An Adventure of My Own

Two summers ago, I tried retirement. The company I worked for was going through some growing pains and my job was to help it manage through it. It was probably the hardest job I’ve ever had. To complicate matters, the headquarters was thirteen time zones away and much of the decision making sat as you would expect in the headquarters. In normal times, this would mean quite a few late evening conference calls and just as many early morning virtual meetings, but if you recall life at that time, the proceeding eighteen months was in the midst of this little thing called COVID.

I had enough and to be honest I wasn’t really delivering on the level of performance that I pride myself on providing. I started having dreams that were very dark. One was of me choking one of my most trusted employees. So, in my weekly one-on-one with my boss I told him and together we worked out a soft exit in a little over a year’s time.

I decided I’d take six months off and then try consulting. I’ve been very successful in my job and had been a strong performer at a few of the industries larger companies. In those six months, I wanted to do two things to reset my life. I wanted to try writing a book and see if it is something I could do. This wasn’t your typical write a book about the thing that you do for a living, but something entirely different. My love for the genre of fantasy fiction pulled at me and I wanted to give it a try.

But first, I wanted to go on my own adventure. There are many people who backpack the Appalachian Trail and at first that was what I considered. I read blogs about it and tried some weeklong backpacking trips and discovered that, while I loved hiking long, long stretches each day, I really hated climbing up and down the hills of the Appalachian Trail. The second thing I discovered was that the process of living for months on the trail would be a job in and of itself.

So it was off to plan ‘B.’ As it happens, the North Country Trail winds its way through two of the places I’ve lived and very close to where I grew up. Wouldn’t it be kind of cool to turn it into a pilgrimage of sorts, walking from where my two oldest children had been born in Dayton, Ohio to where my three kids spent most of their childhood, in Marquette, Michigan? On the way, perhaps I’d detour west and walk through the town I grew up in, met my wife.

And that is when it hit me. I didn’t have to walk. I could go on a trip on a bicycle. A little journey that helped me relive my life to that point. I could bike from where I was living at the time, outside of Philadelphia, to my birthplace, Fort Wayne, Indiana. I decided to do that. I even started a frame builder on a custom bicycle to be my faithful steed. For over a year I planned this journey. Sure, some things changed. For example, my niece decided to get married around the time I was going to start. So, instead of starting in Philly, I’d start on the western side of the map. And there didn’t seem to be a good and possible route to bring in Marquette in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula or where I earned my MBA at Northwestern north of Chicago. Those destinations would have to wait for my second trip, which might be a subject of a future blog.

I mapped my course. It would be solo bicycle journey from Cuba, Indiana where my parents still lived in the house I grew up in, through New Haven, Indiana where I met my future wife, got married and where her parents still live out and around most of the important map destinations of my life—the birthplace of my daughter in Warsaw, where I earned my undergraduate degree and first master’s degree at Purdue University, through Dayton where my two sons were born when we lived there.

I hate climbing hills on a bicycle just as much as I hate doing it backpacking. But God inspired someone to turn old railroad beds into biking trails and if you aren’t really picky on how far you want your trip to be, you can pretty much cross the Eastern United states on these Rail Trails. Since trains hate climbing too, most of the journey was on gentle grades with easy biking. So, I did it. In total, my trip took twenty-six days and covered almost exactly 1,100 miles. All but four days I did by myself, sleeping in campgrounds, parks, and hotels on my $300 twenty+ year old bike. The custom bike wouldn’t be done on time, in fact it ended up taking another 18 months after my journey for it to finish.

I discovered many things on my trip about myself and my goals. I thought a lot about how my first novel would work. When you are on a bike for that long, you find yourself in your head much of the time. It is therapeutic and that internal journey of discovery ended up finding its way to the pages of The Nights of the Purple Sky.

My custom bike is now complete, and I live outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan. When I retire from industry for good in a little less than 22 months (hopefully), I will do part two of that journey and bike around Lake Michigan. I already have the route mapped and it is also coincidently 1,100 miles if I want to hit the three places I’ve pinned as important to me. I hope that provides some inspiration for the future writing I plan to do.