Bicycle Journey Quotes

With some stories, you really can't rush things. And it's often best just to sit back and enjoy the journey for what it is.

Bicycle travel was slow enough to mean something, simple enough to be possible, and hard enough to be worth it.

Every time I got on my bicycle after a long hiatus it was like riding back to myself, the only way there. The dissipation of life in the city—days of to-do lists, errands, emails, small talk with strangers—generated static in my mind that I didn’t notice was there until I started pedalling and realized it was gone, the way you don’t hear the hum of a refrigerator until it stops. Such is the paradoxical freedom of cycling the Silk Road. In restricting the range of directions you can travel, in charging ordinary movement with momentum, a bike trip offers that rarest, most elusive of things in our frenetic world: clarity of purpose. Your sole responsibility on Earth, as long as your legs last each day, is to breathe, pedal, breathe—and look around.

When you travel you become invisible if you want. I do want. I like to be the observer. What makes these people who they are Could I feel at home here No one expects you to have the stack of papers back by Tuesday or to check messages or to fertilize the geraniums or to sit full of dread in the waiting room at the protologist’s office. When travelling you have the delectable possibility of not understanding a word of what is said to you. Language becomes simply a musical background for watching bicycles zoom along a canal calling for nothing from you. Even better if you speak the language you catch nuances and make more contact with people. Travel releases spontaneity. You become a godlike creature full of choice free to visit the stately pleasure domes make love in the morning sketch a bell tower read a history of Byzantium stare for one hour at the face of Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna dei fusi. You open as in childhood and – for a time – receive this world. There’s the visceral aspect too – the huntress who is free. Free to go Free to return home bringing memories to lay on the hearth.

Knowledge is the only sword that can cut through harm being done in ignorance.

If I had my way, the trip’s every moment would be a Moment—ripe with meaning, worthy of at least a sidebar or infographic in my personal history book. I looked back to the road, followed the pavement

Trespassing laws bother me. The idea that I can't trespass on private land but private landowners can trespass into my space, by dirtying my air and contaminating my water, has always left me doubting the validity of such restrictions.

When the spirits are low. When the day appears dark. When work becomes monotonous. When hope hardly seems worth having. Just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.’ Arthur Conan Doyle

The male frogs called, attracting mates to lay eggs and begin another generation. Their calls seemed to be protests, an act of defiance. Even as the walls of development squeezed the life out of Texas, that life called to its doomed future, reminding anyone who would listen that it was their home, too. I listened. With a heavy heart, I wondered how anyone could call such destruction progress.

What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.

When cycling, it is simply better alone. You are not concerned with anyone else, your decisions only have an impact on yourself, and you have a greater degree of freedom. I

I much prefer life outdoors and find that it calms me just being outside. When I am cycling, I only have to worry about three things: where I am going, what I am eating and where I will sleep. In the real world, the working world, you have a constant barrage of information you must process.

