Editor’s note: Sedgwick native Levi Bridges and friend Ellery Althaus of North Truro, Mass., have finished their 9,500-mile cycling trip across Asia and Europe. Bridges has returned to Maine and will be filing a few final installments for the BDN about his trip’s completion.
The romanticism evoked by travel is a curious feeling. It comes and goes like the flicker of a firefly in the night.
After months on the road, the lofty feelings travel inspires begin feeling intangible. Oftentimes, in the rain and cold, a journey seems best experienced in retrospect, leafing through a personal journal chronicling your adventure at home, or, better yet, listening to tales of other weary travelers warming themselves by a glowing hearth.
At the end of an epic adventure, it is easy to forget why you wanted to come here. In the moment, you can only focus on climbing the next mountain or wiggling your toes to keep them from going numb. Other thoughts are distracting. Unnecessary. It seems the true experience can only be felt after the fact.
Unintentional matadors
Three weeks ago, my cycling partner Ellery’s friend, and former boss, Adrian Cyr flew to Europe and completed our journey with us. A man in his early 50s who had never done a trip like this, Adrian’s strength and determination continually amazed me.
Ellery and I have been on the road for more than eight months. Our muscles are sore and our minds exhausted from the daily routine of navigating new roads and finding food and shelter. Adrian’s presence resuscitated our spirits. The excitement he feels riding through a windy storm, or daily confronting new obstacles, is conta-gious. It reminds me why I’m here.
With Adrian we rode the Camino de Santiago, a series of hiking trails and dirt roads, across northern Spain. The Camino was formed during the Middle Ages by pilgrims walking to the holy city of Santiago. Today, both religious zealots and adventurers still cross the famous road on foot and bicycle. Along the way, they sleep in affordable hostels serving modern day pilgrims.
After a day of riding in freezing rain, we seek refuge in a small pilgrim hostel. That night, the kind owner invites us to warm ourselves around his fireplace and serves us homemade liqueurs. Adrian begins strumming a guitar lying in the corner and together we sing songs and talk. As the hands of a nearby clock near the immen-sity of time near midnight, only Adrian and I remain around the waning firelight.
“I’m tired of riding in wind and rain each day,” I admit. “I’ll be happy when this is over.”
“You know, there is an amazing sense of freedom one feels going somewhere new each day,” Adrian muses, “and I think you’ll really miss that when you go home.”
“I just hope that I can incorporate that sense of exploration, the open mindedness to new challenges and confronting the unknown that life on a bicycle demands into how I interact with the world after we finish,” I say.
The following afternoon we cycle through small farming towns. Rural Spain often resembles the Europe of yesteryear. Riding through one hamlet, I pass an old toothless woman chatting with a farmer holding a wooden pitchfork. They stand next to a flock of sheep.
It has rained sporadically all day and we’re dressed accordingly. By coincidence, we all wear red rain jackets. They blaze behind us like rebel flags in the wind.
I ride in the rear of our group as we descend a hill into a small valley. We pass by Holstein cows behind a stone wall. In the distance, I see a large young bull stampeding toward us, nostrils flaring.
“He can’t jump that stone wall,” I think, “or it would be higher.”
Riding up the hill’s other side, the bull runs at a gallop, jumps the wall with ease, and lands between me and Adrian. His hooves hitting the ground sound like a mousetrap snapping shut. Ellery and Adrian are already halfway up the hill. The bull ambles toward them, throwing his weight around like an angry arms dealer.
I get off my bike. Looking ahead, I see a farmer jump lickety-split from his home. When the enraged bull sees his master, he turns back toward me. My red rain poncho billows behind me in the wind like the hood of a cobra, making me an unintentional matador. The bull charges me.
With bicycle in hand, I run back to an open gate in the pasture and use my bike to barricade the entrance. With my bike as a shield, I crouch behind it, bracing myself for the attack. The bull runs toward me, then turns away at the last minute. Through my bike’s spokes, I watch the farmer chase after the bull.
Idiots and heroes
“The hero feeling is pretty weak,” wrote National Geographic writer Mark Jenkins in his book “Off The Map,” an account of his epic bicycle tour across the Soviet Union in 1989. During this bike trip’s difficult moments, Jenkins’ quote seems like the best way of describing my emotions.
One year ago, Ellery and I made business cards containing our Web site address above the caption “The Idiots” to raise awareness about our trip. The card’s title was a literary reference to Russian writer Dostoevsky’s famous novel “The Idiot” and an acknowledgment that you’d have to be crazy to cycle across Siberia. We handed them out randomly on the street hoping the self-effacing humor would intrigue people to visit our Web site.
On April 15, 2009, we began our trip from a beach on the Sea of Japan in Vladivostok, Russia. A swarm of Russian television crews awaited us on the coast to film us ceremoniously dipping our rear tires into the Pacific.
