Aug 19, 2011

Anyone Can Ride


I love the outdoors and enjoy a variety of sports that get me outside into the mountains. Bike touring never occurred to me as another means of getting myself to beautiful places while being challenging physically. Luckily for me, I have a couple friends who are always ready for new and challenging experiences. Through them, I get invited on trips and excursions that I have never seriously considered tackling on my own.

When ideas of a bike tour started circling amongst my friends, the conversation was originally something we talked of just for fun with no real determination to actually follow through on our plans. But then everything started to take shape; we bought train tickets, maps, and TONS of gear. Before we knew it, we were all committing ourselves to a 1,000 miles adventure from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco, California…with none of us having any touring experience whatsoever.

We started riding on July 4th, 2011 and excitedly biked across the Bay Bridge on July 30th. The most prominent realization that came to me from this experience was about the extensive versatility of biking. Anyone can bike and people can go anywhere on bikes. On our tour we were passes by 70 year old couples who have bike toured for the last 30 years, families with children biking across the entire country, young adults with no fancy gear or experience heading down to Mexico, etc. Besides feeling very humbled, I came to appreciate this community of bikers because they were all just ordinary people taking the time to enjoy life on the seat of a bike. Biking is all about time and patience, not necessarily endurance or speed. A bike will get you wherever you want to go, just at its own pace.