Once every few weeks, beginning in the summer of 2018, a trio of large Boeing freighter aircraft, most often converted and windowless 747s of the Dutch airline KLM, takes off from Schiphol airport outside Amsterdam, with a precious cargo bound eventually for the city of Chandler, a western desert exurb of Phoe­nix, Arizona. The cargo is always the same, consisting of nine white boxes in each aircraft, each box taller than a man. To get these pro­foundly heavy containers from the airport in Phoenix to their des­tination, twenty miles away, requires a convoy of rather more than a dozen eighteen-wheeler trucks. On arrival and family uncrated, the contents of all the boxes are bolted together to form one enormous 160-ton machine -- a machine tool, in fact, a direct descendant of the machine tools invented and used by men such as Joseph Bramah and Henry Maudslay and Henry Royce and Henry Ford a century and more before. "Just like its cast-iron predecessors, this Dutch-made behemoth of a tool (fifteen of which compose the total order due to be sent to Chandler, each delivered as it is made) is a machine that makes machines. Yet, rather than making mechanical devices by the pre­cise cutting of metal from metal, this gigantic device is designed for the manufacture of the tiniest of machines imaginable, all of which perform their work electronically, without any visible mov­ing parts. "For here we come to the culmination of precision's quarter­millennium evolutionary journey. Up until this moment, almost all the devices and creations that required a degree of precision in their making had been made of metal, and performed their vari­ous functions through physical movements of one kind or another. Pistons rose and fell; locks opened and closed; rifles fired; sewing machines secured pieces of fabric and created hems and selvedges; bicycles wobbled along lanes; cars ran along highways; ball bearings spun and whirled; trains snorted out of tunnels; aircraft flew through the skies; telescopes deployed; clocks ticked or hummed, and their hands moved ever forward, never back, one precise sec­ond at a time."Then came the computer, then the personal computer, then the smartphone, then the previously unimaginable tools of today -- and with this helter-skelter technological evolution came a time of translation, a time when the leading edge of precision passed itself out into the beyond, moving as if through an invisible gateway, from the purely mechanical and physical world and into an immobile and silent universe, one where electrons and protons and neutrons have replaced iron and oil and bearings and lubricants and trunnions and the paradigm-altering idea of interchangeable parts, and where, though the components might well glow with fierce lights send out intense waves of heat, nothing moved one piece against another in mechanical fashion, no machine required that mea­sured exactness be an essential attribute of every component piece.

The Dutch famine of the ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944 had helped spur the creation of a beneficent welfare state that provided cradle-to-grave security for citizens, and perhaps helped shape Dutch attitudes to work and family. Even the Dutch love of bicycles was rooted partly in the planning decisions taken during post-war reconstruction. To understand the Netherlands, then, one had to understand the war.

Being stuck on one side of the river with no options reiterated what I already knew: society tells cyclists we’re not important, that we don’t deserve space. It wasn’t just the lack of options that infuriated me, it was a system that demanded compromise from non-conformists. For me, bicycling was more than transportation. It was my version of praying.

Scientists have linked this alarming decline in large part to habitat loss. Monarch Watch, the University of Kansas’s education, conservation, and research program, estimates that each day, 6000 acres of monarch breeding habitat in the United States are converted to something else: housing or commercial developments, farms, roads, and other human uses. Even farms, which once invited milkweed to thrive between crops and along farm edges, are changing tactics and destroying milkweed. The presence of milkweed in agricultural fields (between crops and on field edges) declined 97 percent from 1999 to 2009 in Iowa, and 94 percent in Illinois. Each year, the migrating monarchs have fewer places to feed on nectar and lay their eggs. They are losing their habitat, losing their homes. Eviction, extinction.

Eat dessert first; life is uncertain.

The (Milkweed) plants sat so vulnerable in ditches, the caterpillars never eating fast enough to keep the milkweed small and inconspicuous. It seemed inevitable that the plants would draw the attention of landowners who were oblivious to the architecture of life, and the monarch's habitat would succomb to mowing.

If all of us committed to one footprint of land...the world would be a better place.

Every day, I biked for the air, climate, frogs and butterflies, and every day, I was told in so many words that my convictions were crumbs easily swept to the margins.

When I was young, I would ride my bike until I was lost...the realization that I could get where I was going on my own, under my own power, unclocked a bigger world for me.

Monarch Watch estimates that each day, 6,000 acres of Monarch breeding habitat in the United States are converted to something else.

