There is nothing like planning trips and vacations to light the imagination. You start batting around some ideas. You kick around logistics and such. We've been doing this enough to know you shouldn't believe the trip will happen according to plan. Trips never do.Which is fortunate since that is how adventures happen. Trips are fun. Adventures are wonderful.
We are planning some trips for the summer and early fall. Our trips are never big ones. The destinations are not glamorous. Their interest comes from seeing them by bicycle, something that took us many years to understand. We took trips to ride our bicycles in places thousands of miles away only to realize we had just as much fun visiting places by bicycle that were much closer to home.
When you are on a bicycle, people talk to you. You may be a stranger, but you are an interesting stranger. All you really have to do is be very polite, be friendly, and listen as much as you talk. People love to talk about the place where they live. The novelty of meeting a bicycle tourist is fun for them. And you can learn all sorts of odd tidbits about the places you visit. Who needs a travel guide when you can talk to the local people?
So we research our destinations, make our hotel reservations, check out the GPS sites to see routes being used by cyclists, and sketch out our trip plans. It all looks so sweet and simple and flawless.
With luck the rides won't be that sweet, simple, and flawless. With luck we'll have some adventures.
