Itinerant Philosopher

It’s been a LONG time since our last post (almost 7 months), and I suspect some of our faithful readers are wondering what the heck is up with us since our last post, which was a collection of funny things we saw during our just-shy-of-a-year travel adventures.

We returned home in early December, two weeks shy of a full year of traveling. After our expansive European travels, we returned to the US to visit and say goodbye to our dog, Brighton, and then flew out to the East Coast to visit family and so I could complete visiting all 50 states by tacking on Alabama & South Carolina. By the time we finally reached home in Ashland, Oregon, we had visited 11 US states, 18 countries, and 4 continents. And over the past 350 days, we’d slept in a different bed every 2.16 days.

Part of me wanted to stretch our travels two more weeks so we’d hit the full year marker, but we were ready to be home and I was particularly ready to reacquaint myself with our own, comfortable bed.

Back Where We Started!

We spent the first few days enjoying being at home, reunited with all our clothes, the comforts of our own things, and just hanging out by the fire doing nothing. That was great for about three days. Then it sunk in that we had no plans for anything, didn’t have anywhere to be, had no dog to take care of, and a limited social life since almost all of our Ashland friends had moved away. We were also at the beginning of three months of cold and dreary Oregon winter weather that eliminates cycling and puts a crimp on hiking. A few days of this and we decided that we:

• missed being around family & friends (even though everyone was excited to come visit us in Ashland, almost no one did);
• hated the almost yearly ~6 weeks of continuous summertime smoke from California and Oregon fires that settled into the Rogue Valley and made being outside, let alone cycling or hiking, a health risk;
• found the Oregon weather a tad too cold (me) during the winter, and a lot too hot during the summer (Joy).

So after just a week of being at home, we called a real estate agent and put our house on the market so we could move back to California and be closer to family and friends, and where the weather is nicer.

After 3 months of house hunting simultaneously in both the Monterey and San Luis Obispo areas (we had one harrowing weekend where we were worried, “Crap! What happens if both offers are accepted?”) we finally landed a house minutes away from the cities of Monterey to the West and Salinas to the East. 

Our house is in a lovely rural neighborhood where we have biking, mountain biking, and hiking at our doorstep. Fort Ord National Monument is literally across the street so 90 seconds after we leave the house we can be hiking or cycling along trails that criss-cross the ~100 square miles of open space (except for the off-limits area due to unexploded ordinance) . Plus, there’s an astounding amount of musical & cultural stuff to do in Monterey, Carmel, and Salinas.

One of our goals was to be closer to family and friends without being back in the heart of the Bay Area (which now feels too intense & crowded for our sensibilities, let alone way too expensive). We’re easy driving distance to family and friends and see them quite often. In the six months we’ve been in our house we frequently have friends and family visit or come for a meal. We’ve had house guests several times (my brother stayed with us the night after we moved in!). And to top it off, our neighbors are super friendly and we periodically invite each other over for dinner or drinks. Or swap extra garden fruit. (“Please, take some plums!”)

The house has wonderful gardens in the front and back (which I’m trying not to kill). We have 14 rose bushes, 9 wisteria, and ten (ten!) fruit trees. (There is no citrus tree, so we’ll be adding to the count at some point.) My joke has been that our traveling days are over because we’ll be too busy with gardening. Our pantry is full of jars of sweet and savory plum sauces, plum chutney, apple sauce, pear sauce, and sun dried tomatoes. We also have a healthy supply of home-made pesto from our out-of-control basil plants. Our apricots, and Asian pears had small enough yields that we (or the squirrels) ate most of them. Our Fuji apples are still coming in, and the persimmons are getting close to ripening. The olive tree is just now starting its messy fruit dropping phase. I’ve learned to hate squirrels, gophers, and voles. Damn fruit stealing, root-eating, sneaky little bastards! On the advice of an exterminator, I’ve started lining the fences and around the vegetable beds with cayenne pepper to keep critters away. (And learned the hard way to wear protective gear when doing so.)

The previous owners made a few interesting design choices that are “redecorating/remodeling opportunities.” Our back yard has 20 foot long water element that sounds pretty when it’s running but is a monstrosity to look at and leaks massively. As a house warming gift, our real estate agent gifted Joy a sledge hammer with “Joy” written on the handle. The house also has some perplexing bathroom and kitchen design choices, including making you feel like you’re using the bathroom in a Mexican restaurant.

Back in the Saddle(s)

In our post about hiking and cycling Türkiye & Spain I mentioned that we enjoyed using e-bikes so much I predicted we might one day purchase e-bikes of our own. I under-estimated. We’ve purchased three e-bikes! Joy’s main bike is a foldable recumbent e-tricycle. I bought myself a step-through e-bike which I mostly use for road cycling and future US-based cycle touring. And I bought an e-mountain bike so I can tackle all the enticing single track trails in Fort Ord. I’ve learned mountain biking is much harder and more technical than normal cycling. Not coincidentally, next time you see me, you may notice I’m sporting a scar above my left eyebrow.

On the Road Again

Even though we figured our yard- and house-related “to do lists” (currently 117 line items long), would keep us house-bound for a year or more, next week we leave for a three week+ European cycling trip. First, we head to Portugal’s Azores islands for 11 days of cycling and hiking. (So, that’s mostly in circles.) Then we head to Türkiye for a nine-day cycling/hiking trip that will take us from Cappadocia to the Mediterranean (around 350 miles with a LOT of climbing).

Sadly, none of this cycling will be on our own bikes. Even though our touring bikes (the ones we rode across the US and we’ve taken to Bali, Morocco, Ireland, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria & the Netherlands) can be disassembled and pack into their own custom luggage boxes, we’ve found that storing and then retrieving the boxes, particularly if you’re not ending up where you started, is really a pain in the butt. So we’re not taking those bikes with us. And we’re not taking our e-bikes because airlines forbid large lithium batteries. We thought about taking our e-bikes without their batteries and buying batteries there, but that would be several hundred dollars for each battery. So, we rent.