Durham Presentation and S240!

Just a reminder that we’re giving a presentation on bike touring in Durham tomorrow night (Friday)! If you’re in the Durham, Raleigh, Cary area and have always wanted to know what it was like to go on an extended bike tour, you should come by! We’ll have the bikes fully loaded and you can check out the various doodads we use. There will also be tons of photos and stories from the road.

Here are the details and a link to the Facebook Event page.

When: Friday, September 10th, 2010 @7pm
Where: Temple Building, 302 W Main Street, Durham, NC

We hope the presentation will get you fired up enough to join us on an overnight bike camping trip the next day! We’ve only done this in one other city (Austin, TX) and it was a great success. If you’re tour-curious or have a Surly LHT and haven’t “broken it in” yet – we hope you join us! Even if you don’t have a touring bike but can stuff some camping stuff in a bag and strap it on your bike, we hope you join us! One the great revelations that most people come away with is that bike camping is tremendously easy and fun and they often wonder why they haven’t done it before.

Details:
Where: ATT trail head at Fayetteville Rd and NC 54 in Durham, just off I-40
When: Saturday, September 11th, 2010 at 2pm (sharp!)
Itinerary: We will ride down the trail through Durham, Chatham and Wake Counties to Jordan Lake. Campsites are already reserved. To book a spot, please email Jack directly.

VIDEO: Durham Days

We’ve been in Durham, NC for the last few days and have been having a blast meeting with several bikey folks. We’ve stayed with a Durham rider who completed Paris-Brest-Paris (thanks Branson!), met several bike commuters and have hung out with a few readers. We have been wanting to do more videos for the site ala Travel Channel (if they don’t come to you, do it yourself) and decided to try it out.

So here’s our first attempt at a little bit more produced video. It’s rough, I know. I’m shooting the video with my Lumix LX3 that has terrible sound and am doing voice-overs through the mic on the computer, but I don’t think its too bad for a first attempt. We hope to do more in the future and perhaps acquire a little better gear.

We hope you like it and if you want to see more, consider hitting the donate button on the right so we can get another hard drive!

Embracing Serendipity

We’re leaving Winston-Salem, headed toward Greensboro. There’s a bike shop that we’ve heard about that we want to check out, and a brewery in town that everyone says is fantastic. We have no idea where we’re going to wind up that night.

On our way through downtown Winston-Salem, we stumble into a local coffee shop. There’s a beautiful cargo bike parked outside, outfitted as a coffee delivery bike. Russ takes photos. We order coffee and bagels and get to talking with a few other people. It turns out that they’ve recently started their own company building bike frames, and they want to work on some touring-specific frames and bike-packing gear. A storefront is in their future. We mention that we’re headed to Greensboro that night, do they happen to know anyone who would let us crash at their place for the night? Yes, actually, they have a friend, they’ll call her for us. We ride into Greensboro, a beautiful ride, with a stop for burgers and ice cream. The friend calls, she’s happy to host us for the night. We visit the bike shop and the brewery that called us to town in the first place, then meet our host for the night. We sit up chatting, and she and Russ bond over a love of fly fishing. In the morning, she rides us part of the way out of town, and we head through the countryside to meet our next hosts, a couple who we just heard from via email the night before.

So goes our trip, from day to day, week to week. We pedal down the road, enjoying the scenery, stopping to eat at local diners, chatting with folks, telling our story, learning to trust that we’ll find a place to sleep at night.

The more we travel, the more we have learned to welcome and embrace serendipity, and to trust in serendipitous meetings. Serendipity allows us to meet people we never could have conceived of meeting, see places we didn’t know existed, experience the kindness of strangers, try something new and delightful.

Yet, serendipity isn’t really something you can plan or look for. By definition, serendipity is: “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.” You have to just be open to its gifts and allow it to show up.

And this is where serendipity becomes difficult, because this idea of not planning and just being open to “whatever comes along” is hard to grasp and even harder to master. But we’re trying.

The longer we’re on the road, the less we plan. We ride down the road with a rough idea of where we’re headed, but we purposefully don’t lock ourselves into any decisions about where we’ll end up. We’ll look at a map in the morning and pick a campground to aim for, but we never know if that’s actually where we’ll stay the night.

When we tell people that we don’t plan, we’re always met with a look that’s a mix of awe and horror. It’s as if the person we’re talking with can appreciate how great this could be, but can’t envision actually doing it for themselves. “Aren’t you afraid it won’t work out?” “What if you don’t find a place to sleep at night?”

