Yesterday was a year to the day that James and I flew back from Portland, Maine at the conclusion of our cross-country bike trip. Aww! I didn’t really expect to feel sentimental about it, but I kind of do!
In fact, I almost got distracted from writing anything at all by looking back through our old pictures. Ha! In a somewhat hilarious turn of events, I never really looked at all the pictures I took because by the end of three months of travel, I had so many on my camera that it was too overwhelming to go through them all. So mostly I’m familiar with the highlight pictures from James’ phone. Which is why looking at my pictures just now was so distracting. So many sweet memories!
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(like this sweet “campsite,” the back porch of an awesome woman near Cle Elum, WA, who passed us on the highway, then pulled over and waited for us to catch up just so she could offer us a place to stay — and a shower and laundry!! Her daughter even made us cookies <3)
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It seems like frequently when things were the worst, people came out of nowhere to offer the best. Like that day near Cle Elum had started out fine and we’d had a sweet lunch and toodle around in Ellensburg. But then, after we’d been looking forward to taking showers and maybe even doing laundry at the community center it was closed, which was surprisingly and crushingly defeating after having looked forward to it and kinda counted on it all day. And then there was the sun, and the headwind headwind headwind, and the looooong hill, and the depressing highway — and then there was this woman out of nowhere who had no need at all to even notice us, much less think that maybe we’d like somewhere nearby to stay, stopping just to offer us unwarranted kindness.
A year later, that really feels like the whole tenor of the trip, folks just being so lovely, just because.
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(a year later, I also kinda miss this beard, heh.)
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Anyway. I’ll leave it there, but awww feeling happy about this sweet thing we did that was just coming to a close a year ago. I’m tender for little us-es and our lovely, lovely trip:)
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(high five in New Brunswick, the very end of our trip:)
The rest of us are also pretty emotional about it, and impressed, and incredulous….! What an accomplishment!! Un an??? Déjà??!
Congrats! A year goes by fast, doesn’t it? My big tour was twelve years ago, and every once in awhile I go through the photos to remind myself of it. I need to do a big one again…