Apologies to Dante for the lede.

We are luxuriating in a couple of day’s R and R at our friends Steve and Craig’s amazing house on not one but two lakes. It was very nice to wake up “normally” with a few moments of sleepy headedness instead of having to come around by pedaling up a steep hill. We are, more or less, half way through our trek to Bar Harbor. I say “more or less” since we are now deviating from the ACA route for a swing down through Wisconsin to Spring Green and Taliesin. We’ll ride along the Mississippi to Lacrosse then angle east to get to Wright’s Wisconsin home passing through the town of his birth, Richland Center, along a part of the newly designated Frank Lloyd Wright Trail. From there we will head northwest across Wisconsin and eventually reconnect with the mapped route around the north side of Lake Michigan and into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Our detour to Taliesin will add about 180 miles to our trip so I’m not sure where we stand on eventual total mileage.

There has never been a three month period in my life where I have been so totally focused on one goal, one project. I have to confess that there were days early on when the task seemed daunting, as in “how can I keep pedaling day after day for three months.”  The first climbs up the Cascades did little to buoy my confidence but once over the Continental Divide, I felt like this was something we could do. Certainly every day (one might say every hour) presents its mini challenges in terms of hills, wind, maybe rain but the little lesson I learn almost daily is “one mile at a time.” I think we both break down the day’s ride into segments and check the box for that segment when we get there and then it’s on to the next one, the next segment. Sometimes I break the total mileage goal into percentages and tell myself, “There’s 2% finished.” Or figure out how many minutes at a given speed each mile will take then, my mind occupied on the math, suddenly I find we’re half way or almost done.

A lot of our riding has been in file since, except for occasional stretches of deserted highway or on the bike trail, there is no room to ride side by side. Riding one behind the other is not conducive to conversation so we tend to store up comments or topics until break time or until we can ride next to each other. There always is that great moment when one of us will announce, “Half way there” or “Ten more miles to go” and those declarations unfailingly boost my spirits.

I’ve found that my mind wanders often to music: I spent a lot of idle brain power the other day thinking that I finally understood how Charlie Parker sculpted “Yardbird Suite.” And before that it was hearing in my head the multiple signatures of a Mahavishnu Orchestra piece.  None of this is significant in the long run but often solves mysteries I never had the opportunity to visualize clearly. Of course the real danger in all this is that preoccupied, I am not paying 100% attention to the road and have actually run into Maja at least twice!