Point of Entry

“Give the world outside a point of entry. It’ll give back to you.”

That lyric stuck in my soul the first time I heard it in Larry Murante’s title song of his album Point of Entry.

Music is an incredible force, and each listener interprets what they hear in their own way. Words can be heard and quickly forgotten, but put them to music, and they will most likely be with you forever.

I know for a fact that Larry didn’t set out to write a bicycle travel tune. But that is exactly what it is for me. My “point of entry” is my bicycle. It allows me to be more engaged, more vulnerable, and more in touch with the world around me.

With that in mind, listen to the tune with added images, and you may agree that this is one of the most beautiful bicycle travel songs ever written.

Originally posted on the Adventure Cycling Association’s blog.

Note: Larry will be performing this song live at my presentation, Come to Your Senses: A Celebration of Bicycle Travel at Seattle’s REI Flagship on Tuesday, Feb 7th at 7pm. Advance tickets at:
Brown Paper Tickets

It’s the time of year when holiday tunes are playing everywhere. But sometimes when you are traveling far away from home in another culture, hearing a Christmas carol or familiar song can be a wonderful reminder of home … or not.

We were cycling in Northern Thailand during Christmas. We pedaled into a small town northwest of Chiang Mai. I heard a familiar tune. Jingle Bells. It wasn’t Bing Crosby or Nat King Cole singing. It was one of those little Christmas trees with blinking lights and a chip that plays a loop of holiday favorites.

As we got closer, we realized that the storefront window was filled with these things … all competing with each other.

Before you listen to the clip below, I’m going to give you fair warning that this is an earworm for me. There is something about the obnoxious sound quality and the hideous way that Jingle Bells transitions to Santa Claus is Coming to Town that haunts me to this day. I can’t hear Jingle Bells without this version playing in the background of my mind.

If you do listen, you’ll hear a couple of motor scooters go by and you’ll also hear Silent Night from another cheap plastic tree competing with Jingle Bells.

Jingle Bells

Not all the sounds of travel are pleasant ones. Unfortunately, this one has stuck with me.

If you have listened to the audio file and want something more pleasing to bring you back into the holiday spirit, you can check out my post from last year. It is a medley of tunes I recorded in Seville, Spain.

Happy Holidays!

Originally posted on the Adventure Cycling Association’s blog.

If bread is the Staff of Life, it is also, at the very least, the Kickstand of Cycling. It holds you up and keeps you from falling over. I love this carbolicious treat.

As a kid, homemade bread was not in my universe. Bread was something that came in brightly colored cellophane packages from the grocery store. Bread was white, processed, and guaranteed to build my body in a dozen ways. The stuff was so spongy, you could pretend to play a sliced loaf like an accordion. My friends and I used to remove the crusts, and see how many slices we could jam into our mouths at once. I believe my personal record was seventeen.

I’m not sure I truly learned to love bread until I became a bike traveler. I discovered that bread could be chewy and nutty, savory and spicy, hard and crusty (in a good way), or flat and crispy.

There have been so many memorable loafs. But one loaf rises above them all.

It came out of a wood-fired stove/oven in a small village in Turkey.

We had pedaled up into the mountains a couple of days’ ride from Istanbul. The temperature dropped faster than we climbed. We had to walk our bikes through drifts of snow. We debated on whether we had the winter gear to survive the night in our tent. But a couple invited us into their house, gave us their own bed to sleep in, and fed us one of the top-ten best meals I’ve eaten on this planet.

This was a meal that included freshly caught trout, baked with garlic and cheese! But the star of the meal was the loaf of bread. When our host opened her oven I gasped. This loaf was enormous. It was laughably huge. It could feed a village.

Its sheer size made it memorable, but the taste, that glorious nutty, chewy, crusty, yeasty, warm goodness, made our tongues dance and spontaneous grins break out on our faces.

You know, it’s hard to chew and grin at the same time.

