Wade's Vision Quest Notification

Hi Gang,

Amalia and I are on the move again. Actually, we left about a six weeks ago, but I've been lazy about updates. I'll do my traditional guessing game, but this time it's really easy. We're visiting two adjacent countries.

Country #1

It's the only non-communist country I've ever been, where you can see over 400 flags in a 4 hour ride.
Restaurants frequently close at the unheard of hour of 9:00, about the time they open in Spain, thus causing us to miss dinner several times :(
They have the biggest "defense" budget in the world. In fact, it's bigger than the total of the next 15 countries on the list combined. Perhaps this is because they've bombed over 19 countries since World War II.
They have the most Nobel Prizes in Science per capita of any country in the world (by quite a lot).
They're the world's biggest energy hogs. With 5% of the world's population, they consume 25% of its energy… a rate per person double most European countries.
It's the richest country in the world, but can't provide health care or college educations for everyone (that proves I'm not back in Spain).
It's the only country we've ever tried to visit where my wife cannot under any conditions get a visa, just because she's married to me.
It's the only place where I have to put cream in my coffee... not because it's too strong, but because it's so weak it tastes like dishwater.

Country #2

Contrary to popular opinion, they do not all use dogsleds.
They do not live in igloos, and they do have electricity in their homes.
It's the second largest country in the world, but its population is only 50% bigger than Cairo, and ten times smaller than country #1.
They've had only 147 people killed in civil unrest since the nation's founding (an astoundingly low number).
It's the second or third oldest continuously operating democracy in the world (depending on how you count it).
They haven't bombed anybody since WWII.

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You've probably guessed that Country #1 is the United States and Country #2 is Canada. Amalia and I arrived in Boston about six weeks ago. We're planning to ride from Boston to California, but naturally we're riding through Canada on the way. We already rode from Boston to Bangor (Maine), then to Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. We spent a week in Toronto with some of Amalia's friends and had a great time. We felt like real urban people going to bookstores and cinemas instead of our usual cycling and tent business. We're currently in a small town between Lake Huron and Lake Superior, which is the largest fresh-water lake in the world (largest in surface area… Lake Baikal in Siberia is deeper and has more water).

We were originally planning to ride north of the Great Lakes to somewhere around Thunder Bay or Winnipeg, and then drop down into the U.S. and continue across, but we started the trip too late in the year for various reasons. We are afraid of running into winter in Canada, so we decided to drop back into the U.S. and head straight for California. We're in Michigan now, and we'll head in a fairly straight line across the U.S. California is about 4,500 km (2,800 Miles), so we'll be there in a few months.

If you're short on amusement and found this email too boring, maybe you'll find my new hairstyle somewhat more amusing. If not, I guess you'll have to suffer.

Cycling here in North America has been quite good. My only experience with cycling in America before was a one-week tour in Canada about ten years ago, and the cycling I did at home. Based on my previous experience, I had a bicycle friendliness scale that rated America as the bottom of the scale (worst) and France and Spain as the best. Then I rode in Southern Italy, which was so bad I had to make up a new scale. Then a funny thing happened in America. Riding from Boston to Bangor, the cars were extremely bicycle friendly. They are so good, I'd rate them just a shade below Spain. We were extremely happy with the drivers and expected Canada to be about the same.

When we crossed over the border into Canada, the cars immediately got very noticeably less bike friendly. We had gotten spoiled by cars that would wait a few seconds to pass us safely and never drove by really close at high speeds. Within the first 20 km in Canada, we noticed that all that was over. The Canadian drivers are just about exactly the same as the California drivers I was used to all my life. They still aren't as bad as Italians by a long shot, but it was disappointing after getting spoiled in New England.

Amalia and I are starting to get in some kind of shape after our long rest. My trip total is up to about 18,000 km (11,000 miles), and Amalia's is 3,500 km (2,000 miles).

Cheers,
Wade & Amalia

2003-12-25 North America

Well, I have lots of news this time, and I'm not quite sure what to say first, so I'll just throw it out randomly. This email will be a bit longer than most, because I'm covering stuff I won't be putting in the web page.

