From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Wed Mar 06 2002 - 01:13:44 MST
Robert J. Bradbury:
>I'm sorry Amara, but this by itself is bad advice.
I strongly disagree.
>snip
> Far better to put your bike on the train and take the train
> between cities or avoid the bike entirely and stick to trains
> for intercity transport and feet for within city transport.
I've put my bike on trains and plains, too, to cover long distances
between portions of my bicycle trips. The goal is not to cover long
distances though, but to fully experience your environment *along with
yourself*. And this means (to me) staying on my bicycle for
hundreds/thousands of miles.
>I understand the perspective of "feeling" the culture, the question
> becomes how to do so most safely?
snip
It's much much more than "feeling" the culture, although that's
a big part of it.
My preferred way to visit a new place is by bicycle. I've bike toured
several thousand miles during the last 25 years, visiting new places,
[parts of Hawaii, length of Sierra Nevadas, most of the Colorado Rockies,
Redding to Tahoe, parts of Oregon, some Puget Sound islands, London through
southern England, central France through Paris, central Sweden,
small part of Austria, parts of Germany, Canary Islands, Spain,
Provence.]
Two-thirds of those trips, traveling (by bike) alone.
A (relatively) young, attractive woman traveling alone, Robert.
Don't you think that I know that it is dangerous? Learning self-defense
and taking precautions is part of the learning of being responsible
and self-reliant. 'Playing it safe' (as you suggest), though, in my life
goes against my life principles, that's why I strongly agree with your
advice to me and the others here.
I'll send you my Provence writings [*}, privately, so you can understand
more of my perspective of what bike touring does for a person.
Amara
(*) Small part included here:
<begin quote from "My Provence Journey" chapter of my Travel Log book>
I've recognized for a long time, that my bike tours held a special
value for me. In my early 20s, I took apart my bicycle, simply
because I thought that it needed an overhaul, and that was the start
of a couple thousand miles of travelling on my bicycle, visiting new
places. The process of putting my bicycle together from its pieces
and then being totally dependent on it and myself, in strange
foreign places did more (and still does) for my confidence than
anything else in the area of learning self-reliance and
self-responsibility, and being open and trusting in the world.
Bike touring also is, in my opinion, the best way to experience a
new place because you travel slowly enough to really see/smell the
environment, you eat the local food on the way through (you can eat
as much as you want, so no worry about diets), and you do your best
to communicate with the local people. You're a tourist, but you are
also intimately tied to the area that you are travelling through.
[...]
And part of the reason was age, distractions, forgetting one's
roots, and those important means of replenishing one's soul-self. It
happens to the best of us. We go along in our well-worn paths, with
our worries and our duties and our happy or painful experiences with
the people in our environment, doing our best, but we gradually
constrict our lives, not being as open, as trusting, as warm, as
young, as free, and so then those memories of times when we did feel
that way slips into the background. As time passes, the thought of
doing something big that you *just know* is good for you, looks more
like too much effort, and so you have a plethora of excuses and
reasons not to do it.
[...]
One of the things I rediscovered in this journey was my
characteristic bulldog-ness. Bulldogs don't let go easily
[...]
Before and during my bike trip, I simply didn't
want to give up on my bicycling trip. I had many reasons to quit all
through those days, and I didn't want to admit defeat. It was
important to push through, for reasons that I'm not even completely
sure of myself. Perhaps my "inner mother-self" was so convinced that
I needed this journey, that she continued pushing me to overcome any
and all difficulties. When I returned to Heidelberg in the middle of
the night last weekend, I wanted to yell with delight that I
succeeded. It's a feeling that was so nice, that I want to cherish
for a long time.
My bicycle journey basically began in Grasse, France, [...],
(End Quote>
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race." -- H. G. Wells
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