First ride with my gear :)

"You know that feeling when you take your shoes off after a long day at work? Thats how my nuts feel right now."

These words either ruined or made the dinner for a sweet old couple that had the bad luck to be hid behind Eddie as I came out of the Stoudts Brewery after a 33 mile ride, couple beers, and changing from biking spandex into shorts. Hopefully Eddie hid my little visual performance from them as well..

6 of us hit the roads around Adamstown, PA for a beautiful little 33 mile ride yesterday as a test run for my panniers. Couple false starts but got a lot of kinks worked out in the strapping system. Put a new rear cassette on the bike to offset the lower gear selection of the double crank (should help me climb the Rockies a little easier) but the bike, rack, and legs performed great with an additional 40lbs of weight! A great confidence booster for the big trip. :)

My Story

        I have often introduced myself as a large hairy uncivilized heathen from the Midwest.  Sadly this is not completely accurate as I am actually quite skinny now.  But in all seriousness I am from the Midwest, born and raised in Wyoming in the Laramie area where I still have family that ranches and then I went to school both there and South Dakota.  The uncivilized part comes in because while I don’t mind, I truly don’t appreciate the Beatles and will gladly state that they are just a boy band from the 60’s and for the life of me I can’t name one song that Mic Jagger sings after a couple drinks.  As for the heathen part I don’t quite warrant a stake burning I still don’t attend church anywhere near as often as my mother would like and have on occasion used organized religion as the butt of several jokes.

            In the summer of 06 I got bored in South Dakota and took a position in Philadelphia as an Account Executive selling bright flashy things.  Now for a kid from the Midwest this was a great gig.  I got to travel from Boston down to Richmond and taste all the different cultures between.  For about 4 years I got to enjoy the highs and see just how bad the lows got and all in all life was great.  Luckily I landed in a great town just outside Philly, small enough so you couldn’t walk to the grocery store without having at least 4 people say hi and one of them offer to buy you a beer.

But all the oysters in Boston, crazy nights in NYC, Philly cheese steaks, crab cakes in Baltimore and the great friends to enjoy them with got overshadowed by the fact that it was just time to leave.  Work was getting tense with the bad economy, and on top of that I couldn’t help but wonder if my clients would be better off spending more time with their kids then working harder to pay for the shiny I was trying to sell them.  In some cases it was the perfect deal for all in all, but not always, and it was getting tough justifying it to myself selling when there really wasn’t the justification to buy.   Then there was just the general rat race of the east coast; literally the traffic was driving me nuts.  You could take a rabid squirrel, hop it up on hallucinogens and meth, and it would still possess more humanity than your average Philly soccer mom behind the wheel.

           

         And so I decided it was time to wander again, but to where?  There are a lot of cool places in North America but I have seen most of them, and so I decided it would be a lot of fun to wander around Australia.  For quite a few years I have wanted to go, never really knew anything about it but knew I would have fun and the more I learned the more I know I am right.  But the bad part about Aussie is that it is huge and I can’t hang out with my friend Jeff and consume beers and terrible horror movies there, and lots of big and little nasties to eat me.  And so to learn how to wander on my own, and to have the chance to say bye to my friends and fam across the country, I decided to take a long bike ride to get ready.  Guessing it will be around 3,300 miles all in all. 

Racks are done!

Finally finished the racks for my bike.  Richard, a friend and client in MD helped fabricate them from aluminum U-channel and tig welded the permanent corners.  While they are not much to look at they are a lot stronger than most retail racks, and honestly at the end of the day if they hold up then who cares if they are pretty.  The front rack is 12" long and 4.5" wide, just enough to hang some light panniers on each side of the tire and to hold my camera and a few other items on top.  The rear rack is 15" long and 6" wide.  The rear panniers are actually Italian WW2 backpacks with a waterproof main area then a handy little RPG holder on each side that is perfect for a bottle of whiskey... or and extra water bottle I suppose.

Homeless and Hungover

First major step in this adventure of mine :) Turned in the keys to my apartment yesterday after living there for almost four years.  Hard to imagine that I stayed in one place that long but spending the last week cleaning it out and divulging most my belongings for cash or beer definitely brought back a lot of memories.  I have had a lot of good times with great friends here, from Jeff literally drinking me under the table to having a "Deep Fried Disney" feast (founder and bambi) but when it comes back to it, the belongings and the apt were just things and what made it so much fun was the people in my life.  Great friends, past loves, and the hangovers, heartaches, and stories associated with them have been sorting through my mind and I have to say I wouldn't change a thing.  Life has been great, far more amazing than I have a right to expect and its sad to leave.  I can't imagine finding better friends outside Media, but its nice to know that I the ones I have here have made this home and will always be there to welcome me home again if I come back around.