Distance, Driving, and Strange Places

Driving in Utah

Reminds me of Bryce Canyon

For me, there is nothing like driving in a car to really give me a sense of how far we traveled on our bicycles.  3800 miles on bicycles is a long, long, way!  It amazes me in some ways, and in others it seems rather ordinary in that it was just a series of 30 – 90 mile rides.  It was just every day for three months.

Concrete foundations, dust, and gravel roads is all that there is left of the internment camp. 

Yesterday, we drove to the site of the Topaz Internment Camp in Delta, Utah.  It was an odd pilgrimage.  It was a god-forsaken place in the middle of nowhere.  It was hard to believe that my father was there during WW II with thousands of other Japanese Americans.  It was an eerie place.  David felt an evil spirit which is not too surprising given what it was.  I was glad to have made the visit.  It connected me with my family’s history.  It made real the stories that my dad told over the years.

Today we are traveling through Utah into Wyoming.  Miles and miles we go each day and there are many more until we reach the east coast.  We see beautiful mountains and lakes as we drive, but it is at 60 miles an hour through the glass of the windshield.  It makes me long for the immediacy of riding the bicycle – the slow going.  Yet many of the roads we are driving would not be possible on the bicycle – no water, no services, and many miles between small towns. 

All of this driving makes me appreciate how well planned out I had to be when we were traveled on our bicycles.  I spent hours on navigation, cue sheets, and figuring out accommodations.  On the bicycles an extra ten miles is a lot, especially after a 60 mile day.  This is unlike the car where we went an extra 100 miles after dark because we felt unsafe in the place we had landed.   It does amaze me that the navigation on our tour went as smoothly as it did. Driving allows me a time to reflect on the differences between cycling and driving.