For those of you who didn't read the second page of this journal, I have some shocking news.  Prepare yourselves.  Almost nothing you've read here ever happened. 

I know, I know, you're wondering how a bicycle tour that seemed so real could be so fake.  I'm wondering the same thing.  I seem to have fooled even myself, which is weird, because myself is the guy who wrote the darn thing. 

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Believe it or not, I found writing a fictional bike touring journal to be harder work than reporting on a bike tour that actually occurred.  It's not easy to make stuff up day after day.  It would have required even harder work if I was at all concerned about writing QUALITY fiction.  I'm not a detail-oriented type of guy, so I settled for less quality and more ludicrousness.  (Ludicrosity?)

Anyway, I'm glad I did it.  It was fun, and I'm sort of a fanatic when it comes to fun.  Also, it was good practice.  In the same way I need to ride my bike to keep in shape for riding a bike tour, I need to write words and sentences to keep in shape for writing about a bike tour.  I do hope to write about a real tour sometime this year.

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Coming up is a list of things I considered (and didn't consider) when I first conceived of the idea for a fictional journal.  If the list is helpful to even ONE aspiring fictional bike touring journalist, I will consider my life complete.

• My imaginary tour was always going to be focused on the kinds of challenges we all face while on bicycle tours and taking those challenges to the extreme.  I didn't know how extreme I could get until I started writing.  In the end, I was amazed at how extreme I got about such things as running out of water, bad weather, injuries, border crossing fiascos, strange motel experiences, sickness, animal attacks, lousy food, getting lost, etc.
• The next part of my plan involved taking pictures while on local day rides and adapting them to other parts of the world.  Sometimes I wrote stories based on the pictures themselves.  Other times I looked for photo opportunities to support the stories.  Either way, the pictures helped me to come up with some of the most absurd ideas I've ever come up with--and that's saying something.  Then I expanded on the absurdity until I could think of nothing more absurd than the absurdness I was already writing.
• When I sat at my keyboard each day, I had nothing more than a vague idea of a destination and how I'd get there.  Other than a couple of pre-planned vignettes--such as the Mount Impossible climb--I had no solid plan other than to "wing it."
• I winged it by "letting the story take me where it was destined to go."  Many a famous novelist has used that old cliche when talking about his or her writing.  For the first time in my life, I totally get it.  The more I wrote, the clearer and clearer my cycling path became.
• Attention to continuity was a continuous challenge for me--especially with the pictures.  I don't know how to photo-shop, so I had to try to crop my photos to eliminate snow from pictures that were supposedly taken in Australia, Africa, Southern Europe and South America.  Let me tell you, I cropped to the fullest extent of the law.  Eventually I was forced to supplement recent photos with pictures from the past.  To keep things somewhat legitimate, almost all of those older pictures were also taken while on bike rides.
• Related to the bullet point above, all of the photos were my own with the exception of the stock photos of "Lenin," The Penguin, and a few that I stole from Scott A.  
• I think it became obvious that I ran out of creative steam by the second half of this journal.  Sorry about that.
• I'm also sorry about the intrusion of my alter-egos, G-2 and Chef G.  Those guys are so annoying.

Once again, I want to thank Jeff A. for allowing me to write a fictional journal on this website.  I knew it wouldn't fit into the usual Cycleblaze parameters.  I knew it was a risky venture.  I knew it might have very limited (if any) appeal.  I knew it might even elicit feelings of outright disgust.  Worst of all, I worried that readers would see how realistic my fake journal was and think all my previous journals were also fake.

I wrote it anyway!  The floodgates have been opened!  Now is the time to rush in and fulfill your own imaginary bike touring dreams!  Ride out into the universe!  

Thank you for reading!  I hope it wasn't too painful.