I think this is My Final Post...


I miss my buddies, Diana and Dori as we parted yesterday and they caught an earlier flight home..
Our bikes are packed and ready for shipment tomorrow and hopefully, mine will have a better transport home than to the east coast and Merrilys will be back at Jerrys within a week.
I've given this trip a lot of thought as to what made it so special and surprisingly, it was not about the cycling.  As we planned this trip, I think we all thought it would be a wonderful challenge to cycle new roads and perhaps, some days, it was.  But, what made it special for me was meeting all of the challenges off of the bike.  The lost bike, the chipped tooth, finding our way on unknown and sometimes unnamed roads and always getting to the place we were headed..with a few side trips for ice cream and CVS.  The motto of the trip was flexibility..for all of us. It made the trip a treat.  If we were thrown a curve we went with it and all of us shared that one trait in common.  We were proud of that.
Most of all, we had fun with each other, told stories, listened and observed what was going on all around us.  We were inspired by Gail and Wendy and the Woman's tour folks but decided that the kind,of bicycling they do is awesome, brave and focused and probably not for us. It takes an enormous amount of dedication for a long period of time.  We were more foot loose and on to the next exciting part of our trip..
We met some awesome people, too..the Rudys, John at Southbridge Cycles,Marilyn on the Womanstour trip, some other of Wendy and Gail's group who rode in the rain and never complained.
And a special thank you to Larry and Carl who just sat by and let us have our fun!
What started as a search for what lay outside our comfort zone turned out to be a discovery that all we needed was right there inside us all the time.!
Sherry