Sir Arthur Conan Doyle quote from a Scientific American (1896) article: "When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking."

If I was expecting to be euphoric, I was mistaken. The most overwhelming feeling was, and is, one of profound relief. Of all the thousands of things that could have gone wrong: with the weather; the bike; accidents; illness; none of them did (other than for poor Tim of course, who broke his collar bone on Day 2). Not for me or for the other 9 people on the trip (most of them senior citizens don't forget). We didn't even get seriously wet. I did not even get a flat! (The record was one guy with seven.)

Perhaps it was partially due to the fact that the last two days were so effortless: how different would it have been if the finish line was at the top of the pass on Franklin Mountain out of El Paso? It was definitely partially due to me being so completely surrounded by big dogs for whom the effort was no big deal that I lost track of what a big deal it was for me. This only started to hit home when so many of my real-life friends talked about how great it was just to know someone who had done it. Us mere mortals, us city slickers, just do not do this sort of thing.

And maybe the whole thing was just bigger than that: euphoria is fleeting, but the deep satisfaction of knowing that you have cycled across an entire continent is forever and takes a while to sink in. The mental model I have built of the various stages is so big and complex it feels like I can walk around it to look at it from multiple angles. And that takes time to get used to too.

The thing that caught me most by surprise was the mental effort required. I had in mind a sort of retreat, a peaceful respite from the rat race of life, with no decisions to make, where the steady rhythm of eat, ride, beer, eat, sleep would give me ample time for reflection and reading. Instead, the intense pressure of staying upright in ferocious and unpredictable cross-winds, of knowing that a moment's distraction could put you into the door of a careless right-turner or them into you, or drive roadside dross into a tire, or worst of all, suck you under an 18-wheeler, in short of just staying alive, left me as mentally exhausted as I was physically. And that's just the stuff I have some control over. I wasted a lot more energy on things I could not actually control, like willing the thunder clouds to stay out of our path or making sure that nobody got sick. (Perhaps I didn't control it, but it's a fact that we never did get seriously wet, and no one got seriously sick either. So it was worth it.) The upshot being that aided by two easy days to finish, I didn't actually feel all that tired physically, but I'm mentally done in. Arranging not to return to work until the following week was one of the smartest things I did in preparation for the trip. A few days as a couch zombie helped to bring me back up to speed. Certainly as I sat at the gate waiting for my flight home, I was already slipping from permanently wired to overwhelmingly tired.

Betsy: "As we journeyed down rural roads, people waved and shouted, “Ya’ll be safe!” They chased us down in cars and ATVs to offer water bottles. Countless friends with names unknown smiled and waved while perched on their porches and as they walked along the roadside. Hotel clerks and restaurateurs offered prayers and blessings over us as we set out for the day. Drivers pulled up in their cars and trucks at our water stops to ask where we were headed and to wish us safe travels."

Seconded, with bells on. Yes we met our fair share of folks who took it upon themselves to try to teach us the errors of our ways physically using their vehicles or verbally with colorful language but they were outnumbered 50:1 by the examples Betsy provided and so many more.

Things I learned

• Chamois Butt'r. "Chammy butter" is an "anti-bacterial cream used to reduce friction between your shorts and your $ss. This limits the amount of chaffing that occurs during a ride and means that you don't get as many saddle sores." Or as one satisfied customer put it "if you are not using this kind of cream on the places that-rub-you-wrong during your bike rides, I guess my question is: why on earth not?" Learned my lesson early on and bought my own supply.
• Casquette. A peaked cotton cap traditionally worn under a helmet in heavy rain or to shield the head from strong sun. The peak can make riding in the rain more comfortable, since drops do not fall directly into the eyes or used as a sun visor. Can also be worn with the peak backwards so the peak then protects the neck from sunburn. As soon as I started to develop a raccoon suntan under my helmet, I knew I had to have one. Fortunately its rain-deflecting properties were never tested, but I'm nevertheless a convert. Bonus: I nearly look like a big dog. I bet you didn't know that a traditional way to keep the head cool when cycling in hot conditions is to put a cabbage leaf under the casquette. Those were the days.
• Peletons. A pack of cyclists riding closely together to reduce wind resistance and conserve their energy. This loose gaggle of riders is already dangerous enough because a mistake by one is a mistake for all. But not to be confused with ...
• ... Pacelines. A tactic used by cyclists to improve aerodynamics and increase speed by riding close behind each other (in other words your front wheel three inches behind the next guy's back wheel) and so in the draft of the riders in front thus enabling the group to travel at a faster rate than any of the riders in the group could do alone. The leader "pulls" the line and rotates off to let another rider "pull". This is true insanity unless winning is the only goal. But the big dogs love it. My only goal was to get to St Augustine, so apart from the one rotation I did accompanying Scout and to check it off my bucket list, I gave the whole thing a wide berth. Not that I could have kept up anyway.

