Bike Trip Quotes

Even though she had been warned, she tripped over the bike. She probably tripped because she'd been warned and was telling herself not to trip over the bike. She did that sometimes. It was often easier not to know what obstacles were in the way.

Outside my bike, never has anything important in my life been just mine." My body stilled, so did my heart, and my eyes locked with his. He started moving again, slowly, deeply and he kept talking. "Always castoffs, leftovers, used, sometimes even food from the dumpsters." My heart started beating again, only to trip over itself; my breath came fast, not only from what was happening to my body but what he was saying. "Vance-" His lips came to mine, his hands moved out of my hair and went to the side of my face and he stared in my eyes, pressing deep inside. "Mine," he muttered, his deep voice hoarse, that fierce undercurrent there. His tone caused a shiver to run through me, straight through to my soul. Then he kissed me.

Take care of your car in the garage, and the car will take care of you on the road.

Things I want to do with Hannah: dance, watch a movie, camp, swim, hike, bike, take a trip, build something, have a food fight, write more, do Christmas-

I am emotional about engines, if you hurt my car, you hurt my heart.

We ran like young wild furies, where angels feared to tread. The woods were dark and deep. Before us demons fled. We checked Coke bottle bottoms to see how far was far. Our worlds of magic wonder were never reached by car. We loved our dogs like brothers, our bikes like rocket ships. We were going to the stars, to Mars we'd make round trips. We swung on vines like Tarzan, and flashed Zorro's keen blade. We were James Bond in his Aston, we were Hercules unchained. We looked upon the future and we saw a distant land, where our folks were always ageless, and time was shifting sand. We filled up life with living, with grins, scabbed knees, and noise. In glass I see an older man, but this book's for the boys.

Someone once told me to always live for the little things in life. Live for 5am sunrises and 5pm sunsets where you'll see colours in the sky that don't usually belong. Live for road trips and bike rides with music in your ears and the wind in your hair. Live for days when you're surrounded by your favourite people who make you realise that the world is not a cold, harsh place. Live for the little things because they will make you realise that this is what life is about, this is what it means to be alive.

Try to roll with the punches. Keep your chin up. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Vote Democrat in every election. Ride your bike in the park. Dream about my perfect, golden body. Take your vitamins. Drink eight glasses of water a day. Pull for the Mets. Watch a lot of movies. Don’t work too hard at your job. Take a trip to Paris with me. Come to the hospital when Rachel has her baby and hold my grandchild in your arms. Brush your teeth after every meal. Don’t cross the street on a red light. Defend the little guy. Stick up for yourself. Remember how beautiful you are. Remember how much I love you. Drink one Scotch on the rocks every day. Breathe deeply. Keep your eyes open. Stay away from fatty foods. Sleep the sleep of the just. Remember how much I love you.

I biked over to my dad's flat and emotionally blackmailed him into lending me enough cash to leave the country. On that trip I learnt something very inmortant. Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment i boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed.

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.

Some bikers have a code about who they put on the backs of their bikes and when. Rally, party, road trip, could be whoever you pick up. Your wheels are takin’ you home, for me, for Chaos, only the old lady. A woman comes up here, she has her own ride. That way, I’m done, she can go. You gotta wait for me to take you where you need to be. This means, unless I take you, you aren’t goin’ anywhere.

Asking someone else to drive your sports car is like asking someone else to kiss your girlfriend.

have so many merry little pots bubbling away in the fire of my enthusiasm: Myron, future trips, modern poetry, Yeats, Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, villanelles, maybe Mlle, maybe The New Yorker or The Atlantic (poems sent out make blind hope spring eternal—even if rejections are immanent), spring: biking, breathing, sunning, tanning. All so lovely and potential.

Among all the machines, motorcar is my favorite machine.

When Reiko left, I stretched out on the sofa and closed my eyes. I lay there steeping myself into silence when, out of nowhere, I thought of the time Kizuki and I took a motorcycle trip. That had been autumn too, I realized. Autumn how many years ago? Yes, four years ago. I recalled the small of Kizuki's leather jacket and the racket made by that red Yamaha 125cc bike. We went to a spot far down the coast, and came back the same evening, exhausted. Nothing special happened on that trip, but I remembered it well. the sharp autumn wind moaned in my ears, and looking up at the sky, my hands clutching Kizuki's jacket, I felt as if I might be swept into outer space.

I am so obsessed with the cars that sometimes I feel like my heart is not a muscle, it's an engine.

