July 29, 2025
The virtual wall map
We have Rachael to credit for this idea. When I returned to the apartment yesterday she beckoned me over to show me something on her iPad. It was a map of the world, with four or five large circles or ovals hand drawn on it, showing the different parts of the world we've been lucky enough to visit in our bicycling travels together. She's been thinking back on them while sitting around waiting for her foot to heal and was proposing it as a way of showing all of the places we e gotten to visit, now that we're at a transition point into a different way of traveling.
Like some of you that have many bike tours under your belt, we had a large map of Western Europe mounted on the back bedroom of our condominium. For over fifteen years we maintained it faithfully, drawing in the routes of our latest tour. By the end it was getting difficult to read as lines became faded, new routes overlapped with earlier tours, and we ran out of different colors to represent different tours.
I'm pretty sure we still have this map squirreled away in storage, and maybe we'll have a stable enough lifestyle and a large enough wall to mount it on someday so that it would make sense to haul it out. In fact though, it's not really to the point any more and hasn't been for nearly 20 years. It doesn't include any of our travels since we went vagabond seven years ago of course, but also it was too geographically limited. As much as we were focused on Europe, it didn't include our tours of Japan, Taiwan, Australia, or North America. We really need something more broad in scale to help us remember (and to share with others) all the places we've toured together (and I toured on my own before Rachael and I teamed up 37 years ago).
So the solution we've come up with is a Virtual Wall Map, which for the time being at least we'll implement as an appendix at the end of this journal, just as we've added an index for bird photography.
Were envisioning it as a set of regional collections: Asia and Australasia; the Balkans; Spain; France; Italy; Northern Europe; England; Canada; the USA (Probably broken out into regional subsets). We're thinking that each subset will include overview maps for each of the tours, maybe a few characteristic photos, maybe a few words of context, maybe links to associated journals where they exist. We'll figure it out as we go.
So this is mostly just by way of explanation, so you'll be aware it's down there at the bottom in case you care to check it out. We'll start with Asia and Australasia, as soon as I put together the map for our second tourof Taiwan to add to these:
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2 weeks ago
"For the last 5k into Kaiuia we were joined by a very remarkable solo woman cyclist, an Aukland resident who gave us a thumbnail sketch of her last 5 years as a vagabond cyclist as we rode along, with extensive touring through all parts of Europe and a ride up the Nile to Aswan (her description squared with Barbara Savage's account - impoverished residents hurling rocks and swinging sticks at her as she passed by - and terrifying drivers. At about 3 in the afternoon, she was on her way to Aukland, with still 90k to go before nightfall."
2 weeks ago
NZ was my first ever solo tour, 6 months, then 6 months in Australia. I admire the solo cyclists you met cycling in Egypt, and I don't think I met her, though did met other solo women cyclists. That would have been the best serendipity of the connection could have been. However, I so think about early on (within the first few weeks) I stayed at a farm on the North Island with a son who just returned from doing the Big Overland trucks in Africa...the first that I had heard of this type of travel...so I think I was primed to hearing when I met Patrick of his desire to cycle in Africa....that a seed had already been planted in my mind.
2 weeks ago