A Bit Of Rest

First off, believe it or not Amalia and I have stopped for a while. That in and of itself isn't all that surprising, but what is surprising is that we stopped in my old home town of Sonora, California. We've even gone to the extreme position of buying my father's old house and we're planning to stop and live here for a while. We'll still cycle some, but for the time being we're planning to live here and work pretty much like everyone else. I've even taken the extreme step of going back to work full-time. That means I'll have to work a full week at a time, and then do it again. Yikes!!! I hope I can adapt to the pace.

Spain Page

Since I've now adapted this new obsessive work ethic, I've put it to work and finally finished my Spain Narrative and Spain Photo Gallery pages. They've been almost done for some time, but missing the story of my courtship with Amalia. One fine day I had a flash of insight and asked Amalia to write it. She's a writer, among other things and she wrote a beautiful chapter about it. You'll be able to see it when you get to it.

North American Tour

Before we stopped in California, we did a little 2,000 mile (3,200 km) tour of the Eastern United States and Canada. This brought Amalia who had never even seen a recumbent bike a year ago up to a very respectable 3,000 mile (5,000 km) total and brought me up to 12,000 miles (20,000 km). When I left on this trip, I set my goal at 2,000 miles but it seemed like I was shooting pretty high.

We started in Boston and rode up the East coast to Bangor Maine. I was pleasantly surprised to find the drivers on the East Coast to be extremely bicycle friendly... almost as good as Spain or France. I was a bit freaked out by all the blatant signs of blind patriotism we saw. I saw 400 flags the first day out of Boston, we saw lots of 'We support our troops' signs, etc, etc. We even saw one place that replaced their French Fries with Freedom Fries, which is just plain stupid as far as I could tell. Other than that, the ride up the East Coast was absolutely wonderful. We even stopped by Noelle's old school (Bowdoin College in Maine) since we went right through there.

After we finished in Bangor, we rode west into Canada and went to Quebec. Surprisingly, the Canadian drivers were noticeably less bicycle friendly than the Americans, and the change was noticeable within a half hour of crossing the border. It was kind of weird.

After Quebec, we rode south to Montreal and then to Ottawa. We were on the road the day of the Great North American Power Outage, and the first we heard of it was when we couldn't visit a museum in Ottawa that was still closed while getting the system back up. We spent a couple of days in Ottawa anyway doing one of our favorite things, which is treating the local Borders Book Store as our own personal library. We may even have purchased some of the books we read.

After Ottawa, we had to take a train (blue lines are trains) to Toronto and stayed for a week with Amalia's friends Charlotte and Eric. They were great hosts, and we had a wonderful time, and even a funny story. I've been carrying the same Toshiba laptop for this entire trip in my pannier bag, which makes it the most reliable laptop I've ever owned. The display started dying on me, so my company got me a new computer. It was shipped to my friends in Toronto, but my old laptop died a heathen-savage death one day before we went to Toronto. It literally died the night before we got on the train. I though I was in big trouble, but it turned out that Charlotte had the exact same laptop. I took my hard disk out of the dead machine, plugged it into here, booted it up and copied all my stuff over the network to my new computer... no muss... no fuss. That was really exciting, in a tech-geek sort of way.

After Toronto, we entered a period of extreme indecisiveness. Amalia and I wanted to ride all the way across North America, but due to problems trying to get her visa we were starting the whole trip way too late in the year. We wanted to ride north of Lake Superior, so we left from Toronto and rode up to the edge of Lake Huron. From there, we took a ferry into Tobermory Island, which is in the middle of the lake, and then took the bridge from there to the north shore. We rode west towards Lake Superior, but before we got there we decided we were really at the wrong time of the year for that trip, and we were going the wrong way to boot. I can tell you here and now that this will be the last time I ignore the prevailing winds when planning a trip. We were getting just hammered all day every day by the wind, which was blowing in exactly the wrong direction. Add some rain to that, and the trip wasn't progressing nearly as well as we had hoped.

After another abrupt change of plans, when we got to Lake Superior we turned south again and rode down into Michigan. From there, we started heading for a friend from work's house which is just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. We arrived there pretty tired of the whole wind and rain situation, although we did perfect our camping technique. We had been burning money like candy since entering the U.S., and we were running short of it. Besides that, I've been whingeing about my fear of camping for a year now and so it was time to do something about it.

