I Bet You Didn’t Expect That

Riding out under the pale, spreading dawn of Green River, Wyoming, headed back toward Colorado, I prepared for the day’s ride in a way I seldom do: downloading an audiobook to my music player. As much as I enjoy a great story and recall many of them while my thoughts wander the highway, I treasure the marriage of music, rolling scenery, sensual immersion, and freed imagination that the open road offers. Focusing instead on a narrator’s voice during a ride would normally just be a distraction.

I anticipated this day’s ride with the same dulled senses as if I were simply driving a car, though, thinking it would just be getting from one place to another. After all, the road ahead was a stretch of hot, barren interstate, our least favorite kind of road, and it was one that I’d ridden before so I knew it promised little once past the stark, rugged beauty of Flaming Gorge.

Point of Rocks, Wyoming, is a minor curiosity, I suppose, a town made entirely of trailers surrounding a gas station in the kind of place that makes you wonder who was the first person to stop there while looking for a place to settle and say, “Yep. This little patch of dust and rock is perfect, different than all the rest; just what I was looking for!” So, following those high points, the distraction of a storyteller would be welcome, I thought. Destiny, it seemed, had a much better plan in mind for the ride.

It began with the audiobook failing to download over the creaking Wyoming budget motel wi-fi. No worries. I just switched back to the music player, slathered on the creamy 70SPF goo to shield me from the Wyoming sun and wind, and double-checked the strap on my shaded goggles, assuring they’d be tight enough to block the dust of the open high prairie, but not so much to give me an elastic-born headache. Starting the bikes, we rumbled out of the motel parking lot, up the ramp, and onto the usually reviled freeway.

Once rumbling down I-80, rather than the dusty, asphalt monotony I’d expected to encounter, the Cowboy State gave a peace offering in the form of a brisk morning, a clear, open sky, and a nearly-deserted, newly-topped interstate allowing buttery flight at eighty-five. With the horizon spotless for a hundred miles in every direction and the only wind the cool buffeting of the bike flying over the freeway, my player joined in the conspiracy to make me experience this ride a little differently than I’d imagined. Punctuating the rush of laser-white lines and smooth asphalt blazing by under my floorboards was a perfect, serendipitous road medley: Highway Star, We Are the Road Crew, Race with the Devil on a Spanish Highway. The hits just kept coming.

I couldn’t have asked for a better reminder that expectations can be limiting things, and that roads, like people, nearly always deserve a second chance. This is so even for something as ostensibly predictable as a Wyoming interstate, which often offers merely inertia - but there can also be times when it rocks at ninety mph with a cool rush, a driving tune, and prairie falcons racing the bike through boundless skies. Speed offers its own kind of zen, and so I let it take me back, reliving our last ten thousand miles of Journeys to Love, the inspiring people we’ve met, the profound gifts of the American road, and a few funny bits that have me chuckling as the miles race by...

Cresting Tioga Pass in northern Yosemite after a storm, we stop the bikes at a turnout to take in the mammoth granite splendor of Gaylor Peak, its crystal lakes laid out in the valleys below. A smattering of international tourists snaps photos and gasps the equivalent of “Wow” in every imaginable tongue. One group of Japanese travelers erupts in delight, their matron calling out excitedly, “Mar-mot! Mar-mot!” as a hundred flashes erupt from cameras. Video rolls as a furry, spotted chipmunk of the kind that Toni calls a “rock schmuck” sits back on its hindquarters, chewing, unconcerned, while taking them all in. Unimpressed, it hops down and goes about its day in what will be the most well-documented moment of its little life. At least in Japan.

We smile in loving amusement and ride on.

We finally reach the Pacific Ocean at San Francisco, California, but fail to find a place where we can properly christen the bikes with its waters until reaching a beach just north of Newport, along a stretch of the breathtaking Coastal Highway. Amidst bikini-clad sunbathers and tourists in bad shorts and loud Hawaiian shirts, Toni trundles down the sands in her scuffed boots and full leathers from the closest spot we could get the bikes to the shore, a steel travel tumbler in her hand to catch a bit of ocean. Misjudging the capricious waves in her dusty chaps, she dances in the water - as best as one can in wet sand while wearing saltwater-caked biker boots and sodden leather - back up the beach shouting, “I got it, I got it!” I can only imagine what the mundane beachgoers and innocent tourists thought she had captured. And just who was this mad, leather-clad marine huntress to them? Riding out from the christening for which we’d pulled over, visitors gave us a wide berth.