Here’s a secret: I used to be a huge, hard-core planner. I used to plan our trips and vacations down to the last little detail, and I would derive a lot of enjoyment from the planning process. Except that, eventually, my penchant for planning became a liability. We would travel somewhere and I would plan where we would go and have an idea in my head of what it would be like – and, then, if something else came along, no matter how great that something else could be, if we didn’t follow my plan, I would feel let down. I would mope around and whine and get frustrated and feel totally out of control.

One day, I realized how completely ridiculous I was acting, and how much I was keeping myself from experiencing. From then on, I decided to learn how to release control over the outcome. This is a crazy hard lesson, but absolutely worth it. What I discovered is that, if I didn’t have a preconceived idea of what a day would look like, I could be completely happy with whatever came along.

How did I do it? I recognized that it’s in my nature to plan, and I found a new way to channel that energy. There’s a train of logic that says that you can’t actually break a habit, you have to change the habit. Instead of planning exactly where we’ll camp on a given night, I’ll scour the entire map and mark down where ALL of the potential campgrounds are located. Then, I can relax into the knowledge that there are plenty of places for us to sleep at night, and I can simply enjoy my day. Instead of trying to control the day, I try to control my reactions.

It’s been an interesting experience to train ourselves to be open to not knowing what will happen. I think it’s a continual process, and we have to be very aware of our reactions and check ourselves on occasion. But, the reward for all of this hard work is priceless. If we had stuck to our plan of logging lots of miles instead of accepting a home-stay offer and stopping in Sewanee for the night, we never would have been able to hike down to a hidden waterfall. If we had panicked about not having a place to stay our second night in Chapel Hill, instead of putting out feelers and trusting it would all work out, we might never have been able to eat venison for the first time and meet a kindred spirit. These sorts of experiences are why we’re on this trip, so it would be a shame to let anything get in the way.

Recommended Reading

We love to read. And we love to always have a book or two on hand. This was true before we left on this trip (which is why we had to clear out approx 1200 books) and it’s true now (we try to only carry one book at a time these days, but sometimes we’ve actually found ourselves with three each that we’re lugging around).

Over the past few years, we’ve read so many great books about bike touring, traveling, simplifying, making it happen, that we finally decided it was time to share our favorites. If you’re looking for some new reading material, check these out… (Note: Each link provided is an affiliate link. If you purchase a book through one of these links, you’ll also be supporting our journey.)

Miles from Nowhere: A Round the World Bicycle Adventure
by Barbara Savage

This is the quintessential bike touring book for us. Several years ago, Russ found a copy in our favorite used bookstore – and it instantly made him a bike tourist at heart. He emerged from the back of the apartment with a smile and said “we’re going to go bike touring!”

Written in the 1970s, Miles from Nowhere was one of the early great bike touring travelogues. In writing this book, Barbara Savage made bike touring seem easy and accessible, even an enormous feat such as riding around the world. She was mostly a non-cyclist, and before embarking on their round-the-world trip, the most she had ridden at one time was only 15 miles. You walk away from the book realizing that, if she could do it, anyone can do it. Miles from Nowhere is a great inspirational read for anyone who wants to do a bike tour, and we highly recommend it. Unfortunately, there’s a tragic epilogue to the book, because Barbara Savage was killed in a car accident near her house in Santa Barbara only a few weeks before it was published.

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
by Rolf Potts

Before we rolled into Austin, Texas, we had never heard of this book, or the amazing man that authored it. One of our hosts in town had a copy and shared it with us, and Russ and I each gobbled it up in just a handful of hours, putting it down with a sigh and a feeling that everything he had written exactly matched our own travel experiences and what we had learned ourselves about roaming the world.

Rolf Potts began traveling around the world many years ago, in a meandering style that left many decisions up to serendipity. Vagabonding is his “how-to” – but don’t expect to open it and find a check-list of things to do to become an intrepid world traveler. Instead it’s a meditation on what long-term travel actually feels like, how he learned to stop forcing things to happen, and his tips on how you can escape “reality” to head off on your adventure (here’s a hint: the only thing that’s truly stopping you from going is you). There are great travel stories to inspire you, and resources to help you get out the door. But, more than anything, Vagabonding is a spot-on account of the experience of non-destination-based travel.

Smalltopia: A Practical Guide to Working for Yourself
by Tammy Stroebel

Our good friend Tammy just released her second e-book, and we are thrilled for her, and excited to post about it. We contributed a “case study” essay for the e-book, but we really want you to pick up a copy of Smalltopia because it’s an incredible compilation of tips, know-how, inspiration and support to help you build your own small business (which just might create the opportunity for you to go vagabonding too!).