Amalia and I bought better camping gear, better sleeping gear, better food, better winter clothing and the whole works. By the time we got done, we had a pretty good system for camping. We even worked out a pretty cool routine. The bad part of camping is that you pretty much have to be in the tent by dark, which is pretty early at this time of year. No worries though... I had a computer, so I just bought a bunch of DVDs to carry with us. We stopped just before dark, set up the tent, made dinner, and then retired for the night. Once inside the tent, we would watch a DVD for an hour, and then hit the sack. Our favorites were TV series. We watched HBO's "Six Feet Under" for most of the way across Michigan and Wisconsin. We've also been watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation", after Amalia got me hooked on it in Madrid. (Note: I was experimenting with growing my hair back in this photo, but I've since given it up as a failed experiment).

Our usual routine while camping was to try to camp within striking distance of a restaurant. We would get up in the morning, pack up and ride generally less than 5 miles to the restaurant. There we sat down for a good breakfast of bacon and eggs, and plugged the laptop in to charge it up. Charging took about the same time as breakfast. We then filled up our camel-baks and headed off. We ate lunch and dinner out of the panniers, and our costs were very low.

After we had been camping for a while, it began to be something more than a way to save money. Camping is it's own experience, and we came to quite enjoy it. Lots of people do it all the time while cycle touring. I've always thought of it as just an uncomfortable way to save some dough, but now that we've experienced it more I think it's something to be highly recommended. Amalia and I will no doubt camp lots of times in the future, even when we're in a place with cheap hotels.

When we reached Minneapolis, we stayed with Cindy and Mike for a week. Cindy worked with me at IMPAC for the last ten years, but recently quit to move onto other things. One of the other things was that she was just a week away from delivering her first child. We missed the birth, but I'd like to take this opportunity to say Welcome to the World to young Sonja.

Cindy and Mike are both technical geeks like I am. They had lots of cool electronic toys and gizmos at their house, and I even picked up a few tips from them.

Amalia and I have been commenting on the fact that Spanish cooking doesn't seem to have really made it out of Spain. You can find lots of ethnic restaurants all over the world, but Spanish restaurants are very rare. We thought that it would be a great idea to try it in the U.S. By an odd quirk of fate, we found the very first one we've ever seen in the U.S. in Minneapolis. It's a very new and trendy place that's full all the time, even though it's only been open a few months. We went there with Cindy and Mike, and found the food to be excellent. It was just like a restaurant in Spain, except the portions were half the size and the price was double. All in all, we were very happy with the meal. It won't compete with Amalia's mother's cooking, but it will do in a pinch.

During our week in Minneapolis, we vacillated back and forth on whether to continue west or to turn around and go east. We came to America specifically to contact some people that are scattered all over the country. Some are in California, and some are in Chicago and New York. In the end, after several flip-flops per day for the whole week, we decided to turn around and go east back to New York. Mostly, we were just tired of fighting the wind. We turned around and headed for another cycling friend's house in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

About two days out of Minneapolis, we went through Hastings, Minnesota which I will hereby give the honor of naming it the Armpit Of The World. This was the most bicycle unfriendly place I've ever seen... and this is after touring Southern Italy. Within a space of only 10 miles, I had five people either yell at us to get off the road, or make obscene gestures to us... and that doesn't even count the people that drove by two inches from the bike. To put that in perspective, that's five for the ten miles around Hastings, Minnesota and zero for the previous 12,000 miles. Add to that a swarm of bugs that could have carried off a small cow, and it wasn't a place I'd really recommend.

We only rode a few days after that before my right knee started giving me problems, and we frankly just got tired of the American Mid-West which was getting a bit boring. We decided that we'd had about enough of that tour, and just got on the train for Milwaukee. We stayed there with Steve and his wife Cathy. Steve is someone that just stumbled on my web page and invited me to stay if I was ever in the area. Since I was in the area, we took him up on his offer and stayed for a very pleasant week. We even got to go on a bike ride with Steve's cycling club, and we did it on a recumbent tandem.