We smile in mysterious joy and ride on.

Carson City, Nevada, the capital of the Silver State, is home to the Nevada State Fair, something we expected to be similar in scale to the many other State Fairs we’d encountered. Instead, we find something more like a county 4H show, with a few local arts and crafts and a booth selling bacon-wrapped BBQ onion rings with blue cheese dip and root beer - can there be a more American dish? Creekside rubber duck races supported the local animal shelter, while an encampment of delightful, fully outfitted Civil War reenactors rode golf carts and checked Facebook on their smartphones between skirmishes amid the blue and the gray in a nearby field. On the carnival grounds, a small Ferris wheel and Tilt-a-Whirl twirled and rocked just as they should, while swings suspended from chains rotated faster and faster, rising as they accelerated to spin their young riders through the Nevada sky. Between the screaming teenagers and kids trying to keep cotton candy from blowing into their sticky faces, one elderly woman closed her eyes and spread her arms wide in flight, the parchment skin of gnarled fingers becoming wingtips instead, a content smile gracing her face as it turned toward the sun. She was airborne in her joy, young again in a moment of freedom. My bike and I know how that feels, grandmother.

We smile in shared delight and ride on.

The 4th of July brings us to our anniversary, celebrated streetside at Boise, Idaho’s Independence Day parade. Kickstanding the bikes in the parking lot of a downtown bank, we’re greeted by the motorcycle cops, who will guide and protect the event, marshaling under the bank’s drive-through awning. We walk over to thank them for their service, seeing suspicion turn to friendship and then gratitude, as we have with so many folks we’ve met and greeted across the country. We then walk to the parade, filming and laughing as we share the morning with a promenade of Idaho’s antique cars, veterans, jugglers, and church groups proudly showing off their floats and their parade-waving skills. As monster trucks rumble past, one of our new friends on the police force rides up and hands Toni his phone, asking if we’d take a few shots and maybe a video of him riding herd on the parade for his wife and kids. Such a simple human request from a husband and father, carrying with it a young man’s nobility and courage. Officer Mike just wanted to share his day with the family he kisses goodbye every morning, knowing as soldiers and cops do, that there’s always a chance that he won’t be coming home. Today, he offers his life for the kids at the parade, for his little corner of America called Boise. For us. But his thoughts don’t dwell there. They rest instead in the embrace of family. Sure, we’ll take your picture, Mike. It’s the least we can do, my friend.

We smile in gratitude and ride on.

This morning, on our next-to-last ride of this latest months-long journey, we wait for a table at our favorite creekside cafe in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I expect breakfast will be wonderful, but then we’ve been here many times before, so there’s a reason for that. Maybe expectation isn’t such a bad thing after all, I think, when you expect things to be wonderful.

So, opening the weather app in preparation for the final leg of the ride home tomorrow, I expect a beautiful morning. And the weatherman concurs. I expect a little melancholy to set in as we spend our last full day of this Journey and prepare to come away from the long road again for a time. It’s there, of course, though it’s sweeter when shared with Toni on a gorgeous day with a hot air balloon festival and art fair still to come - one more chance on this ride to meet new people and to discover the faces and meaning of love.

Coming to breakfast at the next table over, a little girl, learning to sing at the same time she learns to walk, clutches mom’s hand in one of her own while her other hand explores the oversized daisy sewn to the front of her bright green hat. Her French being no more ready than her English, but mostly knowing the tune, she sings a lilting, barely-recognizable, and cherubic version of “Alouette,” making up any words she needs as she goes. It will be the song I carry in my heart tomorrow as we smile and begin the ride home. Such a little, wonderful thing that makes me glad to be alive.

Destiny chuckles a bit at my fascination, remarking quietly. “I bet you didn’t expect that.” She’s right, just as I didn’t expect flying grandmothers, Toni wading the Pacific in laughter and black leather, or becoming part of a parade cop’s family, even for just a moment. Just like I could never have expected the vast yet simple joy of a Japanese mother calling her family together to share in the amazement of discovering her first Mar-Mot.

Dear Destiny, thank you for the long road and the lands and people you continue offering us on our quests. I can’t imagine what the next unexpected thing we’ll discover might be.

But I expect it will be wonderful.