23 days left...

I've had a strange knot in my chest for the past two weeks - an awkward tension that probably consist of nerves, excitement, worry [for example: worried that I'm not in good enough shape for this trip]... [worried that I'm going to be too broke to eat when we get back from Seattle]... [worried that I'm not going to be able to ride a bike and film at the same time, well enough to give me any usable footage to edit later on]... [etc]

I guess another part of it is; it doesn't seem real. I keep telling myself, "you're going on a 12 hundred mile bike ride up the coast at the end of this month, are you prepared?", but it hasn't really hit me yet. Which I suppose happened the first time as well, everything seemed a bit surreal the first several days into the trip.

In all honesty - my only one legit worry is that the trip won't be long enough to really have any long lasting effects on the three of us. The whole point of a bike trip is that it's a clean slate... you spend your whole life building bad habits & materialistic dependencies, and a bike trip allows you to step back far enough to see things from a different perspective. Not even necessarily a "bike trip", anyone could gain from the same effect by: "climbing a mountain, traveling to a third-world country, seeing the Earth from space...", I really thought I would be able to come up with more examples than that, but I'm drawing a blank.


Here's a slightly random but related journal entry from before my first bike trip:

feb 23 01 "My worries on the bike trip" - I don't know my exact balance - but I know I am behind on my savings. I need 11 hundred dollars by early May - and I don't even have 400 in the bank yet. Shit! I need this bike trip - or at least I have convinced myself I do... every day I wake up scared that I am yet one day closer to realizing I won't be leaving for Cali' on a bike like planned. And I hate it.