I leave Nome in a little less than a
week and in slightly less than two weeks my friend Molly and I will
be on highway 6, heading towards to Oregon coast. It was Molly's
fault for the whole bike trip idea. Some time late last year Molly
invited me to bike the Oregon coast with her in April of this year. I
had planned on being finished with school by then, so I said yes.
About ten seconds later I decided that I really wanted to visit Peru.
And the Panama Canal. And Argentina. And I wanted to bike there. And
why not?
I've spent probably more homework time
than I should have searching the internet for other bikers who have
taken the same or similar routes. The Pan-American highway is well
traveled by bikers and very few of them have negative things to say
about people they meet or the places they go. I met a biker two and a
half years ago as he passed through Fairbanks on the second leg of
his three-part round-the-world bike trip. Matthew Blake biked from
his home in London to Southeast Asia, flew to LA, and bussed and
hitch-hiked to Alaska, where he biked from Dead Horse to Ushuaia,
Argentina. We've kept in touch with Matthew and while planning my
bike trip, I asked him a lot of questions about his. Matthew told me,
“You'll do fine.” That's good enough for me.
I finished the final part of my
college degree last week in Fairbanks, and now I am in full adventure
mode. I've given up on small, loose pieces of papers and have moved
to an 11x18-inch sketch book for writing out lists, diagrams, maps,
and brainstorms. Almost everything on my lists has been scratched out
and one of my final duties in Nome is to track down a bike box that I
can use to ship my bicycle half way across the continent to give my
self a cheating start from the lower 48. The tentative departure date
from Portland is the 10th of April. The date is entirely
dependent on weather and preparedness.
