Changing Gears

So its been a while.
      I promised myself when I started writing about this trip that I would absolutely not blog just for the sake of blogging.  I honestly wanted to make sure that the words I wrote were meant for more than just filler.  I did enough empty writing in school.  This isn't an assignment. This is meant to be enjoyable, to me, and to whomever decides it's worth giving a read.  I will admit that my last post was a touch depressing. I tend to write how I'm feeling,  and at that particular point in time I was feeling pretty damn low.  I needed to write it.  I needed to write it, and then I needed to read it, over and over again.  I read it until I convinced myself to cowboy the fuck up and start living again.  It took a lot of convincing. A large amount  of alcohol was consumed and an even larger amount of time was spent feeling sorry for myself. But now I'm almost out of this ugly mess and coincidentally, just like winter is turning to spring, things seem to be getting a lot brighter and much more colorful.
     Not a day has passed that I haven't thought about my trip.  I've been quietly plotting and scheming as to how Im going to do more than just dip my toe in the water (the people closest to me may disagree with the "quietly" part of that).  At some point I need to close my eyes and blindly jump in.  Unfortunately I am at a standstill.  The next baby step in this process is not mine to take.  I have been scouring the internet for used enduro bikes.  I have found about 1000 that I would love to buy.  The next step is to get someone to buy the house I am currently living in.  Until that happens my trip is frozen in time.  My plan was to blog only about forward progress, and unfortunately there has been none.  In my head the trip is at its next stage, unfortunately in my bank account, it is not. It is amazing how much havoc erasing another person from your life can have on your bottom line.  It is discouraging to me that this one last tie  to the life I  have crumbled up and thrown away, is the only thing keeping me from taking that next step.  This house is an electric dog fence around my mind.  Every time my thoughts wander to the open road,  with the sun on my back, and 360 degrees of natural beauty, I get zapped back to realty by the fact that I still reside in Portland CT, and that I cant change my life until I change my address.
     Here's my problem.  I have been dying to do another post for a while now.  I can't write about my new bike, because there isn't one.  I can't write about any weekend trips, because without a bike, it would just be a car ride.   I cant post pictures of the places I have been, because I haven't been anywhere.  I can't write about the people I've met, because they don't exist.  What I can write about is where I'm headed.  I can write about the pieces that will fall into place once I get two all-terrain bike tires underneath me.
    I have had ample time to think about how I'm going to approach this.   My intention is to get my bike and plan a trip every three weeks.  This way I will have a week to recover and two weeks to plan my next route and research points of interest.   One week of planning for every day of riding.  This way I can insure that my routes are as rider friendly as they are scenic. Going on trips this frequently will be my crash course in enduro bikes (hopefully just figuratively).  I plan on using these trips to gain experience in many different departments in order to make planning of the big trip run a little smoother.  The trips are going to be short enough to do in a weekend, but I intend to pack a ton of miles and points of interest into them.  This way I will familiarize myself with riding under a strict time line, which I will no doubt encounter on the big ride.  Although I will have other riders with me and a truck as a chase vehicle, I intend to only live off of what I can fit on my bike.  I feel that over the course of many trips this will teach me what is really important and what needs to stay at home.  These small rides will also serve as a means for grabbing more attention for the big ride.  The more awareness I raise for the "what" and the "why", the more potential there is for the charitable side of this trip to really take off.  Also these trips will be a great opportunity to familiarize myself with using social media.  I can be a bit of an "old man" when it come to facebook and twitter, but I realize that they are necessary for something like this to gather as much speed as possible in a short amount of time.
     These are the things that I have been thinking about for the past couple of months.  I have actually started planning my first trip!  Now, when the bike arrives, I will be ready to go.  I have mapped out a few waypoints that I feel will bring me through some beautiful areas.  The destination of the trip is the top of the Mount Washington Auto Road in the White Mountains. However, and this is the important part, so pay attention...........I am open to suggestions.  If you know a place within 200-300 miles from the center of Connecticut that is worth seeing, let me know.  It could be a landmark, or it could be a quiet meadow next to a stream in the middle of nowhere. I  DO NOT want to be on roads that have a purpose, I prefer the ones that take you away from purpose.  I have chosen to avoid highways at all costs because it is impossible to feel like a modern day explorer if you're never more than 2.5 miles away from a Starbucks.  Im also looking for volunteers.  The trips will be made up of a minimum of two vehicles.  Vehicle #1 is me on my currently non-existent bike.  Vehicle #2 will be my truck.  Each trip will take a minimum of three people to properly function, everyone has a job.  My job will be to take everything in and figure out what the hell I'm going to write about when I get home.  Also, at this stage, my job will  be to learn through trial and error how to handle any issue that may arise.  The next job will be the driver of my truck.  That's all, drive and look pretty.  The passenger of the truck will be responsible for media, your job is to take as many pictures as possible so that they can later be added to supplement what I have written about the trip.  That job also consist of facebook posts and tweetifying, twittening, twitching........whatever the hell it is.  The most I want on any trip is 3 bikes and two cars or trucks, any more than that and you start dealing with more issues than necessary.  As things become more concrete I will start announcing when and where the future trips will occur.  In the meantime, if your interested, the Mount Washington Trip needs at least two other people before I can go.   Absolutely anybody is welcome (minus murderers and motorcycle thieves).
For anyone with riding experience who may read this.  I currently have zero knowledge about what I am doing, although I'm doing my research.  If I screw something up, or am about to really screw up, let me know.  I have no pride when it comes to things I know nothing about.  If your advice is to not go......save your time, I've heard that one enough and for some reason it wont sink in.
stephenlohmeyer@hotmail.com
For a map of the waypoints go to Googlemaps and type in the search box "Mt Washington bike trip junish"

