Coda

It's been two months since our Final Hurrah finally ended.  Of course, it hadn't quite, and not nearly so abruptly.  And the moment it really did end, the real world, which we had ignored for sixty-seven days, would be denied no longer:  lots of catchup needed doing.

Never mind mulling how to best put a tidy bow on the whole thing, then place it on the shelf of particularly vivid memories.

I left off with us having reached land's end.

I had found a not too distant Super-8 motel where we could stay before setting out for home the next morning.

Susan thought different.

Our trusty steeds cluttering their otherwise tres fancy lobby

Whereupon we spent the rest of the day on five-star lunch, dinner, and bar in between.  Many, many reminiscings.

The next morning we reentered reality.  Three and a half miles to the nearest U-Haul, and just as we had started in Boise, hurling our stuff in the back of the thing and trudging down the road, this time towards home.

This particular U-Haul truck, probably the oldest in their fleet, brought a whole new level of drudgery to the trudging.  No sound system.  Speed governor limited to 75mph.  You know what is not at all, even a little bit, fun?  Barely passing big rigs on the way up hills, only to be unpassed on the way back down.  Or an hour being completely unable to pass, because four miles per hour of overtake just doesn't work.

Eight and a half hours of plodding got us to Ligonier, PA, where we spent a couple nights with Susan's friends, Cathy and Gary Sherman.

Then another five hours to Wheeling, WV, for a particularly fortuitously timed Susan's family reunion.  

After which, Susan was having no more plodding.  She flew back to Boise.  I spent 30 hours behind the wheel, about which we shall say no more.

With the bikes unburdened of 58 days' road grime and restored to their places in the garage, we could draw a line under the Final Hurrah.

About which there should be something memorable to say.

The Final Hurrah, while never qualifying as an adventure, was quite a journey.  

And it isn't the sort of thing many people get up to, requiring a rare-ish combination of circumstances and, being kind, odd minds.  Having time enough and money points in the direction of the chronologically gifted who are nonetheless in good health while having nowhere in particular to be.

Now that I know how Venn diagrams work, the intersection of those six populations isn't very large.  Reality bore this out.  On our first real day, we ran into a couple young guys going from Seattle to the Bay Area.  A few days later, a guy near our age was en route to Vancouver from Bend, OR.  Then no one until we saw maybe twenty people total doing the Erie Canal Trail.  We didn't run into anyone doing the whole megillah.

Part of that is due, no doubt to the US being very large, we very small, and having picked a logistically challenging route.  But the rest is down to the "odd minds" qualifier.  How many people, given the choice between say, a cruise on the one hand, and four months of work-up, followed by two months of burgers,  interspersed with days that will be various combinations of arduous and uncomfortable, with sometimes dodgy motels in between, wouldn't immediately jump on the former, while wondering why they were facing such a foolish question in the first place?

Clearly, The Science™ says Susan and I have odd minds.  In which ways shall be left to the viewing audience.

The photo of us on the shore makes it look as if we were leaping with joy, happy to be done with it.  Yes, there was definitely a feeling of accomplishment having reached the goal.  And while neither of us have any reason to be anywhere in particular, more than two months gone from home is a stretch.  

In the Origin Story post, I mentioned how this journey had an elegiac feel to it — that we would never again get up to anything like this.  Which might have had some connection to why it was occasionally so dusty — something not particularly common in Portsmouth — as we neared the end.

So, am I glad we did it?  Absolutely.  Would I do it again?  

Sadly, no.