The world is our oyster

A few kilometres from John Backman’s front door, I started to entertain some grave misgivings about showing up at his house.

We had bumped into John briefly on the street in Syracuse, NY: he had been just finishing his own Erie Canal journey, rummaging in his bike bags for his car keys at a pedestrian crossing, and about to enjoy a lunch complete with cocktails to celebrate the end of his cycle.

“I live in Portland,” he told us. “You can stay on your way through! You can get in my pool!”

On this basis, we had sent him a message a few days out and extracted an address from him, and now here we were, bearing down on the poor man’s living quarters with the intention of immediately climbing into his swimming pool.

But we knew absolutely nothing about him, other then that he had been to see the Dave Matthews Band the night before our arrival.

A few months back near the start of our American odyssey, we had commented to a host that they were very good to trust that the total strangers showing up at their door were going to be ok human beings and not deranged and/or unsanitary. To which our host had responded with a laugh, “it’s the same for you guys isn’t it?! We could be totally crazy!”

For some reason, before arriving at John’s house, these words started repeating on me. Who was this person we had met at the side of the road? Did he have indoor plumbing, did he keep kidnapped people in his basement?

Luckily, the John who greeted us at the door was as cheerful, enthusiastic and full of humour as we remembered from our brief encounter, his bathroom was completely standard issue, and the only people he was going to keep in his basement was us, in a nice spare bedroom he had down there.

He also came with the added bonus of many other lovely people: two of his own adult kids plus one of their fiancées were home, and his neighbour Jess and her son were also in attendance for what turned out to be a barbecue dinner, a couple of beers, and a night of chats and hilarity that went way beyond our normal cycling bedtime.

Jess seemed strangely familiar, like a friend from back home, and indeed her surname was Queally and she was second generation Irish American, with ancestry from Waterford and Cork. We all got on like the proverbial house on fire, and the following morning, Jess returned and took us for a swim and breakfast and much more chatting, before we hit the road late at about 11.30.

We stopped by one of the area’s famed lighthouses on our way out of town, and then got back on the East Coast Greenway route for a short day in the saddle.

We didn’t have far to go, because we were headed from John’s house in South Portland to Bath, to visit someone else, this time, someone we’d never met before.

We had left Boston, or more precisely Cambridge, in a cloud of obfuscation and evasion of our own creation.

Our very cool Warmshowers host Mark Stewart, a fascinating person who brought us on a community cycle, to see a World Cup soccer game in the pub, and with whom we had had some really interesting conversations, had been offering to assist us in route-planning, and we had been vague and hard-to-pin-down in response.

This was because we didn’t want to tell him that we were going to cycle a mere 17km down the road to a cheap motel, where we were going to stay two further nights.

We had stayed two nights with Mark Stewart, and for some reason, we couldn’t admit to him that we were too tired to move on. I was a little worried that he would think our time at his house had not been restful enough: it certainly had been, and a very lovely and interesting time to boot.

Let’s talk exhaustion for a moment. I think Mark and I both tend to want to highlight the positive and exciting elements of our journey, maybe sometimes to the detriment of some of the realities of how we might be feeling.

Any sensible touring cyclist is going to factor rest days into their schedule: they prevent exhaustion and injury by giving your body a break. We generally cycle around 100km, five or six days per week. It’s a pattern that has stood the test of time and remained sustainable for most of the 28,000km we’ve been on the road for.

But the truth is, several times on this trip we have collided with a brick wall of total exhaustion, where one rest day just isn’t enough.

For me, I think this is more to do with the psychological impacts of moving on every day than it is to do with the physical exertion of cycling.

It takes a lot of personal discipline to wake up every single morning and efficiently pack all your belongings onto your bike and head off into the unknown. And then the next day, and the next. For a year and a half.

A total legend we have never met called Damien O’Halloran, who got in touch with us via Instagram and who is from Co Mayo but living in Massachusetts, had sent us voucher codes for $100 dollars of credit for Best Western Hotels. They had a short expiry on them, and we discovered there was a Best Western in another suburb of Boston.

And so we bid a genuinely grateful and warm, but slightly disingenuous, farewell to Mark Stewart, and cycled for just over an hour, and arrived to a motel and checked in early, and went back to bed.

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In the middle of our two-night Best Western sleepathon, we did something unthinkably strange: we booked our flights from St John’s, Newfoundland, home to Ireland.

With under a fortnight left in the US, and after that just the four Canadian provinces of Québec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland left to go, we’re starting to get to grips with the fact that we only have a couple of thousand kilometres left to go until the end of our global circumnavigation.

And so the date is booked: we will fly from St John’s to Dublin airport on October 8.

After two nights in a motel, barely moving apart from to venture out to get food, it was time to hit the road again.

The heavy fug of exhaustion had cleared and we were both itching to get back on our bikes again.

With such a sluggish start to the week, it would become one of our lowest mileage weeks to date. We managed just 351km within seven days.

Despite it being a low mileage week, we did manage to cycle in three states in one day, the day we cycled from the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts through New Hampshire and into Kittery, Maine.

Having come from the Wild Wild West, where States take weeks to cross, the tinyness of the States out East only marginally diluted the sense of satisfaction and progress in having cycled clear through New Hampshire in less than a day.

We had a lot of visiting to do in Maine. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the week became less about the pedalling than it was about the people.

We certainly encountered more than our fair share of Maine characters.