We call government support to farmers "subsidies." Support for poor people is instead referred to as "welfare.

capital expenditures required in Clean Technology are so incredibly high,” says Pritzker, “that I didn’t feel that I could do anything to make an impact, so I became interested in digital media, and established General Assembly in January 2010, along with Jake Schwartz, Brad Hargreaves and Matthew Brimer.” In less than two years GA had to double its space. In June 2012, they opened a second office in a nearby building. Since then, GA’s courses been attended by 15,000 students, the school has 70 full-time employees in New York, and it has begun to export its formula abroad—first to London and Berlin—with the ambitious goal of creating a global network of campuses “for technology, business and design.” In each location, Pritzker and his associates seek cooperation from the municipal administration, “because the projects need to be understood and supported also by the local authorities in a public-private partnership.” In fact, the New York launch was awarded a $200,000 grant from Mayor Bloomberg. “The humanistic education that we get in our universities teaches people to think critically and creatively, but it does not provide the skills to thrive in the work force in the 21st century,” continues Pritzker. “It’s also true that the college experience is valuable. The majority of your learning does not happen in the classroom. It happens in your dorm room or at dinner with friends. Even geniuses such as Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, who both left Harvard to start their companies, came up with their ideas and met their co-founders in college.” Just as a college campus, GA has classrooms, whiteboard walls, a library, open spaces for casual meetings and discussions, bicycle parking, and lockers for personal belongings. But the emphasis is on “learning by doing” and gaining knowledge from those who are already working. Lectures can run the gamut from a single evening to a 16-week course, on subjects covering every conceivable matter relevant to technology startups— from how to create a web site to how to draw a logo, from seeking funding to hiring employees. But adjacent to the lecture halls, there is an area that hosts about 30 active startups in their infancy. “This is the core of our community,” says Pritzker, showing the open space that houses the startups. “Statistically, not all of these companies are going to do well. I do believe, though, that all these people will. The cost of building technology is dropping so low that people can actually afford to take the risk to learn by doing something that, in our minds, is a much more effective way to learn than anything else. It’s entrepreneurs who are in the field, learning by doing, putting journey before destination.” “Studying and working side by side is important, because from the interaction among people and the exchange of ideas, even informal, you learn, and other ideas are born,” Pritzker emphasizes: “The Internet has not rendered in-person meetings obsolete and useless. We chose these offices just to be easily accessible by all—close to Union Square where almost every subway line stops—in particular those coming from Brooklyn, where many of our students live.

A bicycle journey through life enhances a person’s body, mind and spirit. Each encounter creates an opening for intellectual growth. A bicycle journey promotes exceptional fitness. Two-wheeled travel offers spiritual lifts in ways unexplainable. On a bicycle, you know you live on the edge, at the peak and into the thrust of life. You live it because you choose it. Or, it chooses you and you accept the opportunity. Thus, you command your life.” Frosty Wooldridge-- Bicycling Around the World--Tire Tracks for Your Imagination

A journey of 4,000 miles begins with a stack of pancakes and one turn of the pedals" - David Barnas

Does every pickup in Idaho come complete with a dog in the back?

A report by an Australian think tank ran the numbers: if nothing changes, human civilization as we know it today will likely collapse by 2050.

It was the intimacy of that moment that struck me most, of being part of the less glamorous rituals of life. I took the opportunity to soak up the gift they had given me: the gift of ordinariness, a window through which to see their unguarded lives.

The thrill of walking comes not so much from movement—except for the initial turning of a step out the door into a journey—but from its gifts of freedom and nonconformity. In a world built on speed, walking somewhere is an act of rebellion. You reject every type of contraption that your forebears have invented to get you there faster—including the bicycle—for your own two legs. You head out into the world while turning your back on its ways.

I had come to appreciate the peace and clarity that cycling with a hangover gave me. It was much easier to focus on just one thing, or even to attain the elusive blank state of mind that made the miles slip by unnoticed. Steering and watching the road for danger by reflex, the mind can climb inside itself and go to sleep.

Surely it's better to lose at a running race at an early age than to reach sixteen riding on a wave of life's inability to disappoint and then commit suicide because the WiFi's gone down for twenty minutes.

