Diary 8-7-03

[Note** I go to school in Colorado Springs, CO, at the Colorado College, I will be a senior this upcoming year, but am on the ‘five year plan’ for school]

I’m in Colorado Springs. I can’t believe I’m here. I’m a total mess, I’m filthy dirty, ridiculously tired, and so full of stories and thoughts that are tied together like a house of cards, I try to tell one story, and a hundred more come down, one after the other, each begging to be told, and injecting a little snipit here and there that I just give up and start laughing at the immensity of it all.

It’s so good to be in a place again where I know people and places. I have a deep and comforting feeling that ‘I live here, this is my home.’ Though I’m not staying in a house of my own, I can come and go whenever I need, there’s plenty of food and water and company it feels so good.

I’ve ridden 3022 miles since the day I left and got here in exactly one month. That’s almost exactly 100 miles a day. Before I left, that’s exactly the number I was looking to get, but two days in, I realized that would be absolutely impossible. And yet here I am, so perfectly on target for what I was thinking for the trip would be that it’s gives me a warm feeling of hearty success.

Seeing friends again, and hanging out, laughing, chilling, eating, and going out is perhaps thte most comfortable thing ever.

There’s an immense difference between being a guest in someone else’s house, and being the host in your own. Being a guest is wonderful, and yet you’re not quite free in the same way as you are at home. In a way looking at the overall feeling of this trip, it feels as if I have been alone on a desert island that I hadn’t resigned myself to living on, and trying and trying to get home, and finally, here I am.

It feels great. Home.

Now the question is, with necessary spare parts hopefully to arrive on Monday, the 11^th, leaving twenty days before school starts again, can I make it California? I guess we’ll see. First I’ve got to get over these Rockies.