It was and remains the ultimate loaf.

Perhaps we should be honest and declare ourselves bread seekers who use bicycles to travel from one loaf to the next.

Do we eat to cycle or cycle to eat?

I’m not sure. But it brings me great joy to understand that the very treasure we seek is also the fuel that propels us onward!

Originally posted on the Adventure Cycling Association’s blog.

If you have the pleasure of taking a bike trip in New Zealand, don’t miss the cathedral. While I know there are beautiful churches in Christchurch and Auckland, I’m referring to one made by Mother Nature.

Cathedral Cove is on the Coromandel Peninsula, east of Auckland. As I recall, you’ll have to park your bike and hike out to this cove with its grand arch. It is a protected marine reserve popular with divers and snorkelers.

After a visit, you can get on your bike and pedal out to Hot Water Beach, where thermal activity under the sand provides a great opportunity to dig your own hot tub. Borrow a shovel (unless you are already carrying one on your bike. Really? You are?) and dig a hole in the sand when the tide is low. The water will be too hot to sit in, so you’ll mix it with seawater.

The trick is you’ll have to also build your own little sand wall to keep too much of the cold ocean water from spilling into your hot sand hot tub. It’s hard work. But you won’t mind because you’ll remember that back at home it’s snowing or raining or clear and thirty below.

I was there nineteen years ago. Normally I wouldn’t lend out specific travel advice that is nearly two decades old. But unlike restaurants or lodging options, which can drastically change from year to year, Mother Nature is pretty consistently awesome!

Originally posted on the Adventure Cycling Association’s blog.

When you read the word “crowded” what images come to mind? How about “crowded room” or “crowded bar” or “crowded bus”?

A couple of definitions I ran across were, “close to capacity” and “uncomfortably close together.”

But what is “capacity” and what is “uncomfortable”?

Let’s take the situation of putting your bike on the bus. Where I live in Seattle, the bike racks on the buses hold three bikes. A bus driver is not allowed to let you bring your bike on board. So the capacity is three. End of story.

In many countries around the world, the capacity of public transportation is whatever will fit inside, on top of, strapped onto, hanging off of the vehicle. The bus is at capacity only when the driver screams and waves his arms “Enough!” or when the bus literally topples over. You think I’m kidding? It happens.

If you say “crowded train” to someone who lives in India or Japan, their mental image will be far different than that of someone who lives in the United States or Canada.

One of the many things I love about travel is that it constantly tweaks our own language. Each one of my bicycle journeys has redefined certain words: beautiful, ugly, loud, serene, rich, poor, fair, unfair, tragedy, happiness.

I remember getting onto a bus in Guatemala. The driver wouldn’t leave until all the seats were filled. Then he kept picking up people along the route. His helper, who collected the fares, walked on top of the backs of the seats to get around (being small was a requirement for this position). Before each stop I thought, “This bus is full.” And then two or three more people would get on. I began to wonder if there was actually enough oxygen for us all to breathe.

When is a bus crowded? When is a highway busy? When is a road steep? When is a pannier full?

The answers to those questions (and so many others) are defined and influenced by our wanderings on this incredible planet.

Originally posted on the Adventure Cycling Association’s blog.

In a little town in Northern Romania, two boys laughed as they wheeled up and down the street. I’m sure they would have been pedaling bikes if they’d had them. They didn’t. But they had a wheelbarrow. It had a metal wheel that squeaked so loud you’d swear a 700-pound hamster was exercising in its cage. They took turns pushing each other around. The smaller boy had quite a difficult time pushing his larger friend up the hill, which only made them laugh harder.

No doubt the ride would have been smoother if their wheelbarrow was equipped with a shock and a top-of-the-line long distance touring tire. No blisters on their hands if they had custom gel gloves. And they could have mapped their progress up and down the street if they had a GPS-enhanced wheelbarrow-ometer. They didn’t.

Their smiles challenge me. Okay Mr. Traveler, can you have as much fun as we do?