After Milwaukee, we went to Chicago for a couple of days and then took the train to another work friend just north of New York City. Kathy has worked with me for ten years and long ago invited me to come to visit. She's been working out of her home for the whole time I've known her, and only occasionally made visits to the main office. She was even one of the engineers I was managing back when I had some ambition just before the cycling trip. Kathy was kind of surprised that Amalia and I just wanted to sit around the house and not do anything exciting while we were visiting. Visitors are supposed to get out and do things, but by that time we were a bit burned out and just hung out with her. It was a great visit, as I haven't seen her for a couple of years.

After the week at Kathy's, we headed down to New York City for a couple of days, and then flew to California. I went to see Stomp while in the city and would highly recommend it. It's unlike anything I've ever seen. The whole show is all percussion and dancing using everything from garbage cans to insulation tubes to big drums and hub caps. It sounds weird, but take my word for it... if you have a chance to see this one don't miss it.

We also went to see La Boheme, a very famous Puccini opera. It's one of the absolute classic operas. Amalia loves this opera. I prefer the more modern version, also known as Rent. I recommend either of them. We also went to a couple of museums, but didn't do the whole N.Y.C. tour thing because we've both been there before and will both be there again in the future. We even spent a couple of days locked up in Borders as is becoming our custom. We can always be happy in a good bookstore. I may not have mentioned previously that Amalia is a literature professional, and had the most popular literature radio program in Spain right up to the time we left. She's now working on her first novel (she's had 2 non-fiction books published), and is also a journalist writing for several of Spain's biggest newspapers. <--(shameless bragging... so sue me).

Landing In The Oddest Place

When we came back to California, we did the oddest thing... something totally unexpected even for ourselves. My stepmother was planning to sell the house she built with my father, and Amalia and I decided to buy it and stay for a while. We're not necessarily going to stay here forever, but we want to live in America for a while.

The house is really very cool (my Dad did good work). It's situated between Sonora and Silicon Valley (where my office is) on top of a hill. I'll tell a bit more about it later, but for the moment this email has gone on way too long so I'm going to pack it in.

All in all, it may seem strange to go on an epic journey and end up almost right back where I started. In the end though, all journeys are internal. I may be back almost where I started... or even back a step since I'm in my father's house, but I'm not quite the same person who left. I've learned a lot of things along the way, but the most important is that it isn't where you live but what you have inside that matters. The journey of life continues, and Amalia and I have decided to continue our journey right here for the time being.

2004-10-16 A Different Vision Quest

Hi Gang,

You've probably noticed that there haven't been any updates to the old Vision Quest Journal in a while. Let me fill you in. The last you heard, Amalia and I had settled in California. Well, that plan didn't stick and for various reasons we moved back to Madrid. That by itself isn't all that exciting, so let me also mention that we had a baby. You are hereby officially introduced to Selena Hatler Sancha.

Selena was born on 3 September in Madrid, Spain. As you might guess, this means we won't be doing a whole lot of cycling in the very near future. It'll be at least a couple of years before Selena is ready for distance cycling, and I imagine we'll be pretty busy for a while. I won't go on in great depth about Selena, because you can see her own personal page in English and Spanish here (bad Spanish, but Spanish nonetheless). You'll find a bunch of photos, and a bit of text as well.

I'm back to work full time doing pretty much the same thing I did when I left. One of these days I plan to write a book about my trip because I think I experienced a lot and learned a lot during the journey. My working title is Stepping Out Of The Machine, but don't hold your breath waiting for it. I haven't even started yet, and I'm well known as a notorious slacker.

Amalia is back to writing as a journalist from time to time, and she's also been working on writing a couple of books. We expect her next book to be published in Spanish in a few months. She'll be starting another one in the next month or two.

I'm afraid I have to say that this email is the official end of Wade's Vision Quest Journal. Amalia and I haven't given up on travel. We've been to Iran, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, the U.S., Canada, Germany, Italy, France and the Czech Republic since I quit writing my full-blown journals, but I just don't have the time to continue. If you're a trivia buff, you may like to know that the printed version of the journal excluding the photo galleries comes out to about 400 pages. I guess that will have to suffice. This email will be the end of the list, but if you would like to follow Selena's life, there's another mail list you can join on her page. As always, Amalia and I would love to hear from any of you from time to time.

2003-09-16 Back On The Road