Post-ride information overload

Hi hi from Syracuse!

This is my last post, and in it is contained various pictures from east of Colorado, silly stories about my post-trip fun, me reminiscing about biking cross-country, and a book list!

The bike path from Silverthorne to Breckenridge

Highest point on the transamerica! It's mostly downhill from here.

The view from Hoosier Pass

My only nice picture from Western Kentucky

Looming storm clouds in Kansas - I found shelter, fast.

Current River - Missouri

Crossing the Ohio river from Illinois to Kentucky

Kentucky sunrise

Treehouse!

Happiness is a bike tour

Newby, the wonderful groceries fairy

As much as I hate invasive vines, they make for some interesting landscapes

Somebody in Virginia doesn't like Obama

Mick biking up the Virginia Creeper Trail

Now I know why they're called the blue ridge mountains

Panorama from the blue ridge parkway

Sunrise somewhere pretty in Virginia

Struggling to lift my bike over my head in victory (I failed)

 After finishing my trip, I drove into DC, spent a day there, and then Sonya and I went to the beach in Delaware.

Sonya super excited for the beach

View of the Atlantic from a beach in Delaware

After that, we drove to Princeton to visit my friend Thaddeus!

A great evening ensued, including but not limited to: heart-stopping hoagies, rock climbing, unnecessary difficulties in choosing 6packs, night-time exploration of Princeton, dredging the depths of youtube (this), drunk facetime, hand-carved wooden spoons, and 40 koozies.

No, that's not a corpse - that's a bacon cheeseburger, french fry, and  mac 'n' cheese wedge hoagie.
Princeton knows how to stop your heart (hand for scale)

Thaddeus channeling his inner Nordic god at the Princeton climbing wall.

After that, we went to see Abbe Hamilton in PA! Unfortunately, I have no pictures, but we went caving (oh man did I miss caving), and then attended a potluck with the caving crew! It was incredibly fun. The evening included explaining burning man to an Italian girl with barely any knowledge of english, being called Chip & Chop (the Italian version of Chip & Dale) due to our matching fleeces, lots of fun songs about animals and nature, and trying to patch Abbe's thumb up after she cut it with a bread knife and refused to tell anyone but me. It was fantastic!

Now, some random thoughts about bike touring!

I would absolutely recommend it to anyone. Any budget can accommodate it, any pace works, and you'd be surprised by how easy it is to get in biking shape, regardless of how fit you were before. Physical disrepair is no excuse for not being able to tour. I've met several couples in their late 60's / early 70's who were having an absolutely fantastic time.

There were times when thought I'd made a huge mistake. I would think: "What kind of hubris inspired me to take on this trip?". But after pushing through and continuing on, I realized that you can only thrive in adversity - constantly blowing your comfort bubble to smithereens and exalting in the catharsis that ensues.
The challenge - both mental and physical of putting in 50+ hour weeks of biking will change you. It's impossible to spend 8 hours a day on a saddle with negative, petty, or angry thoughts. You simply won't make it. Instead, you find yourself focusing on the positives of every situation, and on the amazing experience you've gotten yourself into.

Touring isn't about biking. It's about the people you meet. This trip restored my faith in humanity. I didn't meet a single bad person during the 58 days I was on the road. Everyone I met was kinder than the last. There are good people regardless of where you are, be it the high peaks of Colorado, the plains of Kansas, or the windy mountain roads of Appalachia.

America is an amazingly varied region, and biking through many different climates and geographical conditions gave me a great overview of the country - even if I didn't scratch it's proverbial surface. However, thanks to this trip, I experienced rural America - something that I had never really known anything about. Most towns I went through had populations ranging from 50 to 1000. I stopped locking my bike up after a few weeks. Why bother? Everyone knows each other, and nobody is interested in petty bike theft. Many places I went through were experiencing crippling poverty, but that didn't stop them from being welcoming and genuine people.

Anyways, those were some random thoughts. There are many more, but I don't want to make this too too long.

Book list (in the order I read them)

1) The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King - 8 book series of pretty fantastic science fantasy / western. It's a bizarre world to explain, but if you're into that kind of thing it's great. I have never read any of his other stuff (I hate horror in any shape or form), but these books were amazing.

2) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig - an absolutely marvelous book for a bike trip. In fact, during their motorcycle trip, they follow the transamerica for most of Montana, Idaho, and Oregon. I think that anyone could gain from reading it, it was wonderful.

3) Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect by Matthew D. Lieberman - a compilation of research that explains why we are such social creatures and why we do not thrive when we aren't connected to others. Good read - there are some pretty counter-intuitive findings about human behavior in there.

4) The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity by Steven Strogatz - fun short book that does a great job of explaining the beauty and intricacy of mathematics. Regardless of how much you like (or dislike) math, it's a engaging and entertaining read. 

5) Thinking In Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math by Daniel Tammet - This was my absolutely favorite book of the trip. Through different anecdotes and stories, autistic savant Daniel Tammet explores many different questions that relate to life in this amazing book. It doesn't matter if you need your phone calculator to get you through figuring out a dinner tip or if you're a numerical analysis PhD - I highly recommend it. It's beautiful. I loved it. He has synesthesia, which is a pretty sweet condition that he shares with the amazing author of book #6.

6) Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov - not as good as Lolita (in my opinion), but a great read. It is formatted as a commentary to a 999-line poem, through which the story progresses. The beauty of it is that it can be read in several different ways: Poem then commentary, or by alternating the poem and the commentary whenever necessary.

7) This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works by John Brockman - Edge.org asked the question "What is your most favorite deep, beautiful, and elegant theory?". In the form of 150 one to two page responses by a plethora of famous (and not so famous) scientists, it went through many theories I knew - and many I didn't. Although there was a lot of quantum stuff that went way over my head, most of it was interesting and captivating

8) A Prison Diary (Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven) by Jeffrey Archer - if you don't know Jeffery Archer, you should. He is an absolutely fantastic British novelist, and I recommend every book he has read. In this three part series, he recounts his experience of the British prison system after his convictions for perjury and perverting the course of justice. I found them to be a fascinating take of the British prison system, and they are extremely interesting - although they can get pretty hardcore - he doesn't pull any punches.

9) Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk - as much as I enjoyed the movie, the book is even better. It's a hard book to explain without ruining everything about it, but it is amazing in a disturbing kind of way.

Honorable Mention  Ulysses by James Joyce - I tried. I gave up. I'm sorry.

10) Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World's Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself by Rich Roll - a bad book to read during a bike tour. All I wanted to do after reading it was ditch the bike and start running again. It's a pretty inspiring read, and is making me want to do ultra's even more than before. I'm also planning on trying vegan for a bit due to it. We shall see. If you're into triathlons, ironmans, or any ultra-endurance sport you'll enjoy this. 

11)  Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell - honestly, meh. It's a very popular sciency book, and I don't agree with the way he structures his arguments. He also seems to misunderstand the scientific method. Instead of postulating a hypothesis, constructing experiments to test said hypothesis, and arriving at a conclusion with the data from the experiments; he states a conclusion, uses very specific data that supports that conclusion, and from there postulates a hypothesis that leads to that conclusion. It made me mad. I'm not sorry.

12) Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant by Daniel Tammet - a biography by the same author of #5. It's really good as well. He explains his life as an autistic savant, and I loved it.

13) The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt - I haven't read a novel as good as this one in a while. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which may give you an idea of what calibre it is. Again, I can't say much about it without ruining it, but it is a fantastic read. The metaphors she uses are unique, and the insights offered at the end of the book were beautiful and thought provoking.  

14) Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind by Daniel Tammet - yet another book by Daniel. Funnily enough, I've read them out of the order they were published - but it's kinda fun that way (They go Born on a Blue Day, this one, and then Thinking in Numbers). I'm actually cheating, since I'm still reading this one, but it's good. He talks about how savants don't necessarily have different functioning brains than the average person - they simply function at another level. In this book, he talks about the potential that is within all of us to use our brains more effectively.  

22.5 books in 58 days while biking cross-country. Not bad, eh?

Anyways, all good things must end (I hope this is a good thing). If you're still here, dear reader, I hope you enjoyed these silly blog posts. They were really fun to write, and I was cheered by the fact that a substantial amount of random people have told me how much they enjoyed them.

In conclusion: GET ON YOUR BIKE AND RIDE.

Love,

Malcolm