I recently returned home from my first ever long distance bike trip!

I road 260 some odd miles, first west along the katy trail (a converted old railroad bed) and then north through Columbia to dancing rabbit ecovillage (my third summer in a row visiting there) and neighboring red earth farms, making it there in four days.

I lent a hand to my friend Brian (aka Ziggy), who is building his cob house, while I was at dancing rabbit.

Then I headed on over to red earth for a short introductory visit. REF is intending to grow into a collection of homesteads (more spread out than the village model of DR). The people there are really great and knowledgable, and one homestead, called Dandelion, aspires to grow into a tightly knit group of 6-8 adults, focusing on attaining sufficiency through permaculture. I'm thinking maybe I'll intern with them at some point after portland.

The bike ride back was more direct, 150 miles, rerouted slightly due to flooding, which I made in three days. I experienced many kindnesses from strangers as a touring bicyclist.

I'm amazed at the absense of residual soreness from this adventure. Certainly, my butt and hands and back got sore and tired as each day went on, but off the bike, after each leg of the journey - just fine. Exhausted, but fine. The whole of the trip was very intense physically, and I do want to note that I cried a lot (well, at least for me - I rarely cry, unfortunately. In fact, before this trip, the last time I cried was last december when I was in the midst of a stomach bug - another physically exhausted moment). I really enjoyed inhabiting my body in this way, going to bed tired - and early! At red earth, with people retreating to separate quarters after dinner, I started sleeping with the sun! Finally! It was amazing.

Of course, ever since I've gotten back, I swung violently in the opposite direction to staying up all night and sleeping through the morning. Life is a lot simpler on the road and in the country. When there are so few distractions, it is a lot easier to apply the self discipline to get done what needs to get done. When biking, I used every ounce of self discipline that I have towards biking, so whenever I rolled into a gas station, or a cafe, I ate a whole lot of ice cream and pizza. But now that I'm back and not biking, I'm still eating a lot of ice cream.

Also now that I'm back, my next goal - getting ready to move to portland, is a lot less physically demanding, and there are so many other more interesting things to be doing than sorting through and getting rid of a childhood's worth of shit. I have to shift to applying all that physical self discipline into mental self discipline.


Ohp, sunrise - that's my signal to finally succomb to that heavy pull of weariness and cut off the endless flow of reddit and brainfood and youtube videos.