Why This Tour; Why Now?

I think the best way I can say it is, “Things tend to continue exactly as they are unless you change them.”

My Schedule

Up until a few days ago, I worked at a lab. It was a good job. There was a lot I loved about it.

If I had that job ten years ago, I’d have rolled with it for many years, helping scientists build interesting workflows to do unique research. It would have been perfect for the 2016 version of me. But between now and then something fundamental shifted: I’ve became much more aware of the finality of death, and the loss of opportunity that comes with declining health.

A few years back I lost my father, after a long slow decline into dementia. I’ll never stop missing him of course, but I spent a lot of time with him in later years and that helped ease the loss. Last year, my close cousin died from an awful aggressive cancer, and it happened faster than anyone was prepared for. I deeply regret not spending more time with him. I was living with a delusion, based on my experience with my Dad: There would always be just a little bit more time, so I could push our social plans out just a little bit more and it would be fine.

I had this plan, see. I would convince him to hang out with me for an hour or so every week, and we would record our conversations, and he would tell me all the stories from his youth and adulthood that I missed or forgot. All the things that his own kids were still too young to hear. I would edit the recordings, and then in a few years I would start giving them to his kids, a batch at a time, so they could still learn about their dad. It was a great plan. But my own relatively tiny concerns with work and schedules and stress kept pushing it just a little bit into the future. I had the chance to do it, and suddenly it was gone. Now I feel very, very stupid.

It also made me very thoughtful. I would go to the lab, and in the middle of a meeting or writing some code, a little bomb would explode in my head: “Who’s next? Who are you going to lose next, while you’re sitting here waiting for it to happen?”

The lab had a policy of two discontinuous remote days per week. I wanted the chance to see friends and relatives who lived farther away. I knew I was spoiled by previous jobs: For the last seven years, even before the pandemic, my managers had not cared where in the world I was, as long as I got things done and hit my marks at meetings. Having that flexibility felt urgent in a way it hadn’t before. I asked for the chance to work remotely for longer periods. “I don’t even want more remote days,” I said. “I want to rearrange the days I have, so I get longer intervals. Then I can travel and see people.”

After a year of asking, inside and outside the lab bureaucracy, the final straw came when I lost my cat. I’d rescued her as a kitten and she’d been a constant in my life for over 20 years. It was aggressive cancer, and it took her even faster than it took my cousin. Suddenly I was done waiting around for life to take more things away. I had to see people; I had to be in more places.

I asked for a different schedule one more time and was turned down, so I declared mid-April would be my last week. I’d been agonizing for a year and it still felt sudden. I think my boss was surprised I actually followed through. So was I, honestly. My friends encouraged me to make the change, but my relatives were split. Some of them thought I was crazy to leave a stable gig, especially in this economy shell-shocked by AI and global conflict. There’s only a handful of places in the world where research like this happens and I’m lucky to be involved.

Well, as they say, you can do anything but you can’t do everything. And some things you can do now, but not later.

My Body

My job was great, and there was also something great about the routine I had around it. Halfway between the house and the office is a café, and the coffee and food there are so good that instead of calling it by its real name, I just call it “Best Café.”

Why does it deserve that title? Because of all the places I’ve tried in the world so far, including cafés in Paris, Copenhagen, New York, etc., that café makes the best iced mocha.  They start by scooping chocolate ganache into a glass with an ice cream scooper, then stirring it by hand to melt it.  They stack ice on top of that, and pour hot espresso and a bit of cream over it, melting most of the ice and forming a drink with several layers by the time it gets into your hands.

This iced mocha is so good that I couldn’t resist buying it every time I went from the house to the office. So at least three days a week I bought this extremely rich drink and finished about a third of it on the way to my desk. Some days I would work at the café, snacking on the very dense quiche or frittata, or curried chicken salad, or poached eggs and sausage. I was probably eating a third more calories every day than I actually needed, in spite of riding the bicycle uphill to the café.

When the emotional turmoil set in, of feeling like I should be somewhere else but also feeling like I had a great thing going, I addressed it by eating my emotions. When you have a “Best Café” within easy reach, it’s easy to take that option. It’s honestly surprising that I only gained 15 or 20 pounds over a year and a half.  My body somehow ignored most of the extra calories — or perhaps my brain turned them into code.

Starting last year, I’ve been able to grab a wad of extra flesh about the size of a baseball in my fist, from just beneath my belt.  It’s at the point where I have to unsnap my pants on long car drives to be comfortable. I refuse to deal with this by just buying bigger pants.

I’m appalled that I can’t go up a single flight of stairs without feeling winded. I’m horrified that my pants feel constricted just when I’m standing straight up. I’m depressed that sometimes when I’m in the shower, I can’t see my own junk unless I lean forward.  I’m too young to stop being on a face-to-face basis with my own junk! … Or maybe just too vain.