Eating an elephant

     The only elephants I have ever seen have been in captivity, most recently on my honeymoon, two years ago in Disney's Animal Kingdom.  I suppose I should have known the marriage was doomed the second the honeymoon plans involved anything having to do with  the words "Disney" and " World".  I digress.  In the few times I have been in the presence of elephants I was never afforded the opportunity to eat any of them. Although  I am not really sure that I would want to.  However, on more than one occasion, while describing the scale of my future journey, instead of advice on what the most common part to break on a BMW motorcycle is or how to deal with the native people of Honduras, I have been given advice on how to eat an elephant.  Everyone seems to agree that the best way to consume said pachyderm is to eat it one bite at a time.....confusing.   Another piece of advice that I seem to get most often is regarding my means of travel.  It is widely agreed on that to get from Portland Connecticut to Tierra del Fuego, the best way to move is by taking baby steps.  Again, confusing.  It would take a lifetime to make this journey in such a way.  I tried it yesterday and it took me 30 minutes just to get from one side of my yard to the other.  Not to mention I  now have some very confused neighbors. If I had not spent thousands of my parents hard earned dollars attending prep school, before hastily dropping out and enlisting, I would not understand the use of metaphors.  But I did waste thousands of dollars going to prep school and then I did promptly drop out to enlist in the Marine Corps, therefore,  I am a master of the metaphor and I believe what my friends are trying to say is that great things just don't happen.  Large scale goals require patience and planning.  A collection of small bites or steps towards a large goal, eventually lead to the completion of it.  I had a poster on my wall when I was younger.  One of the work- place propaganda posters that you always see hanging in offices. They have one word written in bold at the top, followed by a Chinese proverb that is meant to motivate the masses.  On the poster was a mountaineer, decked out with climbing gear and standing at the bottom of a giant slab of ice.  The picture was taken at low angle so that the climber was silhouetted against a bright sun and the challenging piece of climbing he was about to take on.   For some strange reason I remembered the proverb but I can't seem to remember the bold word at the top of the poster.  The proverb read, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step".  Coming up with this crazy idea and then not letting reason or common sense destroy my resolve to see it through was my first step.  By my precise and scientific methods I have calculated that there are only 52,799,999 steps to go!
Step 1:  The idea
       I completed my first step on a 35 minute drive home from Old Saybrook Connecticut to my hometown of Portland.  My family and I had just buried my grandmother and I was at the end of a incredibly trying week.  In one week I had lost my grandmother to congestive heart failure and lost my wife to figurative heart failure.  I came to terms with my grandmother's death in the hospital after saying goodbye.  I have not yet come to terms with losing my wife's love, and most likely wont for a while.  The burial of my grandmother was one of the first family events that I had gone to alone since meeting my wife.  As everyone stood over the coffin I looked around at my uncles, sisters, cousins, and mother, all being comforted by the person they said vows to.  There I was, standing over my grandmothers open grave, eyes welling up with tears. Not tears for the loss of my grandmother, but tears because I was alone.  On the drive back to Portland I turned the radio off in my truck so I could be alone with my thoughts.  I find when I have painful thoughts throwing themselves against the walls of my skull, a long quite drive can be the best way to emancipate them.  After witnessing the end of my grandmothers life, I found myself pulling my own life apart and wondering where I was headed.  I  have a love/ hate relationship with my job.  I love creating things with my hands, and I hate how little I get paid for doing it.  This was not exactly where I saw myself 8 years after leaving the Marines.  I lived for my wife and for the plans we had together, not for work.  I felt that a happy family would be my success.  My path was to start a beautiful family and live everyday for them.  That path ended with the words "I love you with my head, but not with my heart".  Everything I had worked for was now worthless, I had put all of my faith in a life that was now impossible.  What I realized on my trip home was that this was going to hurt like hell, but I have been granted freedom.  Step one was figuring out what to do with this unwanted freedom.  I don't know how the idea to ride a motorcycle came to me on that ride home, but it did.  Had I been anywhere else, emotionally or physically, I may have immediately dismissed it.  Instead of immediately shooting down my own idea, I embraced it.  I realized that this may be the perfect time to do something foolish.
     Step 2: Making it count
      Step one complete, I now needed to find a way to make this more than just a hip pocket trip, taken by a man struggling to come to terms with loss.  I wanted to make it more than a personal vision quest.   I had decided that I was going to use my trip to raise money for charity.  I flirted with the idea of a few different charities but settled on the one that affected me on the most personal level.  A few years ago, my older brother was almost taken from us because of complications caused by Ulcerative Colitis.  It is his story to tell, so I will not go into detail.  Long story incredibly short, we almost lost him.  When I discuss what happened to my brother with people, it amazes me that almost everyone I talk to knows one or two other people who either suffer with Chohns disease or Ulcerative Colitis.  I decided to ride for the Crohns and Colitis Foundation of America.  It isn't official yet, but I intend to use my trip to raise as much money and awareness as I can for these awful afflictions.
     Step 3: Training
    I have never been on a motorcycle, not even as a passenger.  Common sense tells me to learn to ride before I take on a near 20,000 mile journey into the unknown.  My intention is to find an older version of the bike I am going to ride and familiarize myself with it.  I am going to do this by going on weekend trips to all the places within in a days ride from my home that I want to see, and then writing about them.  Hopefully this bike will breakdown on every trip.  This may seem like an odd thing to hope for, However, I would rather learn to fix the common failures of a motorcycle in Springfield, Massachusetts than on the Baja Peninsula in Mexico. I am going to blog about every single adventure that I take so I can  become comfortable writing about my successes and failures as a motorcycle rider.  I can guarantee there will be failures, but I hope they will be vastly outnumbered by successes.
     I have some work ahead of me, steps 4 through 52,799,999.  It is a big elephant that I have decided to eat, and some parts may not taste as good as others, but I have taken the first three bites.  To not finish now would be wasting a perfectly good elephant, and I was raised better than that.