Have you ever seen the inner tube of a bicycle tire?” “Of course.” “When it is fully inflated, it can easily take you to your destination. But if there are leaks in it, the tube eventually deflates, and your journey comes to an abrupt end. This is also how the mind works. Worry causes your precious mental energy and potential

He has no audience for his journey, even though he is flying angel-like over the heads of the busy people below. He thinks: for whom am I laughing? Who is watching me? Nobody of course. The eye is a tiny central circle of blak vacancy moated about with the beautiful bicycle-spoke colours of the iris, radial barcode lines of blue or brown like craks in glaze, and round that the fat glistening white of the eye that bespeaks the fat glistening globe of the eyeball itself. But the Eye of the Cosmos, if you'll, if you'll indulge me in, the Eye of the Universe is all blak vacancy and nothing more, nothing at all.

But in the end, you must move forward into the future. While you may not ‘create’ a moment, the very fact that you pedal down the road, that action thrusts you into another unique event in your life. Relish it, live it and smile that life treats you well. You represent living poetry in motion.” FHW

Bicycles are essentially anti-social and selfish institutions. The only valid plea for them is that they develop the calves of the legs.

over

Because they owned only one bicycle, Lintang’s father departed from their home in the middle of the night to make the journey by foot. Once morning came, Lintang followed with his mother on the bicycle.

I was a young man wanting to slay dragons, but I'd grown up swaddled and in a post-dragon world.

A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for. - Grace Murray Cooper

Britain's geography is odd. Peterhead is the eastern-most point of mainland Scotland although that puts it further west than Stratford-upon-Avon, which is on the western side of the British Midlands. It's sometimes difficult to believe that east coast Edinburgh and Dundee are both farther west than west coast Bristol.

The picnic table next to mine was full of old moaners complaining about how the youth of today have it so easy. Well, of course they do. With zero-hour contracts, piles of student debt and house prices containing more zeroes than a Belarusian bank note, they don't know they're born.

During the run-up to the vote there had been an argument that leaving the EU would disproportionately disadvantage the youth. But since the millennials had it so good, the consensus around the table seemed to be that the miserable old sods had given the youngsters a challenge by dragging them out of the EU and the 27 other countries in which they could have found work. That'll teach 'em.

A few miles north of Aberdeen is Balmedie, home to one of Donald Trump's Scottish golf courses. Even if you know nothing about golf you instantly know that the course is one of his, because like every other business he owns, he has his name plastered on it. I'm assuming that 'trump' isn't a euphemism for 'fart' in the USA. It's interesting to see the reaction of the Scottish people to the mendacious human Wotsit, even before he got his tiny fingers on the nuclear button. Michael Forbes, a farmer in Balmedie, won the “Top Scot” trophy at the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards after refusing to sell his land to the pussy-grabbing billionaire. Trump had claimed that Forbes' farm was a slum and would spoil the view of his new hotel. Forbes replied that Trump could “take his money and shove it up his arse.” Trump said that for Scotland this whisky-company's accolade was a “terrible embarrassment”, national laughing-stocks being something of a speciality of his.

Other Scots had it worse. David and Moira Milne lived near the coast. “Before the golf coast came here, this was a pristine, natural landscape, wild and untamed,” said David. “It was rough land, nature at its finest. Now, it's just a golf course. I'm bang in the middle of the estate, I'm afraid.” Trump's solution, as it so often is, was to build a wall, and then he sent the bill to the Milnes, who, like Mexico have promised, refused to pay up. Trump knew the Milnes valued their property's vista because previously Moira had taken Donald Trump Jnr around the front of the house to point out that they had an uninterrupted view of forty miles of coastline. So, to remove what the Milnes held most dear, Trump had his lackeys plant tall trees all around David's property. Nice guy.

Trees aside, nothing grew very tall, the moorland dotted with the occasional low shrub and the odd single stone, standing all alone, like Katie Hopkins at a party.

He said he was from Bradford. “I got lost in Bradford once,” I said. “As long as you can find your way out,” he replied, “then you're going in the right direction.

As a bonus, unless your Spanish is amazing, you won't have a clue what is happening in national politics, which makes for a happier mental state.

wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. – Daphne du Maurier