starting to prep for 2013 ride

I am starting to prepare for my bike ride up the West coast to Seattle where I will turn right and take the Northern tier over to Maine and then go down the East coast. I have ordered the maps from Adventure Cycling Association. I bought a new sleeping bag. I found the mummy shape to be uncomfortable on my last ride. My legs would get restless after long rides and the mummy shape restricted my movement too much. In the warm weather which I will be in most of the time the mummy was also too warm for me. When I go over the mountain passes where it is colder, I can just wear my sweats at night to keep warmer and I will get by without the hot mummy bag. I still need to get a new sleeping pad also. A few more cooking pots and pans are on my list too so that I can eat better and cheaper on this trip cooking more food myself. I ate too many cans o soup and stew last year just because it was easy to open a can and heat it up on my stove. I need to improve that diet this time. I plan on leaving in April so I have less than three more months to get ready. My body weight is already high again even though I have been riding almost three hundred miles a week weather permitting. I just put new tires and tubes on the bike also. Marathon Plus tires again and heavy duty tubes. That combination slows me down a tad but it is worth going a bit slower and not getting flats. They are a bit tough to fix when there is a flat but such is life. My health still sucks. I am healthier on my rides than I am living in one place maybe because I only do about half the mileage when I live someplace. I also have been overindulging in food and beer so that does not help things. I will update again in a few weeks.

More Killing

This week there was yet another mass killing in this country. This time twenty kids and 7 adults were killed by an angry mixed up 20 year old man that in retrospect had some mental health issues. There have been so many mass killings in this country and they are becoming more and more frequent. Why? How do we end this senseless violence? People are screaming for more gun controls. Some people want to get rid of all guns. The NRA is again saying guns don't kill people, people kill people. The rift between those two polarized groups could not be any wider. Who is right? Is the availability of assault weapons the cause of the killings? Or are people the cause of killings. My guess is that even if all guns disappeared, there would still be an increasing number of mass killings. Gun control advocates don't want to hear that. They want the clear cut easy solution of getting rid of the tools of mass destruction to end the killings. Sure rapid fire assault weapons make killing easy but unfortunately there are so many ways to kill people that getting rid of guns would not slow down the killing rate at all. A simple match and chain can kill thousands and there are no controls on either tool. A vehicle can mow down scores of people at a time. Bombs are easy to make as Oklahoma City demonstrated and are very effective. A man in China used a simple knife the same day as the latest killings here. So people also blame the mental health care system for screwing up and allowing all these crazies out on the streets. Are they to blame? Maybe somewhat but the reality is that there are so many people with mental health issues that if they were all locked up like they used to be there would be hundreds of thousands of people incarcerated in institutions yet only a tiny percentage of them might be mass killers. The killers in retrospect were all by definition mentally messed up because only a crazy person would do that kind of horrible thing. The truth is that most of the mass killers were above average to frequently way above average in intelligence as measured by tests and although most of them had experience with the mental health care system they were intelligent enough to manipulate it to stay on the streets. Almost all of the killings were meticulously planned. The one other common trait that seems to be associated with the killers is that they were almost all socially rejected by society. They were misfits and loners. They kept themselves bottled up so to speak. They were full of resentment. Is that their fault? Combine some mental health issues with school kids and you get rejection and social isolation of the kid with the mental health issues. Combine that with the stresses of living in this increasingly stressful American culture and the breaking points of these individuals is surpassed...Boom another mass killing. Who is responsible? Are the school age kids that pick on the misfit kids to blame? Are their teachers to blame for allowing it to happen? Should we track down the people whether they were kids or adults that tortured the latest shooter and blame them? Is there no one to blame? Or are we all to blame for not being a more tolerant society. My personal opinion is that almost all of American society is to blame. There is so much polarization where people are either for or against something whether it is a particular religion, a color of skin, an ethnicity, sexual orientation or whatever topic you choose, the lines are drawn and everything is black and white. Fifty shades of grey is merely a book title. If this society does not learn to get along better and decrease the stress levels of just surviving than the next killer is just a few taunts away with or without a gun in their hand. Of course no one wants to hear that they could be contributing to creating mass killers. But incrementally the stress builds up from rejection, or dealing with the DMV, or the jerk that cuts in front of a line, or the rude driver and the list could go on and on and on. I don't think anything short of a cultural revolution will stop the ongoing creation of mass killers in the United States. People will need to learn to be kinder and gentler to each other. To learn to treat everybody with respect. Everybody needs to have a reasonable way to earn a living with secure housing and medical care available. A close knit family that is accepting of differences. A close knit community that allows various cultures to coexist without hostility whether the different cultures are based on religious beliefs, ethnicity, color of skin, sexual orientation or whatever the difference might be. A government that offers security of life and the pursuit of happiness that is not defined by any one group's definition is crucial. People should be more friendly, helpful and all those other traits that we all know but frequently overlook. If this society does not get better soon the next mass killing is just inevitable. What do you think? blame

