Decision
When I first started planning this thing, I was going to leave in April. I knew I'd be slow, knew I'd be carrying a whole mess o' gear, knew I'd be taking a lot of rest days. Selling the house wasn't a simple thing, though, and I pushed my departure date to May 1. Then Ron The Mortgage Broker happened, and I ended up leaving from Yorktown on May 25, three weeks later than my "must leave by" date, and almost six weeks past my "would like to leave by" date.
On Saturday, I pulled a 59-miler to get to a campground in Bardstown, Kentucky, anticipating six straight days of riding. Not all 60-milers, of course, but I was ready to start hammering. I hadn't done the math in terms of days left in the decent season and miles left to go, but I knew that the numbers probably weren't good. At the campsite, I met Lonnie and Debbie, who were kind enough to share their meal with me, and were good company. Cell phone service was hit or miss, but I called the only motel I'd be passing for the next five or six days to make a reservation. There was something about the fellow who answered that made me ask whether they had phones in the rooms. Sure enough, they didn't.
This was a problem: I needed to complete my project and send it off to the client early enough in the week so that they could do what they needed to do with it, and for that I needed a readily accessible phone jack. So instead of heading out on for a 35-mile ride on Sunday, I just pedaled mile into Bardstown proper and got a motel room. Another day's travel lost.
Once in the room, I began to do some serious freaking out thinking. The thought of the Missouri Ozarks in the heat of late July filled me with dread. And when I totaled up the miles I had left to go and the days I had left to travel...well, folks, it wasn't looking good. The reason I wanted to leave in April is so I didn't have to kill myself to do this. I really needed the three weeks in May, but I didn't have them.
Ben (the mind behind The Blenster's Blog) lives about 40 miles away from Bardstown, and he came on down to see me Monday night. By the time he got there, I was a wreck. Tired and daunted, I told him of my worries. During further conversation over dinner in town, it becamse clear that it was, finally, time to make the decision: could I reach the west coast under my own power, or not?
The answer, as you've probably guessed by now, was "not."
The math told the tale. Having done over 800 miles, I had 3,400 miles left, give or take. If I did 50 miles a day, every day, that was 68 days of travel left. There was no way I could do that, so figuring five days of riding and two rest days, that was about 95 days left, which would put me in Oregon sometime in October. But, realistically, I knew that there was no way I could get fifty miles a day out of myself, not through the Ozarks in dead summer, not across the plains, not up the Rockies. I had run out of time.
Time, that is, to do the trip in a way that was even remotely enjoyable. I already knew that I wasn't a fellow who was going to burn across the country in sixty days. I like my days off, I like to poke along, I like to look at stuff. What I don't like is exertion to the point of continuous misery, and that's what I was faced with.
I had a number of options. I could just go on until I felt it was time to stop, wherever I ended up...which would probably be somewhere in the middle of Kansas, running naked and sun-crazed through a cornfield, leading my tribes of Bedouin against Akabah. I could hole up in Bardstown and write a novel...although there was the distressing possibility that I'd never leave the room alive. Or sober.
Then again...I could...skip ahead to the end. Pack all my gear up and high-tail it across the country to Astoria, then cycle 1,100 miles down the Pacific coast to Santa Barbara.
I had already written off the planned Pacific Coast leg of the journey as impossible. That was disappointing, because I do like the ocean, and everyone I mentioned the route to who had been to that part of the country had nothing but praise for its beauty. The coast isn't flat...but it's temperate, in the mid-seventies, and it's chock-full of campgrounds in gorgeous settings. The weather will stay decent through October, when the rains pick up.
I needed Ben's help, which he graciously provided: a ride to the Lousville airport, there to rent a minivan. We hung out at his place for awhile afterwards, eating Chinese food and watching cartoons...very good for my head, actually. I had, after all, just committed myself to bailing out on the Epic portion of my journey. Although the Pacific Coast route is no small feat (and neither, for that matter, are the 800 miles I've done through the one of the toughest part of the TransAm route), "across the country by minivan" just doesn't have the same romance as "across the country by trike." I won't be cruising across the open-sky'd prarie, listening to Qawali music and getting big with God. I won't sit on my trike at 11,400 feet up on Hoosier Pass. And I won't dip my front wheels in the waters of the Pacific off the Oregon coast.
This was a very difficult decision to make, but I've made it. Today I drove 500 miles from Bardstown to Oak Grove, Missouri. Tomorrow I'll drive another 500, and then on Friday I'll stop over in Denver to see my dad and his family. It is so very strange, to be here in this motel. It looks just like a lot of the other motels I've been in. But I didn't pedal here. The trike isn't stashed in a corner of the room with me; it's outside in the minivan by itself. I didn't get to enjoy a feeling of accomplishment as I arrived with banners flying, or relish the luxury of a shower after a long day in the saddle. I'm just another guy in a van who showed up looking for a place to sleep.
I've acknowledged my limits, and I've changed my journey. It's a fork in the road.
But the road remains...
