June 25, 2019 Filed under Inspiration
“It’s not that plotting the whole journey is undesirable. It’s that it’s impossible. When you’re at the beginning, don’t obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to look different once you get there. Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending, and get moving.”
Chip & Dan heath, The Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
June 24, 2019 Filed under Uncategorized
People with lots of hair don’t need to worry about the sun burning their heads. I’m not one of those people. I began losing my hair in high school. By the time I was in college it was easier just to shave it all off and be bald.
DCF 1.0
After college I got a series of jobs with microbiologists. They encouraged me to learn about DNA and genes. I also learned about the way ultra-violet light works to damage DNA.
Think of it like a hailstorm. Direct sunlight rains down on your skin, and little bits of UV light knock into the DNA inside your skin cells and warp tiny pieces of it, like hailstones putting dents in a roof. It has nothing to do with temperature! It can be a cold, windy day, and the heat from the sun might feel great on your limbs, but that hailstorm is still happening, knocking DNA out of place.
The cells in your body are also filled with tiny little repair robots. When UV light breaks things, they find the little broken bits and repair them. When you’re young they work pretty fast, which is why kids can go running around in the sun for hours and the robots will keep up with the damage. Even so, if the sun is really intense, the damage will accumulate anyway and you’ll get a sunburn.
When you’re older, the little repair robots wear out, just like everything else. If you make them do lots of repairs, their decline is even faster. Your skin starts getting dry. Little spots appear, and cuts and bruises take much longer to heal. The key things is that it’s cumulative. You may get plenty of sunlight for years and look fine, and then one year you’ll discover that you’re crossing a threshold where all the little repair robots can’t keep up with even limited exposure, and damage will appear and then stay there, while more appears on top of that. The decline is not reversible.
Too much sun does terrible things, kids.
Since I only have one “hairstyle” for myself at this point, and it depends on the skin on top of my head, I’ve become paranoid about covering my head (and to a lesser extent my chest) with something that physically blocks UV light whenever I’m outside for more than a few minutes. I’ve been paranoid like this for about 15 years, and it’s paid off. I know people the same age and skin tone as me, who’ve been shaving their heads and then walking around outdoors for years, and their heads now look permanently like fried chicken.
I fully admit it: It’s almost entirely vanity that makes me do this. But there’s also a little part of me that knows I’m reducing my risk of skin cancer, and that part is grateful too. Thank you scientists, for compelling me to learn about this! My hat’s off to you folks! (WAIT, NO IT’S NOT.)
Anyway, the point of all that is: Covering my head is important to me, even when I’m wearing a bike helmet that’s full of holes. It’s especially important on bike tours, when I’m out in the sun for entire days, back to back.
Just about every bandana out there is good for filtering dust and maybe holding water, but is terrible at filtering out UV light. If you have one around your house, take it outside and hold it up in front of the sun. The sun will still be almost too bright to look at directly though the bandana. Put that on your head and you’re basically walking around wearing tissue paper. The thread count (the density of the weave) of your average bandana is 100 per inch or less — usually 75.
You don’t need something that completely blocks light. Something that scatters it will do fine, because the UV spectrum will get mostly absorbed in the process. The higher the thread count, the more scattering. For example, pillowcases usually have a thread count of at least 300. Hold one of those up to the sun and you’ll see a glow rather than direct sunlight. (In general a pillowcase would make a poor bandana because a 300+ thread count is not very breathable, and the tiny threads don’t hold water well.)
You can buy bandanas that claim to have a thread count of 300, but they’re always a polyester or cotton-polyester blend. I’ve found that if I sweat in any polyester thing for more than an hour, I start to stink. So those are no good for me.
For a while I thought the solution was to buy a cotton cloth dinner napkin and wear that like a bandana, but I tried a few and realized that the cloth was uncomfortably thick, and they were usually too small. What to do?
I went to a fabric store, and bought several yards of thick, supple cotton cloth. Then I walked across the street to a tailor and asked them to cut it into 22×22-inch squares and sew the edges with an “overlock” stitch pattern. (A simple job for any tailor.)
I came back two days later and picked up a pile of bandana-sized cloths.
The tailor on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland
Then it was time for the fun part: Coming up with a design to put on them!
I wanted all these things:
I’m fascinated by the work of early cartographers. After a lot of searching, I found this fanciful map of an Egyptian “labyrinth” at Hawara.
It’s supposedly based on a description of a real place by the Greek writer Herodotus, but I like it because it’s a beautiful example of how ancient maps were primarily artistic works, drawn from a culture’s collective imagination.
