One week later, the last post?

It's been just over a week since we returned from our ride. I'm still getting used to not being on a bike all day, not having to find a place to sleep every night, not waking up in a different city every day. The first of those things is something I miss especially. Financial rewards notwithstanding, sitting at a desk for eight hours a day is much harder than riding for ten.

Riding day after day, not staying put, you discover so much, not least about yourself. But covering so many miles a day, you can only skim the surface of things, never get to know anything too deeply. I'd like to go back to many of the places we visited, and some of the ones we didn't get to visit, and spend more time getting to know them better. There are so many places I haven't been yet, though. It's hard to justify do-overs when so much more begs to be done for the first time. (Well, the first time for me, anyway.)

It will likely be a couple of years before I can justify a ride like this again. These things cost money, which has other priorities clamouring for it. And there are the responsibilities that come with being married - which I wouldn't give up for anything.

There's also something in daily life that's hostile to the kind of freedom that the road offers. That's the curse/blessing of adult life: the necessity of balancing freedom and responsibility. If you choose too much of one or the other, you risk becoming either outlaw or docile.

Nobody wants to be docile, but we all like the romance of the outlaw. Why else would books and movies be so filled with outlaw heroes? We all know in our hearts, though, that the anarchic instinct is akin to the kind of vertigo we feel at the cliff's edge, urging us to lean just a little further out, and then further still. Or the feeling we get leaned over in a sharp turn, when we are on the very edge of our balance, and our skill. Part of us wants to push further, lean deeper, go faster, go all the way. But mostly we don't, reasonably fearing the crash that awaits.

Still, every time I think about it, the road beckons. And that won't stop. And so I'll spend the next year or so deciding what the next long ride should be, and then planning for it. I still want to do my original idea: Vancouver to to L'anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, and back. There through Canada, back through the US. But who knows? There is so much to see in so many places, and the road has a way of taking you places you never expected.

In the meantime there are day rides and weekend rides. Shorter roads that beg for exploration, unexpected places not so far from our doors. Charted but undiscovered, you might say. We'll find them two wheels at a time.