Hi Everyone,
You’d think that cycling 4280 miles in 3 & 1/2 months would be enough cycling to last for a while, but all it did was to stoke the fires of adventure in us. Deep into our cross-country trip of last summer, one of the notes I had made to myself was noticing when a trip was “just” a trip and when it became a lifestyle. And Chelsea and I realized that we loved the lifestyle.
We loved the freedom and independence, and we loved the constant new input. We found out that no matter how awful today might have been; tomorrow could very well be our best day ever. We felt better than ever, we looked better than ever, and we liked that. We loved meeting new people and seeing new places, and we loved the intimacy of getting to know a place by bicycle.
We discovered that we want a lifestyle where adventure is the lifestyle, and where we create our financial opportunities around that.
One day a couple of months ago, on one of our usual bikes rides up to Lake Worth Pier (check out Google Maps to see the area), Florida, east coast, south – as you get in closer you’ll see Lake Worth – we stop at Barton Park where 802 dead ends into A1A), we got to talking about how much we love the bicycling, and how much we love the beaches, and how incredibly lucky we feel every day to be able to ride through the gorgeous scenery that we have here. I just casually (okay, actually it was somewhat longingly) threw out the thought “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to just keep riding and ride all around the coasts of the US and see all the coasts, and see how different they are from each other?” We know, for instance, how radically different Ft. Pierce FL is from South Beach, and how different Naples and Ft. Myers are from the southeast coast of FL. And never mind how different South Beach is from the Oregon coastline!
Once that thought was out there, it took on a life of its own. We thought, why don’t we just keep going once we hit San Diego and then do Mexico… Chelsea has always wanted to see Mexico, and hey, while we’re there, why don’t we just keep going and see Central America, and hey, we’re so close to South America, why don’t we just keep going and see that too…! I said “Hey, we could do a study and call it ‘Coastal Cultures’!” And Chelsea added “Bicycling the World’s Beaches…”! So that was it – once expanded, we couldn’t go back… we wanted to do a long bike ride and call it “Coastal Cultures: Bicycling the World’s Beaches”. Then of course, when we started looking at how we would get back home from South America, I realized that we could just bicycle all the Caribbean Islands, and hop over to the Bahamas and get home from there… and how easy is that?
So all that remained was to make it come it true. And that’s exactly what we are doing, step-by-step. You can follow our progress by checking out our maps, our photo gallery, and by reading our blog. Also check out our supporters page. We’d love to hear from you, too – it really meant a lot to us last summer when you wrote to us. And naturally, we would just love to have you sign on as a “sponsor”, no matter how big or small the donation! You can also get to all of these pages from the box in the upper left of the home page, or from the teal menu bar across the top.
We’ll be talking to you from the coastlines…
Rosemary