July 2, 2003

When I woke up and I thought about it a little, I realized little by little that, no matter how much I wanted to bike to be working perfectly, it just wasn’t. I had ridden before, and in it’s natural state, it should have a) gone up some hills b) had a higher top speed than 20. It just felt like it was getting bogged down, it wasn’t pushing that hard, it lost momentum very quickly and then I’d be pedaling and it just wasn’t right. I called Quill, the resident expert on mechanical matters, but after we looked at it together, we realized that whatever was wrong was serious enough that it’d take longer for us to analyze and fix it ourselves than to just put it in the Righteous Van and drive down to Cosmopolitian Motors, the company who’d donated it in the first place. So I called ahead and started on the 2 hour drive to Cosmotor.

The rest of the day was pretty slow, and a bit frustrating. The only real reason for the frustration was my expectation that everything should be going swimmingly by now and I should be having adventures in the wilds of America. This just wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. I knew then that I’d have to start letting go of my ideas of what was supposed to happen pretty soon, or this trip would be a disaster, but that was turning out to be a lot harder than it sounds.

I should mention the other element that had been causing lots of trouble as well: the technology. The idea of writing and doing photography along the way, sending it to get put onto a website and letting the world see this adventure in realtime seemed like such an easy thing to do at first. If a foot ball game can be videotaped and sent live across the world to thousands of people’s televisions, it should be easy to just type something up and e-mail it from wherever I happened to be, right? Nope. It’s hard. It’s really hard. In a couple years perhaps it will be altogether, but right now there’s no easy way to do it that is at all reasonable in simplicity or price. All the elements are here: cell phones, computers, PDAs. You even have cell phones that can send e-mail from wherever they can get a signal, but on a cell phone it takes three pushes of the number 2 just type a‘C. If you get a keyboard, things start getting complicated and expensive, fast…. in any case it’s been a nightmare. Nobody has even been able to tell me how to do it, let alone set me up with the right components. The cell phone company doesn’t do anything with the PDA company or the computer company; the cell phone company doesn’t do anything with the cell service provider, who doesn’t do anything with the net service provider… and on and on. Basically you have to put it all together into a hodge podge of fees and cables, and maybe if you tinker with it, it will work. Maybe. At this point I was getting ready to give up on PDAs and get a laptop. Which is what I eventually did. But man, the hours I spent calling, and researching and hassling, and calling again, and then doing more research just to end up with the wrong thing and have to spend even more money, just to do what I thought was going to be no problem? Stress and more stress.

I had simply believed the general theory that once you do something, even if it takes more time than you anticipated, it’s done. &quotOK It took all day again, but I’ve got that moped problem fixed.&quot &quotAlright I’ve spent the last 6 hours on the phone, but I’ve got that cell phone problem fixed.&quot No such luck. In this case I kept on &quotsolving&quot the problems and they kept going wrong and I kept getting put down and upset until I just hit bottom, and it still didn’t work. So I’d freak out and then keep with it. Eventually it’s right, but by then I’d have been pounding my patience with a baseball bat for the last 72 hours and was about ready to give up. The key then is to not give up. Just to let go of the assumption that all it would take was one shot. Some things are just really hard, and others are nearly impossible.

In any case – in this case – I drove to Cosmotor. There they took the whole engine apart, found a stripped screw and a leaky seal, patched it all up and put me on my way for the second time. I was a happy camper. I’d spent the time and it was right now, and I wouldn’t have to deal with that problem again. My father had meanwhile gotten a laptop for the trip, so that problem was dealt with too. Things were looking up. &quotI’ll be out of here in the morning,&quot I thought to myself. And went back up to Harriman to camp out in my pretty flowers. A couple of my friends came up to the campground with me, and we had a nice little fire and chilled out went to sleep. Lovely night to end trying day.