Yet I have reflected on the fact that for most of use, there is a hard, impassable barrier between the most imaginatively detailed depravity and its real-life execution. It's the same solid steel wall that inserts itself between a kinife and my wrist even when I'm at my most disconsolate. So how was Kevin able to raise that crossbow, point it at Laura's breastbone, and then really, actually, in time and space, squeeze the release? I can only assume that he discovered what I never wish to. That there is no barrier. That like my trips abroad or this ludicrous scheme of bike locks and invitations on school stationaery, the very squeezing of that release can be broken down into a series of simple constituent parts. It may be no more miraculous to pull the trigger of a bow or a gun than it is to reach for a glass of water. I fear that crossing into the "unthinkable" turns out to be no more athletic than stepping across the threshold of an ordinary room; and that, if you will, is the trick. The secret. As ever, the secret is that there is no secret. He must almost have wanted to giggle, though that is not his style; those Columbine kids did giggle. And once you have found out that there is nothing to stop you—that the barrier, so seemingly uncrossable, is all in your head—it must be possible to step back and forth across that threshold again and again, shot after shot, as if an unintimidating pipsqueak has drawn a line across the carpet that you must not pass and you launch tauntingly over it, back and over it, in a mocking little dance.

We ran like young wild furies, where angels feared to tread. The woods were dark and deep. Before us demons fled. We checked Coke bottle bottoms to see how far was far. Our worlds of magic wonder were never reached by car. We loved our dogs like brothers, our bikes like rocket ships. We were going to the stars, to Mars we’d make round trips. We swung on vines like Tarzan, and flashed Zorro’s keen blade. We were James Bond in his Aston, we were Hercules unchained. We looked upon the future and we saw a distant land, where our folks were always ageless, and time was shifting sand. We filled up life with living, with grins, scabbed knees, and noise. In glass I see an older man, but this book’s for the boys.

I liked the way the boats looked, but I didn’t do anything about it. After a blowup with the feculent Times bloater—lying there on his waterbed playing the paper comb and drinking black rum—I flew up to Houston, Texas— don’t ask me why—and bought a touring bike. A bicycle, not a motorcycle. And I pedaled it to Los Angeles. The most terrible trip in the world. I mean Apsley Cherry-Garrard with Scott at the pole didn’t have a clue. I endured sandstorms, terrifying and lethal heat, thirst, freezing winds, trucks that tried to kill me, mechanical breakdowns, a Blue Norther, torrential downpours and floods, wolves, ranchers in single-engine planes dropping flour bombs. And Quoyle, the only thing that kept me going through all this was the thought of a little boat, a silent, sweet sailboat slipping through the cool water. It grew on me. I swore if I ever got off that fucking bicycle seat which was, by that time, welded into the crack of me arse, if ever I got pried off the thing I’d take to the sea and never leave her.

It’s really strange watching people walk past. They all seem to be in such a hurry that they nearly trip over their own feet. Those on bicycles whiz by so fast I can’t even tell who’s on the bike. The people in this neighborhood aren’t particularly attractive to look at. The children especially are so dirty you wouldn’t want to touch them with a ten-foot pole. Real slum kids with runny noses. I can hardly understand a word they say.

...the land is moody, waiting. Den turns around and looks at his father who leans into the bike, leans into a long drag on his cigarette, leans into a thought not ready for words. The man is so familiar. They should be at home by now. They should be sitting at the dinner table. This familiarity is deeper than the desert, longer than the miles they’ve traveled. It confuses Dennis. What is the source of this sadness? It’s time to go home. Den holds the camera steady.

Riding a bike is one of the best ways to explore parts of Finland in summer. The terrain is largely flat, main roads are in good condition and traffic is generally light. Bicycle tours are further facilitated by the liberal camping regulations, excellent cabin accommodation at campgrounds, and the long hours of daylight in June and July. The drawback is this: distances in Finland are vast. It’s best to look at planning shorter explorations in particular areas, and combining cycling with bus and train trips – Finnish buses and trains are very bike-friendly

Pop trips over some vegetation and lets go. I’m roaring down the slanting, bumpy dirt path, trying to dodge the rocks and shrieking with delighted terror. I’m heading into the stand of Java plum trees at the end of our clearing when I lose balance and crash into a lantana bush. I’m winded and scratched as I try to crawl out of the prickly bush. My bike lies in the path, tires spinning, already getting smeared with red Kauai dirt. Pop runs over and picks me up to see if I’m okay. My knees have hit something and are scraped, lantana thorns tangle my hair, but I’m panting with excitement. “Let’s do it again!

Recent estimates have Chinese companies outstripping U.S. competitors ten to one in quantity of food deliveries and fifty to one in spending on mobile payments. China’s e-commerce purchases are roughly double the U.S. totals, and the gap is only growing. Data on total trips through ride-hailing apps is somewhat scarce, but during the height of competition between Uber and Didi, self-reported numbers from the two companies had Didi’s rides in China at four times the total of Uber’s global rides. When it comes to rides on shared bikes, China is outpacing the United States at an astounding ratio of three hundred to one.

