Monday, July 27, 2009
42: The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything
| Stoker's Log Day Forty Two |
 |
| 7/26/09 |
| Rest Day |
| Aurora, CO |
I have a confession to make.
I've never truly considered quitting, packing up, flying back, and ending the trip entirely. Not in Pennsylvania, when my new shoes were tearing up my achilles tendons. Not in Maryland, when a large part of Kyle wanted to stop and offered multiple arguments for doing so. Not in Indiana, when we had a long talk about just how empty and impossible Wyoming would be. Never...until this week.
The bike is still being repaired and we can't be sure about when we'll get it back. We hadn't planned to spend so many days here, and now we're running out of time for the rest of the trip. We're currently on Day 42. Thanks to work, Kyle must be on a plane by Day 64, and we'd really like some time to explore Oregon before that happens. Can we really make it to the coast in twenty days or less?
We spent much of yesterday and today searching googlemaps and hotel sites, trying to figure out if it was possible, and talking seriously to each other, trying to figure out if we wanted it to be possible. I never wanted to quit before because there was never a good enough reason to do so. I'm a stubborn, driven person, and I thought we should be able to push through all of the small stuff and even the not so small stuff to accomplish what we set out to do, and what we promised everyone else we were going to do, whether they believed us or not. But now there's a chance that we'll be stopped by forces outside our control. If it becomes physically impossible to make it across, no one could blame us for quitting, not even ourselves. Right?
We tried to get used to the idea of ending the trip early. And as we discussed alternative plans, we started to feel relieved, even excited. We could ship the broken bike back home and not have to worry about it anymore. We could spend more time in Aurora, see Pickle and Dave when they got back, and then return to the realm of the blue demon horse and fly home to enjoy the rest of our summer. Our downtime in Aurora has reminded us just how nice it is to relax in one place without any pressing responsibilities. Or we could rent a car and drive to Oregon and have plenty of time to tour it, something we'll barely get to do even if do we make it there by bike. And if we wanted to, we could fly into Denver next summer with our bike and finish the rest of the trip. That would almost be the same, right? I didn't want to admit it, but that plan started to sound more and more appealing, and I started to come to terms with abandoning the trip here and now. Of course I would always rather finish what we'd started, but I started to believe that if the bike was beyond a quick repair it wouldn't be such a bad thing after all.
But we couldn't completely come to grips with it, not so long as there was a chance we'd be getting the bike back soon. No matter how nice a relaxing, bike-free August sounded, the part of us that was still dedicated to finishing this trip the right way kept looking at maps and planning out a route. It would take a number of very long days, sometimes several in a row, but it was doable if we didn't run into any other major setbacks. We would also have to be a little insane. (Check.) It's going to take a lot out of us, and we still can't be sure that we'll have time to make it all the way across, but we've pursued this dream so far already that we both feel like it would be just as crazy not to go for it. Somehow after two days of talking, planning, and vacillating, we found ourselves recommitting to this crazy endeavor all over again.
Here we come, West, whether you and we like it or not
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| posted at: 02:11 |
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