BRO QUEST 2009

After having biked almost 3500 miles, I can tell you that bicycle touring changes you, both physically and mentally. Our legs, of course, are grotesque, as expected:

YIKES!
In addition to our legs, though, we've got bruises and callouses on the palms of our hands (from the handlebars), repetitive-stress induced nerve and soft tissue damage to our shoulders, elbows and wrists, and our hands and feet routinely go numb at night due to exceedingly low blood pressure. We can each consume a large pizza in one sitting and then happily eat another meal, we don't bleed very much when injured (Pat first noticed this, it's really really weird) and we have so little body fat that we've taken to wearing jackets when the temperature drops into the high sixties.

All this, of course, is nothing compared to the mental changes that have occurred--mileage is not a concrete measurement but rather part of a larger, more complex "distance we can cover" value that involves road conditions, weather, wind, number of stops etc. On pretty much any day where we are only covering 70 miles we don't even consider it real riding--we'll get up late, take a long time at breakfast and lunch, etc. The effects of essentially being left to your own devices for 6-10 hours of physical effort does strange things to the psyche, too--you start muttering to yourself, create long lists, disappear into your own head, look towards the future, the past, to people you've met and to books you've half-finished. You become a master of keeping yourself amused.

AMUSEMENT

When talking to strangers, you end up taking turns answering the same questions. "We started in Portland, Oregon. It's been almost two months. I don't know why we're doing this, maybe we're crazy? You unconsciously check nutritional labels on everything prior to purchasing it. When you meet other touring cyclists the questions boil down to just three:

• Where from and where to?
• How many miles a day?
• What do you think about <x> gear?

Your coping skills also improve: hills, rain, wind, traffic--they can't be avoided, so you just ride. Outside of Hamilton we hit a patch of road construction during a rainstorm. The traffic was truly awful and the road had a seven percent grade, meaning you had to balance riding your brakes enough to keep from hitting 50mph and not accidentally locking your wheels and sliding under somebody's two tons of transportation. There's a sort of fatalistic grim humor to almost getting hit by a car or running out of water ten miles outside of the next town.

Given that we can't carry everything with us, breakdowns get handled in interesting manners. For example, we repaired Pat's bike the other day with a broken phone and a piece of pipe that we found on the side of the road, a hack that was inspired by the piece of aluminum pipe that we zip-tied to his rear rack to fix the problem on the other side of his bike.

I'm not sure how transition into non-touring life is going to go, but I know that this trip has made me more patient, more resourceful, and more willing to go without showers for days on end. Might have to watch out for that one.

We're trying to make it to Auburn for the evening, we've got more photos and such when we get there.