Road stories - Experience

This year I'm not going to sit down and try to do a ride report. I don't have the drive. But, I want to share some of the stories that you return with after a while on the road.

So I'm starting a new type of post, the road story. They'll be little vignettes of travel.

Onto the first one - Experience:

On our first day on the road, Jerry and I rode through Washington State, past Mt. St. Helen and into the very northern parts of Oregon.

The first hotel we hit was sold out, so we rode over to a place that we stayed at previously, either last year, or perhaps the year before? We couldn't remember. It's getting like that. The trips and the stories run into one another.

I don't see it as a bad thing. We've just had enough riding time, that the specific trip is not important. The day, month and year are irrelevant. But the experience is what counts.

All of it made us feel like quite old hands at travel. So as we sat outside the hotel, getting ready to lock up the bikes and a guy comes up to talk to us, we're used to it. After all, we're the big travellers.

Except, we're not.

He'd just finished a 6000 mile ride (that's 10,000 km for those metric folks) and he wanted to chat. A bit of a round trip, with a stop in Deadhorse, Alaska, just for good measure.

So, it turned out he'd done the big ride, and we were on our first day, with bikes looking shiny and new, by comparison.



And it reminded me of a saying from diving:

"Experienced is relative to who you're standing next to."