How To Move The Stars is the day by day retelling of a bicycle ride around the world. Start from the beginning to get the whole story.
My adventure was a modern day epic, a solo, self-supported bicycle ride spanning 38,000 miles across six continents. There were moments I barely survived, and times I cried tears of joy, but mostly, this is a story about the thousands of people I met along the way. I moved through their cultures, and dramatic landscapes. I ate their food and slept on their land. I was constantly arriving to the open arms of strangers who were excited to help me achieve a feat that few could imagine. I did this for years, immersing myself in the world and meeting the people who live here. The story I returned with is a snapshot of humanity, captured in a lived experience. Thank you for joining me on my journey.
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May 27th, 2013. Lada. I seem to have found a corner of the map few people drive through. The quiet road was a joy to ride, and I relaxed as I took in the landscape. There were fields of purple flowers blooming under the sun. I watched swirling wind ripple across long rows of green wheat. Little gray birds danced in the sky. I’ve been seeing car repair ramps alongside the road. There are twin concrete structures sloping upward, leveling off, and sloping back down. With a car parked on top, a person could walk underneath to access the bottom. Eugene told me the roads across the Soviet Union were so bad that people would carry spare parts in their trunks to make repairs on the go. The ramps were the compromise between improving the road and doing nothing. I still see the ramps being used and sometimes a car called a Lada is parked on top. Many of the cars I’ve seen across Eastern Europe are the same model. They’re compact four-door cars that came out in the late ‘7s and for three decades they were the bestselling vehicle in Russia. Eugene told me that they were cheap and easy to work on and so that they would always be that way. The car was barely updated. Even when the lotto was discontinued in the mid200s, a new car off the lot was actually a model from the 80s. The whole country is now full of spare parts to keep them running. And with ramps to do the work, I expect the lotto will be around for decades more. In the late afternoon, I met a Russian cyclist out on a 10-day lap around the peninsula. He looked like he was having fun. In Russian, he told me his name was Victor, but I wasn’t able to understand much more than that. We rode together for a few miles, quietly enjoying each other’s company before our paths diverged and I was alone again. I carried on for another hour before sneaking away from the road to sleep between the farm fields.
1 Comment
Wow, interesting story, well done 💜