I was working one summer in a crappy titty bar for a dude we called Big Louie. One Saturday night when I got home I realized I did not want to go back. So I went online and searched for cheap tickets to anywhere. Iceland popped up, and I bought the ticket for the following Friday. It was a month-long round-trip ticket, so it crossed my mind to ride around the island on my bike. I had once ridden about twenty miles on a bike path, but other than that had never really used the bike much.
Over the next week, I learned how to box it and change a flat, cobbled some camping gear together, and the following Friday instead of going back to the club, I was on a plane to Iceland for my first ever solo bike tour. I got into the airport at two in the morning, built the bike in the baggage claim area, and literally just biked out of the airport in the dark.
Over the next month I made it all the way around the island, camping each night wherever I landed. I was twenty years old. It was spectacular. A couple years later I was living on a sailboat in the San Francisco bay, going through a big life change, and I decided to go for another ride. I bought a one-way ticket to Anchorage with the idea that I would “just head south” until I figured things out. About 3500 miles later I had made it back down to San Francisco, and had indeed lined up a new trajectory for myself. I did nearly all the trip solo, except for the last couple weeks when I traveled with a little pack of folks heading down the coast. One of them was Jenn Hopkins, an incredibly bad-ass woman who I will never forget. She had just raced the Continental Divide Trail on a single speed, and was cycling down the coast of the US as “a cool down”. She was still on her single speed, and none of us could keep up with her, even though by that time we were all in fantastic shape.
A few years down the line found me living in Bogota, Colombia, loving it but unable to renew my tourist visa. I hatched a plan to bike north to Venezuela to renew my visa at the border. I bought a used bike for $50, found a wonderful French mathematician who had never biked before, and the two of us went on a great adventure across the country. But when we got to the border, they did not renew my
visa! So I had to leave Colombia. My partner Scott flew in from Colorado, we got him another cheap bike, and the two of us biked south from Bogota to Quito. This was a special ride because he had just recovered from cancer and it was his first ever bike tour—over the Andes on a bike with a duffel bag for panniers!
The last ride I did was around Costa Rica with Scott and our good friend Simon. We had all been working at a sustainability education center there where Scott and I are now co directors. We biked around the country visiting farms, education centers, and agricultural research stations to learn more about plants and agricultural systems in Costa Rica. Biking was a great way to do that because we really saw and felt how changing landscapes affected plant morphology and agricultural techniques.
Earlier this year I injured my leg, tearing my ACL, menisuses, and tendon. Its a long recovery process and I am very overdue for a bike ride! I am hoping to head down to South America to bike the Peruvian highlands later this year as part of my rehabilitation.
For me biking has always been about health—physical and mental. As you bike you get stronger in every way. You move yourself forward, and change in the process. Across gnarly deserts, windswept peaks, or winding roads, you have to keep moving and as you do, you change with the landscape. Any bad feelings you have get sweated out eventually. And you meet the kindest people in unexpected places. I am so happy to find other women cyclists who go for it, support each other, and continue to break down the barriers about what women can and can’t do!
