Bike Odyssey 2014 – the flag has fallen!

Sunday May 18 2014. That was us (photo, left) as we emerged from home, yesterday – Saturday May 17 – onto Easton Lane, photographed by Claire. Today we rose to a huge breakfast cooked by Anne and Dave, followed by the time I spent with their friend Randy (see 3rd photo, below, next to Joe) who lent me internet access to post yesterday’s update. It was hard to tear ourselves away from Anne and Dave’s little corner of Philadelphia country paradise – I woke to see their stallion and their mare, nose to nose, nuzzling gently in the paddock, until interrupted by their daughter who pushed them apart. None of that, please! Pay attention to me.

We were realizing that on our trip each overnight spent with strangers or longlost friends is so intense, with so much news and information being packed into a few hours, that it feels as though you’ve spent several days with them. Time expands to accommodate the force of emotion. Especially so with someone like Anne, whose tiny person – she had seemed an amply full-sized adult, to my 6-year-old eyes, though now revealed as diminutive – hides a dynamo, and with whom the memories to be shared seem at once to belong to a different life and to be the very roots of one’s being.

We set out reluctantly, but grateful for gorgeous weather: not too hot yet, and I was glad to be wearing the super-light Merino wool under clothes, top & bottom, that Joe brought me from Australia. Didn’t wear them yesterday and felt a little chilly in the later afternoon, as we sped along. Today we covered 150 uneventful miles to Baltimore, one of the most beautiful cities – and least celebrated for it – in the world. Uneventful miles, until to Joe’s huge amusement (and mine, when I discovered it) the wind tore the Union Jack off the back of my bike after a mere 350 miles, in total, of travel, and dispatched it in a northerly direction, as we traveled down 83 at 70 mph. (I had visions of it landing on someone’s windscreen, perfectly filling the driver’s vision, and causing mayhem. British Flag Causes Multiple Highway Pile-Up. Luckily not.)

Baltimore brought us a remarkable and delightful stranger (except by email), our first couchsurfing host, John Millen. John is my age, widely traveled, a follower of shamanic ways of truth, a drum-builder, and a boat-builder who taught himself to sail on his home-built trimaran in the treacherous Caribbean. And a house-builder extraordinaire. In a forest park in Baltimore, his Fuller-style dome sits on a steep slope amid towering trees, and his windows sit in the canopy of leaves. He taught himself to craft every part of the house, to shape and fashion circular stairs and curving banisters – a continuing labor of 30 years’ worth of love. He hosts many couchsurfers, a good many of whom return for further visits. We could see why. Here is John gazing at his work in progress, a boat in his sitting room, so light he could and did lift it himself, to show us; a boat built Inuit-style, with the slenderest of cypress wood ribs. Tomorrow we venture out into the forests and the mountains ourselves, along the famous Skyline Drive through the Appalachians.