Check in

I am just checking in to let you know I am still active. I am living in Bakersfield waiting for spring when I plan to finish my ride around the country. I am trying to get about 40 miles a day in riding around Bakersfield but the wet weather we are having is cutting into the days available to ride. Since I plan on heading up to Seattle in the spring I really should get out in the rain here because there is no way I won't hit considerable wet weather going up the West coast in March or April. The reason I don't ride in the rain around here is really just that it is too dangerous. My health has gone steadily down since I finished the first part of my ride. It seems to me that I not only love to ride but that I also need to ride in order to stay healthy. On my rides I generally have low pain levels. The high heat helped since I was crossing the Southern states but also just the daily work outs help keep my pain at bay. I can't explain why I just know that if I sit around I lose because my pain levels just get worse by the day. My pain can sky rocket to unbearable levels and then my brain sinks down into dangerous depression. There is a direct relationship. It is like a switch gets flipped when my pain starts increasing and then my brain just melts. I hate it. Which is why I ride so relentlessly. When I finish my ride around the country I will likely not stop riding but will just pick a new destination like maybe Ushuaia Argentina or someplace crazy like that. I will try to update a couple more times before I leave on my ride in the spring. Until Spring then, see you later.

Back to Bako for the Winter

After my visit to the SF Bay Area I went to Vegas for a few days before ending up back in Bakersfield CA. The weather here in Bako is about 100 almost every day even at this late stage of the year. It will soon drop into the 90s then rapidly drop down for winter here. It is still warmer than the SF Bay Area where I get so crippled from the cold wet weather. Here in Bako I have a longer warm season to keep me mobile. I did go for a nice 60 mile bike ride yesterday. I rode 15 miles along the dried up Kern River and then followed the county roads to the Tule Elk Preserve East of Bako. I did not see any Elk because as soon as I arrived I turned around and headed back home in the sweltering heat. I saw lots of wildlife but I did not have my camera with me. There were wading birds, a coyote, a rattlesnake, some chukar, a roadrunner and lots of raptors flying overhead. Next time I will make sure to have my camera so I can post pics. I am recovering slowly from my leg injury. It still is swollen at the knee but it no longer swells up like a balloon every time I ride. So I guess it won't stop me from riding, I will just keep rolling along....

Bay Area Update

I have not posted in a while. The main reason is because my life is on hold for a bit while I heal up from my fall a few weeks ago. I have started to ride a little again in the last few days. I did a short 42 miles with one ride up a nine hundred foot high hill on that ride. I felt pretty good on the ride and after. My knee still swelled up later so I had to ice it for quite a while to get the swelling to go down. I need the swelling to stop soon so I can resume my daily riding. I am thinking about doing a ride all the way around the San Francisco Bay on the Bay Trails. The ride looks to be about a three to four day ride to go all the way around from Berkeley, to San Jose to San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge over to Vallejo and then around the rest of the way back to Berkeley. It looks to be somewhere around 260 miles but not all of it is on bike trails. At least on this ride if i had trouble with my leg I am close to friends or family that could rescue me. The weather has been very nice in the Bay Area lately. September is the best month to be around here. I would like to get some fishing in but I can't afford it at about $150 for a day trip. My arm is also still weak from my fall so I am not sure I could actually fish and land fish. I a considering it though. I love going out to the Farallon Islands about 25 miles outside of the golden gate bridge to go for rockfish and lingcod. Recently there have been lots of whales and other marine mammals around out there to watch while you fish. The Blue Whales are around and they are so huge I love watching them feeding. Then there are the seals and dolphins etc and even big great white sharks come up to the boats once in a while. More updates later...

Short Update

I am currently in Fort Irwin California living on the base for a bit with my daughter's family. I have not been riding in quite some time now. I am still having trouble with my leg, knee and shoulder. It has been about three weeks since I fell and the bruising has mostly gone away but the swelling and the pain remain. I am afraid to ride because it might make me even worse. I hope a bit more rest and some physical therapy will get me back riding before too long. Meanwhile it is fun to play with my grandson. If you have not read the beginning of this blog maybe now is a good time to do so. Click on the archives to the right and then click on 2010 and start at Calabar. I will be back up riding and posting again just as soon as I am able. Enjoy life everyone.

I just got my bike back from the shop. It was in getting a major service including new chain and new rear cassette along with replacing all the cables and clean and lube all the bearings. I went two weeks without the bike which had me jonesing for a long bike ride. After I picked it up I rode along the San Francisco Bay Trail that circles the bay. It was a beautiful cool sunny day for a ride along the bay. I would have liked to ride the entire 200 miles plus or minus a few miles. I will not be posting very often until next April when I plan to leave San Francisco and head up to Seattle WA then turn right and go across the northern tier to Bar Harbor Maine then turn right and ride down to Norfolk Virginia to complete my circumnavigation of the states. Meanwhile you can read from the archives if you still have not read all my posts. There are posts talking about my African adventures and my European and Central and South American journeys also. The most popular posts are Calabar which is the very earliest post followed by First Opium Den then P.O.W. which was posted on May 20 2010. All the bike ride posts get a lot of hits as well. Enjoy and I will post a few things here and there if there is something interesting. Thanks for reading. PURAVIDA