pedalpanam

Exactly a year tonight I was on a train somewhere in Wisconsin or Minnesota, on my way to Portland with my bike.  After a crazy two weeks of goodbyes and packing up, I biked down Lake Shore path with Cooper and Tim to the Amtrak Station downtown (not before stopping at Trader Joe’s to load up on snacks for the 40 hour ride), where Karen, Karla and Pete were waiting there with my heavy duffel bag of stuff I’d eventually fit on my bike.

To mark a year since I’ve not been in Chicago, I’ve compiled a list of top bike rides in the city (and a few bottom ones as well), it is by no means exhaustive.  Clearly this list will be skewed towards my experience of Chicago, which generally was on the north side.  Feel free to chime in if you have something to include on the list.  In no particular order:

Continue reading My Kind of Town

The past few days have been rather unusual.  Namely, the lack of hills!  Yesterday and today’s average speeds were 13.4 and 14.0 miles per hour, the likes of which haven’t happened  since the flat days along the coast south of Los Mochis last December.  It has still been hot, but fortunately the wind and clouds mean that I haven’t been sweating buckets.  In fact, for each of the past 3 days I’ve filled my two water bottles up and that has sufficed.

At the beginning of April in Antigua, Guatemala, Paul and I were looking at a map of Central America when he informed me that we had at least 1,200 miles to go until Panama City.  I was a little skeptical, after all, wasn’t Central America kind of tiny? I was honestly not looking forward to these 1,200 miles.  I didn’t know much about Central America and the places to visit, and the heat made me think I’d never make it.

Yet somehow we made it this far and are only 50 miles away from Panama City.  Lots of early mornings, sometimes up at 4:30 or 5, lots of time spent on the side of the road on a long uphill waiting for our heartbeat to slow down to a safe rhythm, lots of soft drinks (much more than usual).  It will be hard to forget the sweat, but there were highlights that made the past 2 months worth the effort.

Yet this isn’t only almost being done with Central America, this is actually the end of North America as well!  What next?  Some how get to Colombia (not Columbia, cyclist bloggers take note, misspelling, of geographical names in particular, is a pet peeve of mine, but I guess that is my problem!), by either boat or plane, but all that still needs to get worked out.  For now I’m just excited to be arriving in Panama City, where my high school physics teacher and his family live, and are letting me stay with them.  Should I still refer to him as “Mr. Worthington” or “Sir”?  Either way, Paul and I have an ongoing disagreement about a certain knot and its suitability for hanging hammocks, which I’m hoping can be tie broken (the disagreement, not the knot) by Mr. Worthington.

Observations from Matt Kelly on Vimeo.

A few notes:

Continue reading Observations

I intended to get at least one post up for each Central American country, but it looks like that didn’t happen for Honduras (only spent 3 nights there) or Nicaragua (but as usual I did try to check in via Twitter every few days). Of course I’ll get around to telling some stories later, but unfortunately for now references to those places will now be made through the lens of Costa Rica, which as you will learn soon, is rather different than the past 5 countries!

Continue reading Alajuela, Costa Rica

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-motorized traffic are treated.

-Mahatma Gandhi Matt Kelly

I was working on a long post about the last 3 weeks of the trip, but that is unlikely to get finished anytime soon, so I’ll try a real quick update for now, as I wanted to have at least one update from El Salvador.

Continue reading San Miguel, El Salvador