21 june 2019
So, I realized when I posted my feels entry for yesterday that I had previously posted about going on a week long bike trip across the state and that I would provide updates to the world during my trip. Well, as you can tell from the lack of updates, this did not go as planned. I originally had planned on making a short post every day, updating where I was, how the ride that day went and what I had been up to. Unfortunately, my plans changed on day one. My plan was to use my smart phone to make a brief post every day. On the first day, however, my phone leapt from my pocket while my body was in motion. This put a quick end to my plans as well as any hope of communicating with the outside world with more than 144 characters (now relegated to my dumb backup phone).
Unfortunately, I can't spend much time retelling all the stories of the week on the bike but I can summarize the week. It was AMAZING. I haven't really spoken about my passions outside of technology here much. Cycling is definitely one of them. I happened to look at my Strava stats the other day. I ride, on average 12 hours a week over an average of 5 days. My average weekly distance is right at about 200 miles per week. The week of my bike trip, I averaged 73 miles or 4 hours and 30 minutes each day. The total distance for the week came to right about 450 miles with my longest single day at 104 miles. It was an amazing experience.
Beyond just the bike riding itself, though, the experience of hanging out with people and being in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but talk and read was just, wonderful. My friends and I described it like summer camp. Back before we all grew up and got jobs, when we still had summers off. We went to summer camps and got to do really cool stuff all day and just hang out; new experiences every day. This was very much how we felt about our bike trip.
I think it goes without saying at this point but I'll be doing this trip every year from now on. We'll go to different places, but a week long bike vacation is now a must do for my mental sanity.