Years ago I wrote an entry about my relationship with food, which was mostly about the emotional component in my eating. Some people can be surrounded by amazing food and diligently manage their intake regardless of what they’re feeling. Not me. I’ve always had a hedonistic streak, and it’s how I counterbalance the side of me that’s prone to bleakness and depression.  Modern medicine has ways to cancel out that part, but after 50 years I feel like I would lose a kind of personal continuity, or sense of who I am, if I intervened that way.  Also, the lows I reach are relatively shallow compared to some other people around me – some of my favorite people in fact – and I would feel like a fraud if I couldn’t handle mine through some natural means. If I wander too far away from nature in the management of my brain, I face difficult questions about who or even what I am.  Gratefully I can choose to avoid those.

Is that choice rational? Nope! Very little of what people do is rational. Since I can’t resist a perfect iced mocha, especially when I’m rushing to my first meeting of the day, I’m putting 5000 miles between me and the café it comes from. Rationality is how we do science, but our lives are utterly dominated by emotions — including the ones we don’t know we’re feeling.

One of my favorite lessons from the book “The Switch” is, “Environmental tweaks beats willpower, every single time.” To make a real course correction, I can’t just burn a zillion calories in a week and effectively starve myself into a different shape. I have to keep that downward caloric pressure and upward metabolic pressure in place for much longer, and at the same time pay more attention to what my body is really saying.

Hence, bike tour. Like previous tours, I actually expect to eat ravenously, but at the same time I expect to burn such an outrageous amount of energy that my body will change shape in spite of it.  Food will taste amazing, but as long as I am conscious of what my stomach and my guts and my limbs are really saying, and as long as I keep pedaling, I can expect positive change.

My People

Some of my friends and family have moved farther away in the last few years. Out of the state, or out of the country entirely. A job that needs me on-site for most of every week isn’t compatible with seeing them, so that needed to change, but it’s also likely that my next job will require me to be within the continental US. Since I don’t know how much time I have for international travel, I’m starting with a trip abroad.

After seeing Iceland, I was keen on exploring more of the far north in Europe, but never got the chance. When I arrived by ferry in Hirtshals at the end of 2001, I saw that I could immediately board another ferry bound for Norway. What if I could get to Hirtshals again, and make it one continuous bicycle tour geographically, even though there’s a gap in time of five years? That would be cool.

The smartest way to explore Norway is to follow the coast, then head inland if the weather permits. And you know what Norway has a lot of? Hills. More than Iceland, more than New Zealand, more than any other place I’ve been so far. I’m going to climb a zillion hills and I’m going to like it.

I’d also like to see more of Copenhagen, and Denmark in general, where my grandfather was born. And, I’d like to retrace some of the explorations my Mom did over 50 years ago, including Amsterdam, where one of my best friends now lives. We’ll see how much time I have.

Time to pack things up again!

About a week before departure time, I kitted out the recumbent with all my touring gear, to do a “road test.” I took the bike up to Best Café – where else – and sat outside eating a slice of cake, thinking about how it was probably the last time I would be going here for a long while.

A woman wandered by and asked to take a picture of the bike, then told me a long tale about one of her sons, who lives in Texas currently but is a life-long bike tourist. “It’s not how I would do things,” she said, “but it’s great for him. He’s been all over, and he loves his life. He and his wife just spent a month biking around France!”

“Ah yes,” I thought to myself. “I forgot about this bit. More than any other kind of vehicle, a loaded touring bike gets attention.” This bike had been parked outside the café a couple of times every week for well over a year, and hundreds of people walked by it without comment. But this time I had the touring gear on. I chatted with the lady for half an hour, then she waved goodbye … and wandered back five minutes later because she forgot to take the photograph.

It was a reminder to me, that I was making a massive change to my life, and it was entirely voluntary. This could have been like every other week. All I had to do, was nothing.

The Other Me

There’s a version of me that did do nothing. In a month, instead of being in Norway, he’ll be at his desk at the lab. In six months, he’ll be at his desk. Roll forward five more years and he’ll probably have enough money saved up to pay off his mortgage and effectively retire. From the outside looking in, no one will accuse him of making a bad decision.

He’s probably even pudgier than I am now, and he’s probably using a CPAP machine to deal with his sleep apnea, and he probably regrets not seeing his friends and family. But he’s got his name on a bunch of papers and he helped a lot of great science happen, and he’s probably enjoyed another 700 of the best iced mochas on the planet, and now that he’s retired maybe he can try and get back into shape.

That me is well taken care of. He’ll be fine. But I think I’m getting the better deal.