In January, Tammy quit her job and began working for herself, building up a small business based, in part, on her writing. The ensuing freedom inspired her to help others achieve the same. If you’ve ever sat under a fluorescent light in an office, logging your required eight hours a day, and wished that you could just find a way to escape, you really want to read this book. Smalltopia is both practical and motivational, helping you think about what you really want to do and pushing you to start achieving your goals. And this book is huge. It’s not some thin bit of fluff, but a substantial guide that helps you examine what you’re not doing and advises you how to make a change for yourself.

Cruising in Seraffyn
by Lin & Larry Pardey

Cruising in Seraffyn is not about bike touring. Rather, it’s about sailing – or, more specifically, it’s about cruising, which is sort of like bike touring on a boat. It was recommended to us by a friend because of the wisdom that the Pardeys recount at the beginning of the book. Their world tour on a sailboat was one of the first such journeys to be publicized, and their narrative account of how they made it work was one of the first such books to be published. And the lessons they share still hold true today.

The Pardeys have a saying that we like to remember and relay to others: “Go small. Go simple. Go now.” Or, in other words, stop worrying about all the nitty-gritty, the timing will never be 100% perfect, just jump in and go for it and make it work. They talk about how the most important part of going on a long rambling journey is just making the decision to go – and that once you’ve decided, everything else is just details, and it will all come together. For us, reading Cruising in Seraffyn was like sitting down with a venerable old sage who’s accomplished what you want to do – we walked away realizing that there’s no magic secret, you just have to be sure in your decision and run with it. The Pardeys also write about how they’ve managed to fund their years of travels so that they can just continue sailing around the world.

Trout Bum
by John Gierach

If Edward Abbey and Mark Twain were fisherman, they would collectively write this book. Trout Bum is funny and off-beat and John Gierach pokes fun at the foibles of human nature, through the metaphor of fly fishing. Russ picked up a copy in Asheville, read through it in just a few days, and admitted (somewhat embarrased) that it was his favorite book that he’s read while on the road.

Trout Bum is one of John Gierach’s first books, and the quintessential example of his writing. In it, he waxes philosophical about catching trout and the absurdity of belly boats, all with a dry wit that manages to capture the essence of fly fishing, but also human nature. As much as he appreciates the latest fishing technology available, he most appreciates the simplicity of fly fishing, and pokes fun at the industry trying to sell you the “latest and greatest” crap. Even if you’re not a fishing fanatic, you’ll still appreciate the story-telling in this book.

Desert Solitaire
by Edward Abbey

After hearing the name “Edward Abbey” pop up again and again, Russ decided to pick up a copy of Desert Solitaire. Edward Abbey is an environmentalist, but not of the the typical tree-lover stripe. Imagine if Thoreau drank beer, smoked cigarettes, wore a cowboy hat, and wasn’t afraid to swear… you’d have Edward Abbey.

Desert Solitaire is a collection of essays, some of which cover his time as a seasonal park ranger in Utah, and some of which are soliloquies about man’s antagonistic relationship with nature. In one of his essays about Yosemite, he advocates the banning of cars into the park, and says that people should have to take a train, walk or ride a bike into the valley. Edward Abbey is full of ironies and contradictions – he wants to keep the parks pristine, but also writes about tossing beer cans out the window. His writing is full of sardonic humor, and some of his ideas are a precursor to Fight Club and E.L.F. If you like nature writing, with a jab of hot sauce in your eye, pick up a copy of Desert Solitaire.

The Pine Island Paradox: Making Connections in a Disconnected World
by Kathleen Dean Moore

This book stands as one of Laura’s most favorite titles. In fact, it was near and dear enough that it’s one of my few possessions that got stashed away in a box. Pine Island Paradox is a collection of philosophical essays about nature, and our relationship with nature. They are deep and thoughtful and touching and can transport you away from your to-do lists.

Kathleen Dean Moore looks at the fragile intersection between the natural world and our developed, industrial world – and, through her writing, compels you to take a look as well, without forcing any opinions about what “should” be done. She writes about razor clams, trees, dancing, her family – and Pine Island, a very small primitive island in Alaska where she vacations. I read Pine Island Paradox for the first time in the middle of Southern California, and it was exactly what I needed to stop focusing on the traffic and remember how calm and restorative the forest is.

How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art
by Kathleen Meyer

While killing time in a bookstore in Alpine, Texas, Russ spotted this book with a laugh. He instantly took a photo and posted it to Facebook (which elicited a rapid response from others who had read and loved it), and then took the plunge and took the book with him.

How to Shit in the Woods is the definitive field guide to doing your business in the woods. It’s a mix of funny anecdotes and practical advice. On a serious note, it covers the topics of water quality in the outdoors and what can be done to keep our rivers and streams pristine. How to Shit in the Woods is a tiny book and a quick read, it will make you laugh and re-consider where you squat, and in a pinch it can be used as toilet paper (which you should then pack out with you).