I hate the Fourth of July. The early middle age of summer. Everything is alive and kicking for now, but the eventual decline into fall has already set itself in motion. Some of the lesser shrubs and bushes, seared by the heat, are starting to resemble a bad peroxide job. The heat reaches a blazing peak, but summer is lying to itself, burning out like some alcoholic genius. And you start to wonder - what have I done with June? The poorest of the lot - the Vladeck House project dwellers who live beneath my co-op - seem to take summer in stride; they groan and sweat, drink the wrong kind of lager, make love, the squat children completing mad circles around them by foot or mountain bike. But for the more competitive of New Yorkers, even for me, the summer is there to be slurped up. We know summer is the height of being alive. We don’t believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we know that we’re only given eighty summers or so per lifetime, and each one has to be better than the last, has to encompass a trip to that arts center up at Bard, a seemingly mellow game of badminton over at some yahoo’s Vermont cottage, and a cool, wet, slightly dangerous kayak trip down an unforgiving river. Otherwise, how would you know that you have lived summertime best? What if you missed out on some morsel of shaded nirvana?

Playboy: Do you believe religious things about drugs? Thompson: No, I never have. That’s my main argument with the drug culture. I’ve never believed in that guru trip; you know, God, nirvana, that kind of oppressive, hipper-than-thou bullshit. I like to just gobble the stuff right out in the street and see what happens, take my chances, just stomp on my own accelerator. It’s like getting on a racing bike and all of a sudden you’re doing 120 miles per hour into a curve that has sand all over it and you think, “Holy Jesus, here we go,” and you lay it over till the pegs hit the street and metal starts to spark. If you’re good enough, you can pull it out, but sometimes you end up in the emergency room with some bastard in a white suit sewing your scalp back on.

Rebel [Verse 1] I don't give a fuck my brudda, I never have I'm straight from the gutter my brudda, we never had We living on a budget - holes in the rooftop Room full of buckets, it's getting bad Things could be worse I suppose, school trips, school kids Cursing my clothes, is it the same in every house When the curtains are closed? (daydreamin') I'm in a world of my own (I ain't leavin') It must be because I hate my reality That's why I'm on the verge of embracing insanity Put me in a padded room Throw away the key and let me escape the anarchy I can't take it, I turn my back on the world I can't face it, Ray-Ban gang fam Can't see my eyes cause I'm on my dark shades shit (Ray Charles) [Bridge] Black everything, you can ask David Cameron if we're living in the dark ages Black everything, you can ask David Black everything, you can ask David Black everything, you can ask David Cameron if we're living in the dark ages [Hook] (It's a living hell) I'm a rebel Always have been Where I'm come from it's a mad ting (It's a living hell) Standing in my Stan Smiths Stamping on the canvas for action (It's a living hell) All I acquired from the riot Is people are sick and tired of being quiet (It's a living hell) Dying to be heard That's why there's fire in my words [Verse 2] I don't give a fuck my brudda, I never will Straight from the gutter my brudda, rare real We been living life like "fuck it", living life like there's nothing To live for but the money, I'mma keep it 100 The hunger inside is what drives us That's why there's youngers inside who are lifers They say love is blind so you might just Fall in love with them crimes that'll blind us And I'd be lying if I said I wasn't out late Around H, scales out, another ounce weighed More pounds made, sounds great Salts under my tongue, my mouth's laced So many feds chasing me down, the ground shakes Helicopters, bikes and cars chasing So many officers behind, my heart's racing [Bridge] [Hook x2]

Kelly’s Island was fabulous. It was still early in the season and there were very few people about. We spent the day riding up and down quiet little lanes and exploring every inch of the island. We visited several beaches, I swam in a disused quarry, we played crazy golf – this time, a more traditional (crap) British style, complete with a windmill that you had to putt through – and we ate many ice-creams. We returned our bikes late afternoon, much to the delight of the tyrannical lady in charge of rentals, and boarded the ferry back to the mainland, before driving to a rest area further along Lake Erie.