That morning, I had neglected to securely close the rubber pouch of water in my Camelbak backpack. It suddenly exploded and soaked my clothes. I shivered in the cold Russian wind. Camera crews shoved microphones in my face before I had a chance to change.
On bicycle, the U.S. Consul General in Vladivostok escorted us out of the city with a small motorcade in tow. I followed them wet and miserable. Finally, I stopped to dump out the remaining water in my backpack. A camera crew filming me for a piece that aired that night on Russian national news stopped their car to capture the moment.
“Mr. Bridges, how do you feel right now?” A young journalist asked holding a microphone to my face.
“I’m cold,” I answered teeth chattering. “Really, really cold.”
Later that day, a van of Russian army officers stopped to cheer us on.
“You’re heroes,” one of them said.
A long bicycle tour is the experience of a lifetime. Family and friends frequently write you congratulatory e-mails. Countless cars pass beeping horns to cheer you on. But after countless months riding in rain, sleet and snow, I must confess, the hero feeling is pretty weak.
Oftentimes, you don’t feel like a hero at all. You just feel like an idiot.
The longest mile
We left the Spanish city of Santiago on a freezing morning. In three days, a handful of family and friends would arrive at our ending destination, the city of Porto, Portugal, 150 miles away on the Atlantic Coast. We left regretting we’d chosen to end in Portugal; the Spanish Atlantic coast lay just 50 miles west.
We ride south avoiding the coast on a road cutting through a series of green mountains. Nobody wants to see the Atlantic until we reach Portugal.
That afternoon, the road we follow merged with a major highway that did not permit cyclists, forcing us to take a detour onto a coastal peninsula. Coming up a long hill, the Atlantic Ocean came into view and Adrian stopped riding.
“My leg has hurt all day,” he admits, “I can’t ride any further.”
We push our bikes up the hill. Adrian begins limping as we reached the top.
“Ohhh,” he says, “it’s so bad I can’t walk now.”
We coast down the hill into a small fishing village and get a hotel. Lying in bed, Adrian winces in pain just trying to extend his leg.
“My Spanish is good enough to translate if you want to see a doctor,” I offer.
“Let’s see how it feels tomorrow,” he says.
That night I took a long walk on the beach. We hadn’t made it to Portugal, but the sounds of surf crashing on the beach whispered an undeniable fact: We had successfully ridden our bicycles across Asia and Europe.
The next morning Adrian’s leg still hurt too badly to continue. We take a ferry off the peninsula to the city of Vigo, then push our bikes to the bus station. We hoped to get a ride somewhere just north of Porto, and, if Adrian felt up to it, ride into the city the next morning.
“Sorry, sir, it is against Portuguese law to bring a bicycle on a bus,” the ticket seller at the bus station told me, “I can’t sell you a ticket.”
Desperate, I spend hours in the station, explaining our plight to bus drivers. Finally one took pity on us.
“I could get in a lot of trouble for doing this,” a kind Portuguese bus driver told us, “but your friend is injured, so I’ll make an exception. Put your bikes on the bus quick,” he said, “first stop is Porto.”
Two weeks ago, during a snowstorm on the Camino de Santiago, I met an old French pilgrim standing in a thick drift of snow.
“I can’t continue in this snow,” he said. “I’ve walked the Camino several times before, and sometimes, you just know when it’s over. I’m going home.”
The next morning, Ellery and I roll our bikes out of a small hotel in downtown Porto. As Ellery hopped on his bike, the cable connecting to his bike’s derailleur suddenly snapped, became caught in the wheel, and bent the bike frame so that the rear wheel locked. The bicycle was destroyed.
We looked at each other and almost laughed.
“You just know when it’s over,” we both say in unison.
Ellery piled his bike into a taxi and I rode across town alone to the beach house our family and friends had rented. It took me nearly two hours maneuvering through gridlocked traffic, becoming lost in labyrinthine city streets and lifting my bike over guardrails onto major highways to continue.
Finally, darkness fell and I found myself on a lonely road leading out to a long peninsula. In the distance, huge breakers crashed upon the beach. I stopped for a moment to inhale the ocean’s scents, then looked down at my bicycle’s odometer. It read 9,513 miles traveled, just slightly shorter than the 10,000 we originally esti-mated this trip would cover.
Then I round a final corner and see it: Ellery and his parents, my mother, Adrian and his family. They’ve all been waiting outside and worrying about me. I run up and throw my arms around the loved ones I haven’t seen in nearly a year.
We never bother triumphantly dipping our front tires into the Atlantic as planned. Ultimately, those ego-boosting moments of victory are not important. What matters on a trip like this is what you’ve seen, experienced and learned about yourself.
And that’s how this trip ends. With one injured rider, a broken bicycle and a group of happy friends madly embracing on the beach.
I hug the people I’m overjoyed to see and hear waves washing up on the shore. And try to wrap my mind around a seemingly incomprehensible truth: It’s over. We made it.
It’s over.