I’m tickled by the idea that I’m taking an ancient map, which claims to be accurate but is really almost total fantasy, and literally cloaking my head in darkness with it. Plus I like labyrinths.
I’ve seen lots of clothing and tattoos that take words personally meaningful to the wearer and then obscure them in some cute way, usually by rendering them in another language that most people (possibly even the wearer) can’t read.
For many years in my home town there was a plague of young English speakers getting tattoos made of fake “Chinese” characters that supposedly meant “power” or “wisdom” or could even spell out the bearer’s name when strung together. All completely bogus, of course, but most people didn’t read enough Chinese to call them out on it — or those that did just silently scowled and looked the other way. I wanted to pay homage to that in an even stupider and geekier way: By pointlessly embedding a pithy quote into a QR code, only readable by a machine.
There are QR code generators online, so making one is easier than you’d think. Here are some test images I made:
The embedded quote is, “Sometimes you cannot find the truth unless you reach for it.” Hold your phone camera up to either one and chances are it will automatically appear!
Since the Egyptian labyrinth drawing is divided into convenient squares, I decided to add pieces of maps from computer games I played as a kid.
They blend in pretty well with the diagrams of fictional walls from 350 years ago.
What if I’m in the middle of some foreign country and my bicycle gets stolen, along with everything on it? And what if my phone and my wallet are on it too?
Chances are I’m still wearing my bandana. Written along the corners I’ll find useful things, including contact phone numbers for my relatives, an obfuscated credit card, and the encryption key for my backups.
After a bunch of Photoshop work, I had something pretty good:
The inspirational quote in QR code is different from the one I used for testing. Hold your phone up to the screen and see what it is!
With a good design in hand, it was time to get it printed onto the bandanas. Early experiments with a mail-order screen and my own ink were okay, but not great.
I decided to reach out to a local print shop called The Grease Diner. Could they make me a silkscreen big enough to fully cover a 22×22-inch bandana? Yes they could! I contacted JonJon and worked out an order for a large screen and some time on their press.
In a few days it was ready, and it looked beautiful.
JonJon helped me get everything aligned perfectly and I did six bandanas.
We pressed the printed bandanas in an iron to set the ink, and then JonJon gave me the stencil for safekeeping. Without his advice and help I’m sure I would have made a mess. Hooray for the Grease Diner!
The result was a bandana (plus a few spares) that blocks UV light, holds water on hot days, and is durable and soft. I’d happily wear it all over the world.
It's useful AND mysterious!
June 2, 2019 Filed under Introspection, Stress
In conversation with myself.
This is one of my all-time favorite comics. Credit to Nathan W Pyle
Do you think that a bike tour is the gateway to a more interesting life?
Do you think that the interesting things you can see from the seat of a bike make up for all the time you spent at your job, staring at screens, shut inside yourself? Staying up late because you felt unsatisfied at the end of another day spent working, saving up money so you can have an adventure?
Sure there is adventure, and good conversation. Stories to tell, fresh air, exercise, good food. Always a new thing rolling down from the horizon. There’s no denying that a bike tour could bring happiness. But why this particular choice? Any why persevere, through the hard parts — the inevitable rain and cold and hunger, the long empty patches of road where there is no one to talk to, nothing to chew on but your own curious thoughts — and the times when you’re deeply uncomfortable, when you wish for the chance to simply stop and put down roots somewhere, with an urgency that belies it as a human need like food and company… What compels you to spend your limited time on Earth doing this thing?
Is it ego? Are you trying to prove something to yourself?
Imagine you’ve already met your goal; made your journey, and you’re back home in your daily routine again. What have you proved except that you can exploit the available technology in a somewhat unconventional means, to go on what most everyone around you will see as a weird extended vacation? One that most people would not choose for themselves, and would not be able to relate to? Because really, people do not like riding their bikes as much as you do. They will not get it. You seem like a nut-job more than an adventurer, placing yourself in danger on the road, especially when everyone around you is “getting there” faster in a car.
People smile and say “that sounds cool,” and sincerely wish you luck. But make no mistake: They don’t relate. What you’re doing isn’t cool.
Likewise, you can’t be in it for the rebellion, for the “coolness points” of doing something different that sets you apart from others. There’s no happiness in competing for novelty — only a caustic version of pride. No matter how interesting your bike tour actually becomes, there are people all over the Earth who have spent their time doing far more interesting things, far more often, and being so dang humble about it that you don’t even know they exist unless you blunder into them and talk awhile. You will probably meet a bunch of them as you go.
No, if happiness does emerge from this journey, it comes from meeting your own personal expectations.
