Slow Life On A Bike

(The Big Cycling Adventure, 2010)

In the summer of 2010, at the ripe old age of fifty-four, I made my first cross-country bicycle tour. Well, truthfully, I had never ridden my bicycle any distance at all. Since I was twelve years old, anyways. But nonetheless, on May 26, 2010, I rolled out of my driveway onto Castillo Drive and continued pedaling a narrow ribbon of asphalt as I made my way slowly (great emphasis on slowly) across the 2000 miles to Taos, New Mexico.

This trip was the beginning of real change in my life. A victim of the financial meltdown, I closed my business a year earlier and planned the trip in part to help answer the nagging question, “What shall I do with the rest of my life?” And answer it did — eventually (great emphasis on eventually). Those 2000 miles were the beginning of a journey that led me to formulate a new view of how I wanted my life to be, who I really was, and, finally, to the After-Fifty Adventure Man.

The stories included here are some of the tales I wrote while on that first Big Adventure.