The night after John Backman turned out to be not only not a psycho but truly one of the living gems of the world in Portland, we were set to weigh anchor with Captain Joe Jerome.

Captain Joe mostly grew up in Edinburgh, in a circle of friends that included my now-brother-in-law, Roddy.

“Come and stay with us on your way past, we have lobsters and oysters,” Joe’s message to me had read when Roddy told him we were coming through.

He married Bryn, and they live near Bath, a spectacular part of the Gulf of Maine, where the vast Kennebec River, which is part of a watershed that drains 40% of the State of Maine, flows out into the sea, creating perfect conditions for growing some of the best oysters in the world.

Rather than farm oysters in commercial quantities, Joe and Bryn box clever, running North East Salt Water, a fishing charter, guiding and education company that takes people on oyster tours, lobstering, or fishing.

Maine’s licence plates bear the slogan “Vacationland,” and for the people like Bryn and Jerome that rely on the summer season for their tourism income, that’s a short few months to earn the bones of their annual income.

It’s a busy time for Joe and Bryn, who also have two children. But they arranged for us to be put up in Bryn’s parents’ beautiful house overlooking the river, and Joe devoted an evening to taking us out to see his oysters.

We learned how to hand-tumble the oysters, the process of crunching off the edge of their shell to encourage them to grow deep shells and get fat.

Then we learned to shuck them, and they were very delicious and totally unlike the huge offerings you get in Ireland. Each one is a small, sweet-yet-salty mouthful of joy.

After oysters, it was lobster o’clock. We went out to check some of Joe’s pots and one had a good-sized lobster sitting in it. I said an inner apology to the little fella as I put elastic bands over his claws and Joe popped him in a container and we motored back to base for a delicious lobster bake with potatoes and corn on the cob.

We’ve met a lot of clever, hard-working people on this trip and Joe and Bryn are right up there with the cleverest and hardest working.

It’s not the easiest life, but as Joe gave us a spin from the pier back to where we were staying, he spoke with passion about advocating for the rights of people who earn their livelihood from the sea, be they clammers or oyster farmers or lobster fishermen.

He thinks he may eventually go into local politics, but he wants to wait until he can be considered a voice of experience: in his early forties at the moment, he thinks he won’t command respect amongst the hardworking maritime people of Bath until they consider him seasoned enough.

After leaving Joe and Bryn, we were set to turn slowly inland for yet another visit.

Ardelle Gile is a kind-of relation: she’s the mother of my dearly beloved cousin Dan’s wife. Dan is an adventurous soul and he and his beautiful life partner Ann have taken some phenomenal trips, not least when they backpacked the Pacific Rim with their 18-month-old son. But that was many moons ago: while we were visiting with Ardelle, messages incoming from Dan and Ann revealed that they were hiking the Lofoten archipelago in Norway. It looked phenomenal: one for the list.

Ardelle was a teacher for many years before her retirement. She’s a highly original thinker and a great conversationalist. When we arrived at her home outside Waldoboro, she immediately extended a warm welcome: “stay as long as you want,” she said. “I like the company.”

Maybe it’s just that we’ve been on the road for so long now, but it was also certainly Ardelle’s easygoing company and the beguiling surroundings of her unassuming cottage in the woods. We were sorely, sorely tempted.

We ended up staying three nights, and enjoying two full days of time with Ardelle: she took us to Moody’s, a much-loved local family diner renowned for its pies and pickles fries.

We ate local icecream and went to a farm stall to buy sweetcorn, which was coming into season. We toured around and took in the sights, looked through family albums at baby photos of Ann. It was a blissful, gentle end to the week.

Sometimes it feels like the biggest privilege of this entire adventure is the time we get to spend with such a huge array of different kinds of people.

We have stayed with people in lakeside mansions, and in tiny apartments where we have rolled out our bedrolls alongside our hosts. We have stayed with students and pensioners and divorcees and empty nesters, and people immersed in the happy chaos of a family of toddlers.

One of the reasons I wanted to cycle around the world is that I have reached a bit of an impasse in my self. I started this journey with no clear picture of how I want to be in the future, other than that I want my life to be less stressful than it has been.

In the closing months of this global cycle, as we become more keenly aware that each pedal is bringing us home, I’m starting to form a picture.

I’m starting to visualise a life, and how I would like to be in it. If you don’t know where you are going, sometimes maybe it’s good to start sketching in a few details, no matter how small.

Whether or not any of the incredible people we’ve been meeting and spending time with on our travels realise it or not, they are my teachers.

Some of the people we’ve met are modelling characteristics and attitudes that I want to become a part of me in the future. For example, we’ve met a lot of people who have made very considered decisions based on their own values.

“If you’re happy to live simply, you get to travel more and you’re more free,” one host told us. “I wanted to keep using my skills after I retired, so now I volunteer and do accounting for people in bad financial situations,” a woman said.

It’s not necessarily that I want to travel a lot or volunteer, but that these people exerted a high degree of conscious control over their daily lives that I think that I never thought I would have. They have prioritised things that tie in with their values.

Of course, some people we meet are facing severe challenges, of which the great modern loneliness epidemic can be one. We’ve met people dealing with health and mobility issues, people who are not in easy financial situations, people dealing with bereavement and family rifts.

And these people are my teachers too, for the variety of ingenious, gracious, good-humoured adaptations they have made, and for how their own life’s struggles have made them more acutely aware of the challenges of others.

On this global cycle, the world is well and truly our oyster; the people we meet along the way, and the wisdom they impart, its precious pearls.

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