Warm Showers

Here's a nifty site: www.warmshowers.com.

Warm Showers is an organization that connects hosts and bicycle tourists. As a host, you can offer anything from a lawn to pitch a tent in, to a meal and a bed. Significantly, you have to be willing to be a host at some point in order to receive hospitality at another point. Anyone can sign up as a host, even non-cyclists who are just nice, or interested in meeting people with great stories. I'm currently a host.

Back in September (before I was a member of Warm Showers), I met a Belgian couple at my bike shop. They needed some repairs done on their bikes. It was clear they were touring, so I asked them over to our apartment for a meal. They had loads of advice and stories about riding along the Continental Divide Trail. From the Springs, they were flying down to South America to finish their year-long tour. They were planning to pass through Bolivia, where one of my friends had worked for a year. She ended up offering them great local advice. It was a really delightful evening. That's the kind of thing you might expect by becoming a host(ess): a delightful evening. In my limited experience, it's the rare bicycle tourist who is a creep or a mooch. They are mostly a self-sufficient and gracious lot.

Winter Exercise in CO

Most of this winter, my exercise has consisted of commuting to work (very occasionally), walking to the library/grocers/friend's, and going for a long ride (literally 'a' long ride: it was at the beginning of January.)

Because I feel somewhat deficient in this area, I've added two things to my exercise regimen in the last few weeks: stretching, and what I'll call trans-fats loading. The first is more difficult for me (and therefore more effectual) than it sounds. The second really has more to do with my saving money for the tour than with preparing to actually execute it. Cheap food is a staple right now as I attempt to buffer my savings account for three months of unemployment.

One may think, from all of this, that I have a ways to go before I'm ready to ride 430 miles weekly. Indeed.

In fact, I've taken a significant vacation from my bike commuting (which has been my main form of exercise up until the last few months) partly in order to try to return to an enjoyment of riding. It would be an awful thing to begin my tour already burned out. But I've begun to step up my commuting again, and it's been mostly a blast.

Two weeks ago I was riding toward the north of CO Springs just as the sun had set behind Pikes Peak. The sky was completely clear of moisture and the moon was new, so I could already make out the first stars and Venus high up in the south, dominating like a flashlight. There were only two colors in the sky. The black across the plains faded perfectly to the deep-water blue above the Rockies, almost too perfectly. If someone had shown me a painting of that I would have laughed and said it was a nice airbrush job, fit for a license plate. It was a rare sight, something I don't ever see from inside of my Volvo.

So commuting's good exercise. But that's not why it's good.

Advice About Journals

I am pedaling east from Astoria, OR in roughly four months. I have decided an online journal of my preparations and adventures would be a pleasant thing: for my friends, family, self.

Nevertheless, I do not take on such a bold exercise (journal, not bike tour) without a word of caution from a good friend. Old Mark Twain says: "If you wish to inflict a heartless and malignant punishment upon a young person, pledge him to keep a journal for a year."

He wrote that at the beginning of Innocents Abroad, which is a sort of journal he kept for a year.