In May of 2004 I embarked on a summer-long bike ride, from the Atlantic coast of North Carolina to the Pacific coast of Washington. I wrote this mailing list post when I got to Middlesborough, Kentucky, after a disheartening ride through several days of intense storms, steep climbs, and crippling loneliness. The ride would improve later, but my journey through the Appalachians was difficult in nearly every way.

In May of 2004 I embarked on a summer-long bike ride, from the Atlantic coast of North Carolina to the Pacific coast of Washington. This post to the mailing list came when I reached Blowing Rock, North Carolina, having just crested the Eastern Continental Divide ! I'd only been riding a week or so, and I'd already encountered heartache, thunderstorms, wonderful people, and more wonderful people.

In May of 2004 I embarked on a summer-long bike ride, from the Atlantic coast of North Carolina to the Pacific coast of Washington. This post came out when I'd ridden from the Atlantic back to Raleigh, in an astonishing three days. In truth, I was terrified, and Raleigh was a beacon in my subconscious mind. In many ways, this first stretch was the shake-down for the remainder of my trip. On the first day of the ride, as I was daydreaming riding along the flat beach on Ocracoke Island, I hit a huge pothole and bent both of my rims pretty badly. I started learning to sleep in a hammock, and I first experienced the ill preparation that was only bringing my tent fly along with me for inclement weather. Eventually I'd learn, but the first three days were a whirlwind of novelty and madness.

In May of 2004 I embarked on a summer-long bike ride, from the Atlantic coast of North Carolina to the Pacific coast of Washington. It is still one of the hardest things I have done. This was the first post I sent out to the small mailing list that I set up for the trip. In some ways, I was pretty prepared for the trip ; I had an entire list of waypoints I wanted to reach, and I ended up going through all but two of them. On the other hand, I was incredibly unprepared for the scope of the effort. So it happened.

Somehow in 2004 I started getting the idea that I wanted to ride my bicycle across the continental United States. In March, after I'd gotten panniers for my bike, it occurred to me that I should go on a shake-down ride, to check out the gear and see what it was like. I decided to ride up to the youth hostel at Point Reyes, with plans to go even further the next night, up to Salt Point State Park. That didn't work out, and I came back from the trip somewhat shaken by the difficulty incurred in a "measly" 40-mile ride.

Living in a city has so many benefits for the individual. One of these that I hadn't anticipated was more involvement in local happenings ; when local is what happens on your block, it seems much more pressing than in a rural setting, when local is maybe what happens in your county or tri-county area.

Another post from Advogato.

One of the things I hope to explore with this web site is the interplay between short and long writing formats. This one is short.

Another blog update on living and TAing in San Francisco.

Another vanilla blog update on life in San Francisco.

I really started enjoying bike riding in the city when I got a speedy little racing bike and discovered that it takes one around town much faster than any other modality.

City life grew on me in a good way. This is another vanilla blog post about life in San Francisco.

I was pretty excited to start riding a bike in San Francisco. This excitement rather grew during my stay in the city, so it's fun to look back and see where it started. A city has at least three landscapes, each visible through a different transportation modality (walking, biking, and driving). They overlap in the sense that the geography is the same, but the experiences are often completely distinct. After the initial ride to Sausalito, I finally started understanding just how distinct these views of a place can be.

This was a quick blog update on the life in San Francisco.

I went back to North Carolina for Labor Day Weekend after I'd just moved to San Francisco. Even after being in California for just a few weeks, I had started appreciating more what I'd been around in NC for all those years.

I spent the first couple months after moving to San Francisco exploring the city on foot (and on Muni). Here are a few of the spots that captured my attention then.

I moved to San Francisco in August 2003. I wanted to live in a big American city, to see what it was all about, to be surrounded by music and people and tall buildings. This was the first time I wrote about it.

I wrote this after hearing back about my Teach for America application. I hadn't realized it until 2003, but if you stop for long enough, you can see how life is full of places where there's nothing around you. Until I'd finished the multiple decades of school that Americans think is the norm, basically following the society track, I'd never noticed this first-hand. But after graduating, and after my internship started winding down, I'd never had to confront the idea that my life needed some direction from me if it was to go anywhere. Everyone grapples with this at least once in their lives, but this was for me one of the first (of many) such times.

Another post from Advogato.

Another post from Advogato.