We are assaulted with so many choices and upgrade options. How can you proceed until you get the ultimate touring bike? The best digital camera? The lightest tent? The perfect panniers or tricked-out trailer?

Sometimes it’s good to be reminded that you are way ahead if you simply have a bike.

Go out and pedal with as much joy as two boys sharing a wheelbarrow. I double dare you.

Originally posted on the Adventure Cycling Association’s blog.

They are gifts of the road. Nature’s snacks ripened just for you. Their aromas fill the hot summer’s breezes and the late fall’s chill. Roadside trees, far from any home or farm, display these treats more beautifully than any row of sweets in a candy shop. They must have been planted for the benefit of touring cyclists. Why else would their heavily laden branches lean over the road?

Apples in eastern Washington. Tree tomatoes (tomate de arbol) in Colombia. Mangoes in Thailand. Figs. We love figs! You can smell them a half mile away when the wind is just right and they are oozing with flavor.

The fruit that won our hearts in Portugal was the persimmon. Eat it too early and your mouth will pucker up in disgust. But catch this fruit at its peak and the jelly-like interior is a decadent dessert.

So enamored were we with the persimmon, that we planted one in our yard in Seattle. It will be years before it bears fruit; and, due to our cool summers, the taste will probably never match those we slurped in southern Portugal.

But ten years from now, I’ll pick a persimmon and bite into the gooey flesh … and my mind will fly across the ocean and remember a bicycle journey.

Now, that’s sweet!

Originally posted on the Adventure Cycling Association’s blog.

The photos below link to those posts. If you see a photo that intrigues you … click on it. It will take you on a little mini-adventure. You could find yourself on the dramatic coast of Portugal or up in the highlands of Lesotho. You could end up listening to a impromptu violin concert or the final seconds of a rugby match. And you just might find yourself dreaming of your own travels.

When you do travel, I’d suggest you do it by bike. But that’s not necessary. Even if it’s been decades since you’ve pedaled a bike, I’d bet you could still find beauty and inspiration buried in these links. Browse, click and travel. Enjoy!

One of my favorite moments of any bike trip comes when I’m not on my bike. It is that time after a long day’s ride. The tent is set up. The sun is getting low in the sky. There is nothing to do but observe the beauty around me and listen to the world as it winds down.

I’ve heard it said, “If you listen closely … you just might hear your priorities.”

Total bicycle and travel bliss.

Originally posted on the Adventure Cycling Association’s blog.

Thirty years ago I left Seaside, Oregon with my buddy Thomas to cycle across America. July 2, 1981. Almost 11,000 days have passed since we dipped our rear tires in the Pacific Ocean. Hard to believe. In some ways it really does feel like it was yesterday.

In this photo we are wearing gym shorts, cotton t-shirts, and no sun screen.

The shirts are matching. On the back is printed, “East Coast or Bust!” Our friend had them printed up for us. But due to an unfortunate choice of font, they read to most people as “Easy Coasy or Busy!”

We had meant to train … but didn’t. We had an extremely limited budget. I had a total of $400, most of which I’d attained by selling my ’64 Pontiac Tempest. We had purchased these incredibly cheap tires and learned that “you get what you pay for” when they wore out within the first five hundred miles.

In our panniers were cotton sweats, cotton sweatshirts, cotton socks, and no rain gear. We had the first set of maps (that’s all we could afford) from Bikecentennial (now the Adventure Cycling Association).

Many people would say we were ill-prepared, and they’d be right. Perhaps we should have postponed our trip. Waited until we got our gear and plans and routes just right. But then maybe that delay would have led to more delay and changes of life and finally apathy toward the dream trip.

And thirty years later I would be thinking, “What if I’d …?”

But we did. I did. And I have been forever grateful for it.

Happy Anniversary to everyone who has ever begun a trip of a lifetime.

Originally posted on the Adventure Cycling Association’s blog.