Cycling Journey

I had planned to write down some thoughts and reflections of my journey, but it didn’t seem to happen. A combination of the lack of time, motivation, or electrons in my devices. Many books are written with the end in mind and work backwards from there. So I guess this should be okay as well.

So, where should I start? The beginning of this trip, or somewhere between the last one and now? Or even further back?

I wouldn’t have called myself a cyclist back in 2014. Sure, I owned a bike. I’ve had one for most of my life, ever since I learned to ride as a kid. It had training wheels, but I remember digging through my dad’s tools when he was at work and removing them myself. Taking things apart has always been part of who I am. I didn’t have the balance thing down though, and I would lean the bike against our red brick house and get going. The repeated attempts wore down the end of the handlebar grip and started leaving a scratch in the brick of the house. My parents weren’t thrilled about that. Living just outside Buffalo, biking for me back then was for the short hours after school and summer months. It was one of the few outdoor activities I remember my severe asthmatic self doing. I would go around the block to town park, and as I got more daring to be out of sight and yelling distance from the house, I would ride to my cousins. The whole world I navigated back then was no more than a mile away from my yard. 

When I first left home for Massachusetts, I was twenty-two and didn’t have my driver’s license yet. So, I used my bike to commute around. The Stop & Shop grocery store was near work and that was less than two and half miles from my apartment. I was only there for a couple of weeks before I got sent to Oregon for job training. I remember locking my bike up to the radiator in the bathroom and hoping it would still be there in six months.

In Oregon, my apartment was just two miles from work, and I mostly walked when I first got there. Eventually I went to Target and bought a cheap bike. I don’t remember how much it was, but the price tag was the final cost at the register, since Oregon doesn’t have sales tax. I remember it blowing my mind back then compared to the high sales tax of New York. 

Toward the end of my six months out there, I took an adult driver’s education course and finally got my license. I gave the bike to a coworker before I headed back to Massachusetts.

When I returned, I did find my bike still locked up, but since I would be moving over an hour away from work, splitting the distance of opposite-direction commutes with my then-fiancé the bike didn’t get used much after that. 

We would drive between “Boston” and “Buffalo” a lot planning our wedding, which was the original inspiration for wanting to see the Erie Canal at a slower pace than highway speeds in the first place. While I wasn’t biking, I absolutely had never been kayaking at that point, but I guess the idea of traveling the canal under my own power naturally lent itself to paddling over cycling.

For the next decade and a half, I didn’t ride my bike much. It was only when my daughters were learning to ride, and we’d head a couple of blocks over to the park that I would get on the saddle. In 2018, I hurt my neck. I’m not sure what caused it, but it was most likely a repetitive movement thing from my job. I lost use of my left, dominant hand and arm. I couldn’t paddle, or lift the kayak. Even after having cervical spinal fusion surgery and regaining most of my arm and hand function, I still wasn’t allowed to lift anything, so kayaking pretty much stopped. I started walking more. I hiked if I could do so with a lumbar pack instead of a backpack. I even started running a year after surgery. Somewhere along the way, I thought about riding my bike to work. It was almost ten miles. I hadn’t ridden that far in one go before. Plus, what did I need to carry with me? Change of clothes, a bike lock, and my lunch. Would I be able to make it back up the 16% grade hill we lived on after working a twelve-hour shift and riding back home? I could only try and see how it went.

From that point on, it became about lights, tools, GPS computers, cycling-specific clothing, turning a mountain bike into something more commuter-friendly, and then, just a year into this latest obsession, as the pandemic started to unfold, I was building up a new bike from the frame and individual components, myself.

I’ve since taken bike-specific vacations, flying with, it riding to the Amtrak station and getting on a train. Around Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada, Arizona, The George Mickelson Trail in South Dakota, I’ve crossed Iowa for RAGBRAI. I would commute to work. Ride to get haircuts, go to doctors’ appointments, make grocery stops, coffee, sandwiches, and burrito rides. I’ve taken overnight trips to cabins, yurts, or with my tent packed on the bike. 

My longest ride was 200 kilometers for the Summer Solstice in 2023. I’ve done a bunch of metric centuries before. But all of those were in Oregon over a year ago, and sadly I don’t ride as much now that we moved back to New York. Could I bike 360 miles along the Erie Canal? I’d love to stop and see things, the stuff I couldn’t when I was in the kayak, confined to the canal. My plan wasn’t to push big days. In fact, averaging 45 miles would give me the Sunday to Sunday I had allocated, and I could definitely do better than that. I’d need to get from Ithaca to Buffalo first, though. There was an organized fun ride on Saturday afternoon. I added in the idea camping about 40 miles from Buffalo, a place we used to stay at as kids. So, could I do the remaining 155 miles in one big push?