Fresh Hell Learned Everything She Needs to Know on a Bike

Welcome to the Fresh Hell Newsletter, where this week we examine the best sport/form of psychotherapy/life-lesson teacher ever, bicycling.

“You’d be able to get up that hill if there was a monster chasing you.”

Christina and I were on a four-day self-supported bike tour of Vermont. The date is immaterial, but it was back when we both had healthy knees. I planned the trip. I’d done a lot of self-supported touring, which is riding a special touring bike with easy gearing and everything you need, including tent, clothing, food, cooking supplies, the whole deal, packed away in luggage strapped to your bike. You have seen these bikers out on the road; tanned, sweaty, mismatched outfits and dirty shoes, thighs like tree trunks, piloting bicycles that are so overloaded that they look like they might topple over in a stiff breeze, and you have asked yourself why anyone would do that to themselves. We do it because it is incredibly fun and its a terrific way to see the world.

Anyway, Christina, despite having never been on a self-supported bike tour, or indeed any bike tour, and despite not owning a touring bike or any of the gear required, agreed to go on this trip when I suggested it because she is awesome and she trusted me for reasons still unclear many years later.

I gave her a list of stuff to buy, including a touring bike, which she dutifully bought. In retrospect, a shakedown cruise or two would have been wise, but we were not wise. Most of her stuff was still in its original packaging when we arrived at our first B&B in Vermont. It was Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods,” but on bikes.

On the first morning, geared up, the sun greeted us, the winds were light and the temperature perfect. We left our adorable country B&B after a hearty breakfast, full of enthusiasm and sugar. Moments later, before we even broke a sweat, we hit a series of hills that averaged a 4%-5% grade for miles. This, as an average grade, is relentless, for those unfamiliar. (I planned this trip with a paper map. This was way before RideWithGPS and other route-plotting software that would have alerted me to my catastrophic route-planning decisions.)

I knew two things to be true: 1) As a runner, Christina had great endurance, and 2) After a warm-up, there was nothing she couldn’t ride. But sometimes, before you are warmed up, cycling a loaded bike feels so hard that you are pretty convinced you’re going to throw up and then die. Not like “Oh, I could just die!” but “Holy shit. I can’t breath I am going to throw up my heart is going to stop and I will die here on the side of the road and getting my body home is going to be a problem but it’ll be someone else’s problem and I had a good life can I please die now.” She was in that second place.

I knew she’d be fine and her body was more than capable, but she had psyched herself out, which is a very bad thing, especially when you are 15 minutes into a four-day trip. She kept looking up at the rest of the hill ahead, imagining all the pain to come.

Experienced cyclists know that you never, ever look at the whole hill. You break it down into manageable chunks, and promise yourself that at the end of each chunk, you can stop to rest if you really need to. Usually, it turns out, you don’t need to, and even if you do, you eventually get where you need to go. The more you ride, the stronger you get and the bigger the chunks get. You just have to be patient with yourself and ride at a pace you can sustain without ending up in the “I would like to die now please” place.

I explained this to her.

“I can’t make it up this hill,” she said.

I’m not a nice person, as most Hellions know. When I invited Christina on the trip, I told her there were only three rules. The first, and most important, was “no whining.” I don’t remember the other two. Fortunately, in that moment, the molecule of my body devoted to compassion prevented me from yelling at her to stop being a whiny little bitch and instead I dropped my tough-love monster analogy on her.

She shot me a look like she was going to take her tire pump, which, I later learned, she had no idea how to use or even what it was, and pummel me with it until I was a pile of bloody entrails by the road’s edge. The look made me realize how badly I had wronged her. I was about to apologize for this entire misguided adventure and my terrible route planning and for throwing her onto a demoralizing hill right out of the gate. I was about to suggest heading back down the hill to our quaint B&B and spending the rest of the day drinking our asses off. I was, as ever, the asshole.

Then she got a weird look on her face.

“Fuck. You’re right,” she said. “I would make it up this hill if there was a monster chasing me.”

In a moment that obviously stuck with me for the rest of my life, Christina got back on her ludicrously overloaded bike and rode the rest of that fucking hill like she had a monster chasing her.

We hit the top, high-fived, then a few miles later, when we achieved the Magical Warm-up Distance (7 miles) she looked at me with a smile I can still call up in my mind’s eye and said “Holy shit. I feel great.”

Things got hard and uncomfortable periodically throughout the rest of that trip, but by the end, she was riding faster than me, and, I think, having more fun than me because she was demonstrably fitter than me, a theme that would be carried through the other bike trips that we would do throughout our cycling career together, the details of which we would one day recount ad nauseum for HOURS at every fucking opportunity to our eventual husbands, to the point where they can now both recite our bike touring stories verbatim, while also rolling their eyes.