What sets those expectations? You weren’t born with them, you learned them. Where did they come from? Consider your personal history.
You grew up playing adventure games, traveling far away in your imagination — and surrounded by the redwood forest, deep and quiet, blurring the line between your imagination and real places. You grew up riding a bicycle, and have come back to it in adulthood, integrating it with your daily life, working against the car-focused environment and economy surrounding you. Visions of far away lands have been brought to you by the internet, and a flood of practical information as well. This age of scientific wonders, and the accumulated toil of countless generations before it, has knit the world together with roads and airlines and shipping routes, and the gear to explore them is affordable. It’s all there, visible online.
You see a goal within reach, but not too close, like a mountaineer scheming to reach a summit “because it’s there.” Just how far could you ride? Just how far could your mind range? You calibrate your expectations and your happiness based on what’s available. You make it up as you go along, and perhaps you’re even conscious of how arbitrary that is.
It feels like these threads have been converging over years, over decades even. How much of your life, in retrospect, has been about this idea?
But then again, how much of this is just selective remembering — a story you’re making up about your distant past to justify your actions? A lot of it, probably. Why make up the story? Maybe it’s not your past but your present life that holds the answers.
Lately you’ve been spending way too much time immobilized behind a desk. That desk is the centerpiece of a routine you follow almost every day. It goes: Get up, ride to work, stare at screens, talk about programming and science with nice people, eat some food – hopefully something nourishing – spend a little time with loved ones, read a book or watch a film, run a few basic errands, and then go to bed for a night of unquiet dreams. Then start the routine again.
It’s not a bad routine. In fact, it’s a routine that most people on Earth would happily assemble and roll with for their entire lives. There are undeniably good things about it; things you cannot pack up and take with you on two wheels.
But it’s still a routine. And there’s no doubt you would break this routine if you started a long bicycle trip. If you picked yourself up out of your home, moved thousands of miles outside your comfort zone, dropped down in an unfamiliar land with some hardware and a map, and had to contend with the elements and interact with the locals to move yourself across the globe, your routine would be totally demolished. It’s impossible to stay in one place while riding a bike, so a desk is out of the question. (Same with computer screens. Only the tiniest of screens fits on a bike and if you stare at it for more than a few seconds you fly into a ditch.)
You would be forced to witness the world, rather than think about it abstractly like you have for too many years. And perhaps that’s exactly what you want. Maybe it isn’t happiness you’re seeking, or the execution of a grand plan; maybe it’s an intervention. Life in one place has gotten too easy, and you used to have expectations for how it would all arrange itself, but life outmaneuvered and outlasted your expectations, and now you’ve drifted into this weird place nobody warned you about, and been seized by this weird idea as a means of escape.
Is this a “midlife crisis?” What’s your crisis; being bored? If you did exactly what you’re doing now but you were 20 years old, even motivated by the same sense of boredom, would you doubt yourself? Would others?
“Go out there and explore!” they would say. “You’re young, you don’t need to think about anything permanent at your age.”
What about now? Instead they would say, “You’re old. You’re supposed to be settled into something and know what you want out of life.” And “settled in” means, among other things, staying in one place.
You’ve been settled before. More than once.
You’ve managed to work your way into plenty of situations that seemed ideal at the time – jobs, relationships, living spaces – and moved on from them eventually. Your only regret each time was not doing it before things got as bad or as boring as they did. Not everything requires escape of course; some things just require difficult adjustments, and then they continue in another way. But to pursue this particular crazy idea – a long-range bike trip – you are taking apart things in your life that are good as well as bad. That’s obsession. And probably stupidity as well.
People all over the world struggle mightily just to claim a fraction of the resources and connections you have acquired and kept during your life, let alone things that you have accidentally or deliberately wasted. If the extreme good fortune of your position is not apparent to you now, it will be apparent soon, because this journey will put you in close contact with many of those less fortunate. How will you feel then, about what you left behind? How stupid will you look to the people you meet, when you try to explain yourself?
But on the other hand…
Life is full of contradictions and it should not be surprising that something that seems like a really bad idea also seems like a really great one.
You’re well into your forties. By all accounts your life is more than half done. Way more, if you think of it in terms of the aging of your mind and memory. What kind of joke would the back half of your existence be if you spent years on the cusp of a journey that you could quite easily have taken, only to turn around and creep back into your house, close the door, and keep taking the paycheck and eating the fat meals?
Even if it’s a difficult journey to finish, it’s trivially easy to start. Just get on the bike and keep going. People have bicycled all around the world hundreds of years before you were born, and (you hope) thousands and thousands more will during your lifetime and long after. If they can do it, so can you. Do you really need a reason? Ego, identity, change, intervention, escape… Why are you so worried about it?
