At least once on every trip I have a moment where I stop and ask myself
“Why am I doing this, why did I think this was a good idea.”
This is normally followed by a series of thoughts that are roughly along the lines of telling myself that I’m stupid.
These feelings of regret are normally their worst when I’m going to events by myself, or anywhere that’s not on my way to my home in Montana or my home in Portland.
And yet. I’m still addicted to travelling, I’m addicted to seeing what I’m capable of. Pushing my limits and trying to understand more about how I react to situations and why I react that way.
On my way to Babes Ride Out, I stopped at this RV Park in Sunny Valley, OR for the night. When I got here I was cold, hungry, and upset with myself that I chose the easy option with a heater rather than sticking it out in the cold in my tent. This led to me thinking over and over that I could probably have ridden the 868 miles to the event in two days and it was excessive and stupid that I had left on a Tuesday to get to an even that wasn’t happening until Friday. This line of thought just got worse and worse until I was in tears, thinking about turning around and riding home on Wednesday to only have to turn around and go south again on Thursday. This made absolutely no sense, and I knew that. That didn’t stop me from thinking the same loop again and again, until it was midnight,and I was calling my significant other to calm me down.
Most things look better in the morning. Mountains that seemed overwhelming in the dark, turn out to be small hills in the light. Issues that seem insurmountable, often don’t seem so daunting when you share them with someone you trust.
While I’m on the road and moving I spend more time thinking about the landscape I’m riding through, or listening to audio books that keep my mind from wandering into that inevitable loop of ‘this is dumb, we could be warm, we could be in a soft bed.’
My parents are solely responsible for teaching me to remind myself, even while I’m going through these thought loops, that things could be worse. It’s ok to be upset, it’s ok to cry, but it’s important to remember that whatever is happening is not the worst thing that could be happening. Whatever discomfort I was experiencing because of the weather, whatever thing that had broken on the bike, was not the worst thing. There are always worse things.
My Chain Popped off the sprocket 20 miles from Sacramento. Luckily Olivia let me limp to her house and helped me hunt down a replacement the next day.
Getting to see awesome people like Olivia aka Killswitch Queen is also a good motivator to make it over the hump of regret and anxiousness. I’m grateful to her for chauffeuring me around so I could buy a new chain, and sharing her tools with me to remove the old one and install the new one.
Any trip on a motorcycle can be amazing or awful depending upon your perspective. It’s not really the most comfortable way to travel, or the easiest. Getting to see the Golden Gate bridge can be an incredible awe inspiring experience, or it can be a frustrating experience if you focus on the sheer amount of traffic and rude tourists that you have to get through just to see it. You choose to be grateful to be there, to have the opportunity to see something in person that many wish they could see but will never be able to.
Seeing new places, and trying to imagine what it must be like to live there is something I spend a lot of time thinking about in my helmet, and it never ceases to entertain me.
I guess the point I’m trying to get at is that there is a time in any adventure where we may question our sanity. After all an adventure isn’t an adventure until something goes wrong. That could be anything from having to change your plans last minute, to a chain popping off your sprocket hundreds of miles from home.
The difference between a good trip and a bad one isn’t dependent upon whether everything goes right or not, it is dependent upon our ability to wipe or faces, pick ourselves up, laugh it off and keep going.