Christina and I haven’t cycled together for a long time. I miss that more than you can imagine. One day I may talk her into doing a less-laden tour, one with handsome guides and champagne on demand and glamorous hotels in exotic locations, and a van to whisk us up hills if we’re not feeling it. Maybe with our husbands. Maybe not. Probably not. It would rob them of the fun of listening to us talk about the trip for hours on end, which we know they secretly love.

But watching Christina crest that Vermont hill, man, that was the best. It’s the reason I love cycling. It teaches you that there really isn’t much you can’t do if you take a deep breath, stop whining and just fucking get on with it, one manageable chunk at a time. It’s how I wrote my first novel and how I am writing my second one. It’s how Christina built a phenomenal new terminal at the airport that she now runs. (She tackles much bigger hills than I do.) It’s how we both got through the deaths of parents and layoffs and medical and personal crises, and it is how we will get through all the hard shit, both terrible and amazing, that awaits us from here on out.

If you need to imagine a monster chasing you for that extra bit of motivation, you do you. My monster looks like mortality and sometimes, shame. What does yours look like?

As a lifelong cyclist whose knees have left the party, I no longer do self-supported bicycle trips like our glorious Vermont bike expedition. Instead, the Boy Wonder and I now really enjoy supported bike tours, where we pay a company to make the arrangements, plan the routes, haul all our shit from one luxury hotel to another and make sure we are fed and watered appropriately. In my opinion, it’s the funnest type of vacation in the world if you enjoy fun. Which I do.

I have done quite a few of these trips, and combined with a short stint leading these types of tours professionally, I know what makes them great.

1) Routes and itineraries designed by local guides, not corporate overlords.

2) Dining options that are authentic to and embedded in the local culture. (i.e. no chain restaurants)

3) High quality accommodations that have staffers who make you feel like royalty even if you are covered in mud, smell like a horse and are clomping around in those weird-looking bike shoes. Also, a spa with massages. That’s key.

4) A low guest-to-guide ratio. Preferably at least 2 guides per 10-13 guests. You should never be on a tour with more than 14 guests. That’s too many.

The one luxury bike touring company we keep going back to is DuVine Cycling and Adventure Co. They hit every criteria above in spades, especially the dining, which often includes private dining experiences in local homes or from local chefs. We’ve done tours in Burgundy and the Douro Valley with them, and those two tours remain the most fun, and the most comprehensively, expertly, luxuriously organized fun I’ve ever had on a bike. All we had to do each day was ride. We made not one other decision except when to drink out of our water bottles, which the incredible guides kept filled even though we never actually saw them filling them, and when to drink out of our martinis.

Everything else was handled. I can’t wait to do my next trip with them. They rely heavily on guides with local knowledge, which gives guests access to experiences that many tour companies don’t or can’t replicate. On our Burgundy trip, we were drinking full glasses of Grand Cru in the winemaker’s backyard shed, surrounded by cases of his wine and his farming equipment. We didn’t speak French, he didn’t speak English but we all spoke wine. It was incredible.

Their guide training is extensive. Their attention to detail is unparalleled. Many other touring companies claim all of these things, but I can attest that these guys actually deliver on the promise. And no, I am not getting paid to say any of this.

DuVine’s price point is high, but not as high as other supposedly luxury bike tour companies that offer a similar, if sometimes lesser, experience. Also, they, like most touring companies today, offer very high quality e-bikes, which opens the experience up to family members and friends who may not be as prepared or enthusiastic about cycling, but still want to go on a great trip.

I won’t slag off their competition by name, but on our recent DuVine Douro Valley trip, we encountered a huge bike tour group (over 25 people) on one of the competitor’s tours in the lobby of the same hotel where we were staying, the Six Senses Douro Valley. Even though technically they should have been as happy as we were (they were at the same stupendous hotel, were riding basically the same route and they were out in the same weather), they only had two guides, their transportation was very poorly thought out and the guests were so unhappy with their experience that they were asking our three DuVine guides (for a group of 13) for business cards. The unhappy cyclists' trip cost the same as ours.

Caveat: DuVine sold a large ownership position to Lindblad Expeditions in 2021 and it remains to be seen if the new larger corporate ownership will, over time, allow the founder of DuVine, Andy Levine, to continue the exceptionally high quality he has maintained over the last 30 years. So far so good based on our phenomenal 2023 trip to Portugal.

DuVine: Very strong recommend.

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