It doesn’t matter. Possible answers to the question of “why” erupt like weeds – fresh ones every day – and you pull them up, inspect them, and throw them in a pile. The only thing you are certain of is the obsession itself. Unprompted, irreducible, and stubbornly refusing to fade. You’ve spent so long thinking about it, outlining scenarios and testing hardware and saving money, that at this point if you didn’t do it, you might not have much of an identity to fall back on. You’d be some vague person with a job and a house and some good relationships who thought about something really hard for years to the point where it began to seriously interfere with and alter their life … and then dropped it.
Are you afraid of what you’ll learn? Are you afraid in general? For how much longer are you willing to put up with the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously preparing to go and planning to stay? The world is absolutely flooded with opportunities to miss. There is no shortage of them, only a shortage of time. Past a certain level of preparedness, the days you spend preparing turn into their own thing. Are you more comfortable with preparing than you are with actually doing? Are you comfortable in purgatory, and questioning your motives so you’ll stay?
Get on with it. Whatever happens – good or bad, or even just boring – it will be your choice. You’d better be okay with it.
May 19, 2019 Filed under Advice
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March 18, 2019 Filed under Uncategorized
Here are ten handy rules to follow when you’re going on a long-range bike tour, especially one far from home. This is based on my own experience and I update it as I learn.
The number one rule:
Are you late for that train connection on the other side of the city? Too bad. Cancel the reservation and remake it for later. Even if it costs you money.
Really want to get over that 7000-foot mountain pass, but your schedule only has one day for it? Take a day off and use it to re-arrange your schedule.
Fifteen miles outside of town, but that lovely restaurant closes in an hour? Get creative: Call the restaurant and ask if they deliver to your hotel. Call your hotel and ask them to receive the meal before you arrive. Straining on the pedals and rushing around corners is not an option.
Not hurrying also applies when you’re off the bike. Do your best to avoid getting into situations where you have to hurry to pack your gear, unpack your gear, lock your bike, choose your route, book your next destination, cook, eat, set up your tent, and so on. Fixing a mistake you made when you were hurrying will often cost far more time than it would’ve taken to slow down in the first place.
… All way more costly than the time it takes to avoid them.
The baseline daily routine of a long range cyclist is to bicycle from the safest possible place to the next safest possible place, along the safest possible route, at the safest speed. When you’re on an adventure there will be days when you deviate from one of these conditions, and you’ll get away with it. However, if you deviate from two at the same time, trouble will seek you out. The biggest reason anyone chooses to deviate from these conditions is they are in a hurry.
Don’t hurry. I’m serious here: This rule is the difference between riding for three days and getting your spine broken by a truck on day three, and riding for three years and rolling into the driveway back home on the last day without a scratch on you and a head stuffed full of amazing memories.
A new friend from Russia!
Riding that loaded bike, you’re a curiosity to almost everyone you meet, including other travelers.
That high visibility adds to your safety. People will want to talk to you, and if you are friendly in response they will often want to help you as well – offering food, a ride, even money or a place to stay. You can trust these people almost universally. Ask for anything you need, as long as you don’t feel like a jerk for asking. The worst they can do is say no. Consider printing (or hand-drawing) a little stack of contact cards so you can hand them out.
It’s the people who don’t approach you – the people who keep their distance and stare, or who point you out to their friends but don’t engage directly – that you need to be careful around.
Sometimes it’s best to embrace the first kind of people as protection against the second. For example, accepting a ride from the kind elderly couple in the back of their pickup, just to move a few miles down the road from that creepy group of teenagers eyeballing you and your bike at the restaurant. After enough time on the road you’ll develop a gut sense for when people aren’t responding right. Don’t ignore it.
There’s also a more specific version of this rule:
If you see a cyclist coming the other way, stop for a friendly chat and ask about the road ahead. Then tell them about the road you’ve already cycled, so they get the same benefit. You’ll be teaching a good habit by example as you go.
At destinations and pit stops you can also ask drivers for advice, but take anything they say about conditions or hills with a grain of salt. Drivers usually know less than they think about roads, even the ones they drive every day.
In many situations, snapping your head around for a quick look is just too much to coordinate. Besides, you might be whipping it right into the side mirror of a truck!!
Being able to instantly see that you should just roll off the road and wait for an especially big vehicle to clear some narrow chunk of road can save your bacon.
If you are cycling with partners, get radio intercom devices for your helmets, if you can afford them. They are astoundingly useful. Coordination will be much easier and the trip will be way more fun.
