Bob left early with the fishing guide, leaving me with the truck and the rest of the day to find my own adventure. We’d met up in New Zealand for 10 days to hang out and explore. I was traveling there for my nephew’s wedding and invited my best friend from high school as a way to reconnect. The only challenge, Bob doesn’t ride bikes.
I dug myself out of bed and shambled across the street for breakfast, butterflies capering in my guts. I’d planned a big day on the bike, and I was nervous as hell about it.
Sitting at my desk back home, it all seemed so exciting, not to mention easy. Rent a bike. Find the trail head. Ride. Enjoy. Big adventure, easily executed.
On the ground in Taupō, it looked a bit different. Take the truck, which I hadn’t driven yet (his name only on the rental agreement), drive the wrong side of the road (and truck) up to the busy bike shop, make sure to get a bike that fits properly, navigate up over the hill to the next bay, find parking, find the trail head, DON’T GET LOST, DON’T GET HURT. Have a good time.
For all my adventurous impulses, when you are on your own on the other side of the world, all the risks are magnified. There’s no one to call to bail you out if you take a wrong turn or injure yourself. There’s no one to bounce ideas off, no one to check you as you ride along, guessing at the right ride strategy.
On a day like this, there are two fears battling in your mind. The first is the fear of the unknown. The things you don’t know (everything) grow like shadows at the edge of a campfire, wolves ready to pounce. The second is the fear of not doing what you came to do, of rejecting the adventure and going home knowing it was all there for you to do, if only you hadn’t been so afraid.
If you’re lucky, the second fear conquers the first, and you do the thing, and it goes roughly to plan, and you’re glad you did it. In this case, the driving was fine, easy even. The bike shop wasn’t too crowded, and I successfully sized up from a medium to a large Scott Genius that fit me well. I threw it in the back of the truck and headed for Kinloch, twenty minutes away. In Kinloch, I found the parking lot by the beach, though I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that I could just pull in and park and leave the truck there all day without paying. The US is not nearly so generous. I loaded up and rechecked the map and then started pedaling.
The whole ride story is here.
Suffice it to say, it was a great day on the bike, perfect weather, beautiful scenery, fun trails, a swim at the end, followed by ice cream, all within walking distance of the truck, far more than I could have asked or imagined, all of it oddly under-girded by that fear of what might go wrong, all of it driven by the fear of not finding out how great an adventure it could actually be.
Back at the hotel, in the evening, Bob asked me how my ride had been. “Great,” I said. “You catch anything?”
“Nothing much,” he said.