Alaska Tour Wrapup, part 5
I had coffee recently with a good friend that I hadn’t seen since just before my bicycle tour to Alaska. He wanted to know all about my tour. One of his questions caught me by surprise. He asked, though not in so many words, what it all meant and what I learned from it.
Except he didn’t care at all about the things I’ve learned and shared in previous “Alaska Tour Wrapup” articles. For example, important lessons about my insulin pump and making a smooth transitions back to work. Those easy and obvious things. Harder and more nebulous is what did I learn about myself? That’s what he really wanted to know.
It was an excellent question. I think I babbled something about how it was too early to tell which is an admittedly inadequate answer. A better non-answer would have been to say something about Alaska being the forty-ninth state I’ve bicycled in. Even better would have been to assert that I wanted to show that people with diabetes can do whatever they set their minds to doing. That’s an admirable mission, in my opinion, but it didn’t answer his question.
So, I’ve been thinking about his question quite a bit in the last couple of days. I came up with several things I learned about myself. First, I learned I dislike touring in traffic. When I recall the days when I toured through cities, I know they were definitely more stressful for me. One of the things I like about touring and bicycle riding in general is the meditative aspect. For many years, I’ve known that I do my best thinking and my mind seems clearest and calmest when I’m bicycle riding. When I’m touring on a busy street, instead of a clear and calm mind, I have to occupy my mind with negotiating traffic and making sure I don’t get myself run over.
With that in mind, you’d think the very best days on the tour would be the days when I was fortunate to ride along comfortably pedaling and meditating on a remote and little-used road. While those were very good days indeed, they weren’t what I consider the best days on the tour. When I think back to the very best days of the tour, I think about the day I spent with friends in Wilsonville, Oregon; the day I explored Guemes Island near Anacortes, Washington; the six days on the ferry to and from Juneau; the time I spent in Juneau and Sitka, Alaska. These were the high points of the tour. Interestingly, these were also the days when I did less bicycling. In fact, the best of the best days were those in which I did very little at all. 
They were the days when I was able to simply experience what the world had in store for me that day whether it was sipping coffee while sitting in the sun on the deck of the M/V Columbia, watching a long line of tourists disembark from a cruise ship moored in the Juneau harbor, listening to the enormous silence of the Mendenhall glacier or sitting in the grass of Schoolhouse Park on Guemes Island as dozens of starlings flitted endlessly in search of a meal.
I’ll have to remember these peaceful moments of inactivity next time I’m faced with throwing one more “personal project” onto an already long list of projects.
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