Embracing chaos

So it begins.
When I was eleven, I caught the tail end of a movie on television called, "My Side of the Mountain".  It was about a boy who runs away from home and lives in the wilderness by himself.   He made his home in a hollowed out log and he used a falcon to catch his food.  I was so enthralled by this boys adventure, that I insisted my mother go immediately to the video store and rent it, so I could watch the whole thing.  I have always been obsessed with these self inflicted trials, where one is not only pitted against the world, but also against themselves.  I feel that to really know yourself, you have to face incredible challenges and succeed or fail.  Safety is for people who want to survive, not for people who want to live. I have had many grand ideas about how I could put myself in these situations.  Shortly after seeing "My Side of the Mountain", I was in a argument with my step-father.  Through my young eyes, it seemed like something that could never be resolved. My solution was to run away. I picked a brook that was slightly off the road, less than a mile from where we lived, as my new home.  My plan was to live like the boy in the movie.  I would catch fish in the brook, find or build a good shelter, and survive until I was old enough to move away.  This plan lasted until I realized that no one in my family was even looking for me......about 45 minutes.  The saddest part was when I walked through the door, it seemed that no one had even noticed I was missing.  I've had many failed adventures that have never even made it through the first 15 minutes of planning.  There was always something in my head that told me that what I was thinking about was not realistic and never could be.  So many people lack the ability to turn there back on what is safe and embrace chaos.  Its hard to force yourself to be naive about the reality of what you are choosing to do.   Its almost impossible to unlearn the habits and paths that you are trained to live by.  Two years spent on an adventure equals two years not investing in your 401k at work.  My one true attempt at adventure was joining the Marines.  Every war vet I had ever talked to, seemed to be defined by the hardships they faced when put in the worst possible circumstances.  For so many vets war either made them incredible people or broke them down to nothing.  There is something incredibly romantic to me about this chosen hardship.  I went to war, but never really faced anything but my own fears of what could happen, but never did.  ADVENTURE FAILED.  So here I am.  30 years old.  Separated from a wife who chose alcohol and empty bar room friendships over a good man.  I have been given one more opportunity to be naive and careless.....and I intend to.  Last night I put to paper, with the help of my brother and his wife, an idea that most people believe to be insane and careless.  I have decided, with no previous riding experience, to get on a motorcycle, leave Connecticut, drive over the Great Lakes and to the West Coast by way of Canada.  I will then turn sharply South and hug the Pacific Ocean until I run out of land in Tierra Del Fuego, Argentina.  I am eleven again, I am naive, and I am going to hug the ever living crap out of chaos.

Planning 101

The first step...starting a blog.