Loved	Not so much
Thousands of miles of spectacular scenery and empty roads ...	... hundreds of miles of the opposite. Roads you wouldn't dream of riding normally, and hope never to ride again.
Lack of rain ...	... relentless head- and cross-winds. It certainly built character and it helped make the ride a more serious challenge but jeez.
The west's grand hotels and funky motels ...	... the east's chain hotels. Of course they were perfectly fine, they just lacked the character and charm of their earlier counterparts
What a great team. I know it is not always like this, but we were, and I loved it.
Willingness of leadership to change things up, and willingness of team to go with it.
Never feeling alone. The speed at which the sag wagon or the sag rider appeared, and everyone wanting to help anyone else no matter who they were, or what they needed, from a spare tube to a bottle of wine.
Great food and always something different, from fine dining to home cooked, from store burritos to stuffed quail.
Texas! Who woulda thought it? I felt for sure this would have been in the other column, so it is even more special that it moved over here. The flowers alone were worth the price of admission.

Dave's Video

Creating a record of a trip like this is a labor of love. I have created many in my time primarily because I have a memory like a seive and I want to be able to remember the adventure later. It also prolongs the pleasure as I explore all the alleys and byways sparked but not investigated while on the road. I have therefore recommended creating such a record to many folks along the way, but to my knowledge no one has taken up the challenge.

Imagine my pleasure therefore when Dave-the-Elder published his own homage to the trip, a 20-minute video. Hats off to Dave, it transports me right back into the ride, and his self-deprecating narrative along with the moving pictures (in both senses of the word!) together create a captivating and in many ways more appropriate solution to the challenge of documentating our incredible experience than this blog ever can. Highly, highly recommended.

Acknowledgements

This website/blog is dedicated to my COLA family without whom none of this would have been remotely possible. Thank you from the bottom of my heart:

• Obergruppenführer (it's a compliment-look it up) Dennis for overseeing every mile (or perhaps I should say Every F🤬ing Inch), every room, every meal, and so many beers, leaving the rest of us free to focus on nothing but the day's ride.
• Captain America for recognizing my limits of both interest and skill and taking better care of me and my machine than I was doing for myself
• The big dogs for your grace and patience, especially at memorable moments such as staying behind me on the final segment into New Mexico allowing me to be the first to cross the line.
• Betsy for all the big dog stuff, your humor and humanity, and especially for letting me steal quotes from your blog.
• The two loonies (you know who you are) for teaching me so much and for the healthy dose of character you added to the team: it truly would not have been the same without you.
• Shelley for sharing with us such bravery, such strength of purpose, and most incredibly, such unrelenting good spirit and humor. You are an inspiration. A DQ Chocolate Dipped Cone will never be the same again.
• Last but by absolutely no means least, my great riding buddy Dave-the-Elder for being a kindred spirit, and for thousands of miles of support, entertainment, and information. I don't remember when or why he stopped hanging with the big dogs (for a while he played with them in the mornings and then "took it easy" in the afternoons) but it was so much more fun riding with someone who was just as happy as I was to ride at random paces, and to stop on any sort of random whim. And he can talk a dog off a meat truck, a trait I've always admired.