some hot food and a place to stay tonight?” he asked the boys.

They were all for it. Chris turned the car around to gather Daniel, his bike, and his gear. I was in a school fundraiser meeting and got a text:

bringing home a cycling tourist

It was after Chris offered him some food and a place to stay for the night that Daniel told him about the purpose of his trip: Daniel is biking for kindness.

He left Monterey with no food or money, but video equipment in order to capture what he knows will be random acts of kindness offered to him along the way. Daniel has done a lot of bike touring before and knows how good and generous people are. After this brutal election year, he’s fed up with negativity in the news and has set out to capture the goodness happening all around us. He plans to turn the footage of his trip into a documentary.

“I worry people might begin to believe the world is only the bad stuff they see on the news if they don’t get out.” he told me. “Getting out and having experiences with one another is a way for us to learn that, as a whole, people are just waiting to help.”

A piece of advice we received while looking into “training” for this trip is that it’s not as important to get in the miles or gather the right gear: it’s to connect with like-minded people who will inspire and encourage us and not question our sanity. Daniel is one of those people.

We’re rooting for him and his cause all the way to New York.