Well, I’m traveling again but not by bike; I’m on the bus heading up to NY to join Rachael so we can go to the cocktail party that Roger and Laura are hosting to celebrate the epic adventure.

But first Roger and I are going to get together today to get caught up. It’s been three weeks since we went our separate ways, and I’m looking forward to swapping tales of how our journeys ended.

As fun as that will be, there’s another, and more introspective, dimension to our reunion. We often joked about the difficulties we’d have with reentry into normal life after the incredible odyssey we were on. I’m not going to make a whole lot of this – it’s not like we were away at war or anything – but it’s not nothing either.

I had to look this up but in Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon says, “When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”

A bike trip across America gives you a good amount of time to get used to living like that, and it’s an unusual way to live. The novel and unfamiliar replace the known and the routine, yet unlike foreign travel, you remain more conversant – literally and metaphorically – with the circumstances you encounter. As a result, while the sense of being unmoored from one’s ordinary life is less pronounced than it is with foreign travel, under the right conditions it can be a richer voyage of discovery.

At the very least, biking across the country enrolls one in the national mythos of adventure, escape and renewal.

“All gone to look for America”