What makes one person want to listen to live music from some loud and phenomenally talented rock band and another just want to run from the room? Why do some people love to watch game shows while others can’t change the channel fast enough? What makes a person neat and want to clean and another a version of Pig Pen?
People gravitate to things; politics, religion, the arts, and in my case, the outdoors, for reasons I don’t think we even consider, but simply accept and act upon. As my time for retirement draws closer, I spend more of my hiking hours pondering what I’m going to do…and why. I don’t really know what drew me to want to ride my bike to my grandparents in New York when I was 18. The 1,100-mile round trip effort was one of the single most memorable things I have done in my life – many details of that trip are still fresh whereas I can walk from one room to another and not remember why I was going there. Then, I believe, I was motivated by the challenge of it all, my love of cycling, wanting to please my grandparents, and being able to brag about something I’d done that most people couldn’t (or more accurately – wouldn’t). I have always enjoyed the spotlight and maybe that was, and is, my greatest motivator? If so, it moves me in a positive direction, I believe, for what bad can come of keeping myself in shape hiking, cycling, kayaking, and backpacking? I assure you that it all leaves much time to go inside one’s head and ask these mostly unanswerable questions. In any event, it makes me feel good and I’ll keep doing it – and asking why.
I want to write in my retirement and, not seeming to have a knack for making things up (many would say all my factual writing is more fantasy, but that’s another story), I feel like I need to write about what I know, which is what I have done, and so I HAVE to do something challenging and interesting. I am wrestling with a new journey, one that encompasses the important places and events in my life, and traveling that route with my bike, kayak, and feet. Retracing the steps I have taken in sixty-three years would take me from Peninsula back through Highland Heights and Willoughby and on to Buchanan, New York, my grandparents’ home town and the single most influential place in my childhood. From there, I would ride to Bristol, Ct., my birthplace and home for eleven years, through New England on my way to Gloversville and Cooperstown, New York, north through the Adirondacks to Potsdam and Massena where my mother’s half of my family lived and lives, and finally back to Ohio and maybe a swing around the entire state as I did with Tour Ohio. I would certainly ride my bike the route I took when I was 18, but opt to hike and kayak through the Adirondacks on my want to Potsdam.
I don’t know who might find reading about such a journey interesting and I’m not sure what it would do for me and my thinking, but I believe somewhere along that route I may find the answers I seek as to why I am where I am, what has made me the man I am, and what I have to offer to others on a similar journey of discovery. For now, I will continue to work on making the minivan the ideal sag wagon and keeping myself in the kind of shape I need to embark upon this journey.
Hike: One hour and 45 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 70-90 bpm.
Calories Burned: 650.
Bonus: 25,000 steps
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