I Rode On: A Teen Cycles the World 1975-77
About this book
Content Drug use and sexual situationsDownload this book on a tablet or smartphone to see over 300 photos in color; they will look lackluster in black & white on a Kindle.I didn’t want to go to college after high school, so in the summer of 1975, I left home on a 2½-year mission to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before—on a bicycle!Over the last few years, I’ve listened to all 21 cassette tapes of my journal for the first time since I recorded them. Little did I know that I was speaking to my older self. Back in 1978, I didn’t think my story was very exciting or of much literary value, and I utilized a limited vocabulary. Really nice and real interesting are adjectives I overused. Many of the journal entries begin with I rode on.This travelog is not the book I would have written when I was 21. I never expected anyone would read my private journal. I’d have been mortified! Does the statute of limitations ever end for embarrassment? That younger David is almost like a fictional character to me now.Below is the preface to the book I started writing in 1978 titled Faster Than a Speeding Butterfly and subtitled In Pursuit of a Dream.The sun was out and the wind at my back as I bicycled home from North Park on the other side of town. Curt Isakson and I spent the previous summer (my 13th) working on our Cycling merit badge for Scouts. With six 25-mile trips and a 50-miler, it was considered pretty tough. We thought it was fun. And liberating! Still three years away from getting a driver’s license, we had explored most of the country roads around Amery and beyond. For our 50-miler, we went 83 miles. The next summer, we biked to Eau Claire and back, 76 miles away, to see a friend who moved there two years before. It gave me a feeling of power to explore unknown territory between Amery and Eau Claire.If only I could wait for a strong wind to carry me, I wondered how far I could go...If only I didn’t have to make a round-trip and keep coming back to Amery...I could go clear across Wisconsin...across the country...even, even around the world! I didn’t know if my trip was feasible when I got the idea. I kept it in the back of my mind, comparing it to other possibilities after escaping from high school. And the more I imagined it, the more real it became. Though I continuously kept it in mind, I didn’t tell anyone. I feared I would be ridiculed, especially by my brother Jon. I knew how easily that could hinder my dreams. I know how fragile dreams are. They are easily shattered. That’s as far as I got writing my book, working for years on getting that preface just right. I felt it would be easier to re-do the trip than write about it. In 2009 I retired early and began reCycling the World with my wife, Julie. We cycled north to south, from Amery to Ushuaia, and then Cape Town to Berlin. This time I had a digital camera, a netbook computer, and a blog followed by friends (and even strangers) worldwide as we cycled. I felt I was competing with my younger self. “How in the world did he do it?” I wondered. So now, more than 40 years later, I finally completed the story of that first trip around the world.