28 Days

Hello. My name is David and I have a question - what will the world look like after cannibalistic zombies have destroyed the world in just 28 days? Kidding, about the zombies anyway. My name really is David, but in 28 days instead of zombies chewing through the world (hopefully) I'll be leaving on what will be biggest adventure of my life, riding my bicycle across the United States from San Francisco, California to Portland, Maine - 3,226 miles if you drove straight across the country, which I may wish I had afterward.

I'll be rambling first through the Pacific coast from San Francisco south to just outside of San Diego, then east hugging the border of Mexico through Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas. I'll follow the Gulf coast from East Texas to the panhandle of Florida, and then I'm not sure. I'd like to follow the coast of Florida around the Everglades to the Atlantic side, but it's a long trip - mileage estimates vary but I think it's safe to say that Florida has at least 1200 miles of coastline. I'll have to see how I'm feeling at that point - if I'm up for the exercise I'll follow Florida's coast; if I'm not so inclined I'll ride across the panhandle to Jacksonville and then follow the coast to Maine.

Ramble: to wander around in a leisurely, aimless manner
Ramble: to talk or write in a discursive, aimless way

I say I'm rambling (the former) because though I know my final destination and how I generally want to go about getting there, I have no set route. I can start or stop riding when I like, if I want to take detours or go off the beaten path I will. I can follow a whim, take the left fork in the road instead of the right, not ride for a day. When I'm hungry I'll eat, when I'm tired I'll sleep, etc. You get the picture. My only fixed goals are to get to Maine sometime in October, before it gets uncomfortably cold in the Northeast, and to avoid the latter definition of ramble in this blog.

I'm calling myself the biking fool because though I have biked extensively in the past, I've never ridden more than a hundred miles in a day over the course of a weekend. I've never ridden with a trailer in tow. I've never pitched a tent wherever I was at the end of the day: the side of the road, someones backyard, a parking lot. I'm not in the best physical shape of my life. But I've always wanted to bike across the country; I want to be part of the landscape, breathing in the air around me without any barriers - you can't get that in a car. I think it'll be fun to meet the people of the west, and the south, of New Mexico and Texas , Florida and Virginia. I think it will be personally interesting to me to see how I deal with living in a tent, cooking when I can, eating whatever I can get locally, surviving without Starbucks. And if I'm not in great shape now I bet I will be by the time I get to Maine.

In the days to come I'll be blogging about what got me to this point, my various trip preparations, and then we're off. Thanks for rambling in.