Almost all the intercoms for bicyclists are adapted from products used by motorcyclists. Motorcyclists wear head-enclosing helmets (at least the sane ones do) and the intercoms attach to the inside, but a bicyclist gets a more open-air design, with straps or rods that place the speakers near the ears without blocking them entirely. This is because external sound is very important:
A little advance notice is essential when cars approach from behind or around blind corners. Even the quietest electric car will still make noise as its tires roll over the pavement. (You can’t rely on it, but it’s useful when it’s there.)
I won’t go so far as saying never wear headphones – I wear headphones regularly when I bike – but I will say keep your music at a low volume and find some way to shelter your ears from the noise of the rushing wind. Vortex-generating attachments on the outside of your headphones or helmet can actually reduce the wind so much that you can hear better than you would with your ears uncovered.
There are rancorous discussions all over the internet about whether headphones are an acceptable risk when biking. Just use common sense. Take them off when you’re trying to navigate in a city.
This is strange advice to give to bike tourists because they’re an adventurous bunch. But, consider this:
The internet has changed bike touring immeasurably by letting cyclists widely share route recordings. Any time you want to go somewhere new, tap into those online collections and see if someone else has already forged a path ahead of you. Chances are high you’ll find something to use as a reference.
Routes with flagged points of interest, or comments, like “this was insane and I’m never doing it again”, are especially useful!
Sure, you could push those pedals nonstop for an entire afternoon. You’re a touring cyclist – you’ve got stamina up the wazoo. But if your wazoo starts to hurt after the fifth consecutive hour, it will keep hurting for the rest of the day no matter how many breaks you take.
Why spend half the day with a painful wazoo? Stop every hour at least, and stretch or lay down or do a few cartwheels, because you’re on a tour and you can stop whenever the heck you want.
When you’re traveling in a group this doesn’t matter, but when you’re going solo you’ll feel much better if you can lock your bike, then unload it in one go. It’s easy to lose something (to oversight or theft) if you’re leaving one pile of gear unguarded while you go back for another pile.
Usually all you need to do is put shoulder-length straps on one pair of bags, so you can wear those and pick up the other pair of bags by their handles. Instead of a rack-top bag consider a backpack.
Oh look, my bike is already on the plane ahead of me! Airtags are awesome.
See you later, bicycle. Good luck...
Checking your bike as a piece of luggage can be amazingly convenient. But if you fly enough times, an airline will eventually misplace your bike. Having up-to-the-minute accurate information on exactly where your bike is – and that it’s still in the box – is unbelievably reassuring, and is also very useful information to present to a baggage clerk when you’re trying to figure out who is responsible for the error, and what the timeframe is for getting it sorted out.
They may not have the authority or the time to go hunting for your bicycle personally, but being able to prove to a clerk that your bike exists and is at their airport will motivate them to help you, more than they would help a person who has no idea whatsoever where their item has gone.
Don’t get angry about it – that will always work against you – but be insistent. I’ve had a clerk try to mansplain to me that a 60-second-old ping from an Airtag doesn’t necessarily mean it knows where it is right then. I just calmly replied, “Airtags don’t work that way. They are actually never aware of their own location; the devices around them that receive the ping are, and those devices are what do the reporting. I can explain to you in detail how this works, if you’re interested.”
She had the grace to say no, and since I was still polite company, she kept helping me.
Anyway, for your own sanity, get some Airtags.
Good luck finding your way to the right port on this map.
The Open Cycle map has way more useful detail here than either Google or Apple can muster.
Apple and Google work pretty hard to make their maps useful, but the crowd-sourced nature of the OpenStreetMap project often raises it head-and-shoulders above the more corporate options.
Especially in Europe, which has leaned heavily into it. Get yourself an application like “Map Plus” and add the cycling version of OpenStreetMap to it, and crank up the cache settings. It has such sights to show you…
Somebody either dropped their Samsung phone out the window by accident, or threw it out of frustration.
A cell phone is an incredibly useful and convenient tool on a bike tour. It’s easy to become dependent on one without realizing. A compass and a few printed paper maps in a bag can mitigate that risk, but there’s no denying how devastating it can be to lose your phone.
So, consider buying a really cheap, ugly looking smart phone to bring along as a spare. Wrap it in a waterproof sack, tape it shut, and hide it somewhere in your gear. If you’re out in the wilderness and your fancy one gets waterlogged or smashed, all you need to do is switch the sim cards and carry on. Even if your regular phone drops into a ravine or goes to the bottom of a lake, the backup phone can still be used as soon as you find wifi.