Bicycle around the world? Because it was such a spur-of-the-moment idea, and because we refused to dwell too long upon the dangers, it had a good chance for survival. It began in early 1977 while Larry and I were eating dinner in our tiny apartment in Santa Barbara.
“Ever notice how often people say, ‘I wish I’d done something really exciting and challenging when I was younger, because now I’m too old and don’t have much to look back on’?” Larry mumbled through a mouthful of potatoes.
I nodded my head.
“Well, pretty soon we’re going to have enough money to make a down payment on a house. But once we do that we’ll be tied down to the monthly payments. And then again, if we don’t buy but instead spend our money on something else, like traveling, we might find ourselves priced out of the market by the time we return.”
I nodded again and Larry went on.
“But on the other hand, we’re both in good physical shape right now, and who knows what’ll happen in the next ten years. One of us might get injured, and then we wouldn’t be able to bicycle across America like you’ve been talking about lately. And as for seeing the rest of the world, the way things are going, who knows how much of it will still be around years from now.”
A thoughtful silence followed. We both knew the conclusion to Larry’s ramblings. It had been building up within us for months now. We were tired of our monotonous, dull security, and we were ready to plan our break.
After graduating from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1973, getting married, working in Spain for a year, and traveling through Europe for a summer, Larry and I had returned to Santa Barbara to settle down, begin our careers, and save money for our own home. We quickly fell into the eight-to-five workweek: Larry as a mechanical engineer and I as a Spanish-English bilingual welfare worker. And soon that warm, secure sensation that accompanies a steady job, company benefits, and regular paychecks enveloped our souls. We bicycled to and from work each day. On weekends we played beach volleyball and backpacked; and every few months we traveled to San Diego to visit my parents or to San Jose to visit Larry’s.
But by 1977 both of us had grown restless. I’d developed the traditional welfare worker burn-out syndrome, losing my ability to cope with or care about the mountains of paperwork, reams of ever-changing government regulations and forms, forms, and more forms, and a caseload of 130 demanding clients. Larry felt walled in, sitting at a desk every day designing and redesigning computers. Were we to spend the bulk of our lives toiling at unfulfilling jobs inside sterile office buildings? we wondered. Society kept answering yes, keep working, buy a house, start a family, save for retirement, and along the way be sure to pick up a color television, microwave oven, stereo, new car, and an electric knife sharpener.
But what about adventure and the outside world? I’d recently attended a slide presentation by a Santa Barbara couple who had pedaled across the United States. Before I’d seen the presentation, if someone had asked me how long it might take to pedal across the continent I would have figured years. But now I knew it could be done in three months or less and that hundreds of people were doing it each year.
I wanted to bicycle across the United States, then fly to Spain and bicycle. Larry was all for that, and more. He wanted to visit Egypt.
“Well, then why stop there?” I answered. “I’ve always wanted to go to Nepal and have a good look at the Himalayas. Maybe we could fly up there after our jaunt through the Nile Valley.”
We were picking up momentum now. We both agreed that if we went all the way to Nepal, we might just as well continue on around to New Zealand. We had heard a lot of good things about New Zealand and had occasionally thought of moving there. And then there was Tahiti, the mystical lure of a South Sea island paradise. Travel around the world? Why not? If we were going to quit our jobs, give up our apartment, and pack away our worldly belongings, we might just as well take full advantage of our freedom and continue traveling after Spain. If we saved our money for one more year, through the rest of 1977 and into the first part of 1978, we could afford a two-year journey on the cheap.
“OK, so it’s decided. We’ll quit work in a year and travel around the world,” I proclaimed at the end of our discussion. “And since we’re going to start out bicycling, why don’t we just keep right on pedaling and do the whole trip on bicycles. Now that ought to be a real adventure!”
I was shocked to hear such words spring from my vocal cords. What the hell was I saying? Me, a five-foot, four-inch, one-hundred-and-fifteen-pound human being, bicycle around the world for two years? I chuckled out loud as I swallowed the last of my meal. It was a thoroughly stupid idea.
Larry, however, was not laughing, and I looked up to see a pleasant, selfconfident grin form on his lips. The smile sent a chill through my body. Oh my God! I thought, he’s taken a liking to the idea.
“Sure we can do it!” Larry burst out. “If we can make it across the United States, then we can make it the rest of the way. It’s a great idea! It has everything: challenge, adventure, accomplishment—you name it. Forget flying from place to place or sitting comfortably in some super-duper deluxe tour bus that stops at all the catchy tourist spots. We’ll hit the world on bicycles and camp out everywhere. We’ll struggle and sweat and meet the people and experience the world as it really is. And we’ll learn to be self-sufficient and tough. It’ll be an experience to treasure for the rest of our lives!”
“Wrong,” I muttered to myself, “we’ll die. Pure and simple death.” The whole idea was too overwhelming—absurd, to be exact.
But Larry’s enthusiasm began to grab hold of me. He honestly believed that we could make it, and the more he talked about it, the more I was caught up by his emotion. He cleared the dishes off the table and spread out our world atlas. We were like two small children sharing a new Christmas toy. Each of us tried to edge our way in closer for a better view. The United States, Canada, and Europe looked familiar enough, but as we headed east the questions started to pop. Could a woman bicycle in the Muslim countries? Would I have to wear layers of clothing and a veil while I pumped through the hot desert sands of the Middle East?
Larry worried most about India, about the starving masses. He wondered if crowds of begging Indians would follow us everywhere, and if so, how we would react. With his gargantuan appetite, he fretted about a possible food shortage. We had heard about the road from the Indian border into Kathmandu, Nepal, a two-hundred-mile stretch of unpaved switchbacks with no food or water available anywhere along the way. Impossible to cycle, I figured. But Larry was optimistic.
“We’ll make arrangements with the bus drivers at the border and have ’em drop off food and water when they pass us each day. We’ll figure out something. By the time we reach Nepal we ought to be pros at solving cycling problems,” he reasoned.
I drew a blank when we came to Southeast Asia. We knew almost nothing about Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. My notion was that they were primitive countries. What if we got there and found nothing but snake- and tigerinfested jungles? I wondered. I’d never been real keen on snakes.
There were heaps of unanswered questions to worry about, but Larry and I chose to ignore them. If we started thinking now about all the things that might go wrong, the trip would vanish beneath the weight of our hesitations. Instead, we talked about snorkeling over beds of coral in Tahiti, climbing through King Tut’s tomb, and conquering the Rockies, the Alps, and the Himalaya. In the back of my mind I continued to believe that the trip would kill me, but it sounded like a great way to go.
Months after our momentous decision was made, I decided it might be prudent to give long-distance bicycling a try. After all, I’d never done it before. I based my enthusiasm for cycle touring on one slide presentation and Larry’s not-too-reassuring claim that his one and only bicycle tour, a 350-mile, fourday pedal between Eureka and San Jose, California, was “overall, one hell of a lot of fun, even though my body experienced excruciating pain those first two days.” The farthest I’d ever bicycled in one day was twenty-five miles; yet Larry expected us to cover over three times that distance a day