Sweden’s capital is an expansive and peaceful place for solo travellers. It is made up of 14 islands, connected by 50 bridges all within Lake Mälaren which flows out into to the Baltic Sea. Several main districts encompass islands and are connected by Stockholm’s bridges. Norrmalm is the main business area and includes the train station, hotels, theatres and shopping. Őstermalm is more upmarket and has wide spaces that includes forest. Kungsholmen is a relaxed neighbourhood on an island on the west of the city. It has a good natural beach and is popular with bathers. In addition to the city of 14 islands, the Stockholm Archipelago is made up of 24,000 islands spread through with small towns, old forts and an occasional resort. Ekero, to the east of the city, is the only Swedish area to have two UNESCO World Heritage sites – the royal palace of Drottningholm, and the Viking village of Birka. Stockholm probably grew from origins as a place of safety – with so many islands it allowed early people to isolate themselves from invaders. The earliest fort on any of the islands stretches back to the 13th century. Today the city has architecture dating from that time. In addition, it didn’t suffer the bombing raids that beset other European cities, and much of the old architecture is untouched. Getting around the city is relatively easy by metro and bus. There are also pay‐as‐you‐go Stockholm City Bikes. The metro and buses travel out to most of the islands, but there are also hop on, hop off boat tours. It is well worth taking a trip through the broad and spacious archipelago, which stretches 80 kms out from the city. Please note that taxis are expensive and, to make matters worse, the taxi industry has been deregulated leading to visitors unwittingly paying extortionate rates. A yellow sticker on the back window of each car will tell you the maximum price that the driver will charge therefore, if you have a choice of taxis, choose

He'd been hit by a car, knocked off his bike. At the funeral the vicar had called it an "accident". But somehow the word wasn't enough. It wasn't big enough, powerful enough - didn't mean enough. He hadn't spilled a cup of tea, he hadn't tripped over his own feet. He'd had the life smashed out of him. It felt like there should be a whole new word invented just to describe it.

Welcome to Easytripguides. We are an outdoor adventure blog dedicated to encouraging individuals and families to break away from their daily life and reconnect through nature. Easytripguides usually shares various blogs and product reviews on kayaking, biking, camping, hunting, survival camping, etc. We further help families and individuals to go out and plan their trips safely. They also share gear reviews to help everyone explore using the best gears and products they tested, trusted, and loved.

My preferred mode of travel to and from the island is the fast ferry. From April through December, both the Steamship Authority and Hy-Line Cruises operate ferries throughout the day. The trip takes an hour, and round trip costs around eighty dollars. Weather often affects travel to and from the island. If the wind is blowing twenty-five miles an hour or stronger, the ferries may cancel (each trip is at the discretion of the captain). If there is fog (which there often is in June and early July), planes are grounded. (Fun fact: Tom Nevers Field was used by the U.S. military in World War II to practice taking off and landing in the fog.) Once on Nantucket, you can either rent a Jeep (Nantucket Windmill Auto Rental, Nantucket Island Rent a Car) or rent a bike (Young’s Bicycle Shop, Nantucket Bike

A grocery store trip could become an adventure by turning it into a family competition (who can finish their portion of the list first?) or by adding a stop at an international grocery store or a farmer’s market. If you work from home, you’ll take breaks at some point, so why not use one for a fifteen-minute bike ride?

Someone once told me to always live for 5 am sunrises and 5 pm sunsets, where you'll see colors in the sky that usually don't belong. Live for the road trips and bike rides, with music in ears and wind in hair. Live for the days when you're surrounded by your favorite people who make you realize that the world is not a cold, harsh place. Live for the little things.

He tosses my book bag over his shoulder and pulls me toward the door. This time, he has two helmets, and he helps me fasten mine. I love that he tries to take such care of me. My apartment or yours? I ask. He brushes the hair back that’s hanging around my face, pushing it under the helmet. I don’t want you going back to your apartment while Trip’s there. He looks closely watching my face. That okay with you? Fine, I say. I kind of like it when you go all Neanderthal. I grin, and he straddles the bike. I climb on behind him and wrap my hands around his waist. He hisses playfully when I lift his shirt and lay my hands against the tender skin of his belly. We zoom through the streets and into the parking deck beneath his building. He bends at the waist and tosses me over his shoulder. “You haven’t seen Neanderthal yet,” he warns as he carries me up the steps.

I love the wheels, I mean steering wheel.

I will be confident about my ability to resist disease. I will succeed at losing pounds and regaining excellent health. I will be able to fit into fashionable clothes, including my favorite blue dress. My cholesterol will improve by at least fifty points. I will look good in a bathing suit at the pool this summer. I will have more energy and be able to enjoy bike trips with my children. My husband/wife/other will find me more attractive. My job will be less tiring, and I will perform better and make more money. I will save money on health care and will be able to save for my retirement. I will have a better social life and be in a position to attract John [or Jane]. My knees and back will stop hurting.

I found the stack of letters on my desk when I got back. People really liked the idea of the trip; they found it romantic—and I think they were amused, learning where I was popping up from week to week—but I didn’t know that while it was happening. Aside from other cyclists I encountered on the road occasionally and the people I interviewed along the way, I pedaled along in pretty much total isolation

If you tell yourself that you need more riding experience, more mechanical prowess, more tools, a better bike, and try to cover every single contingency you might face before setting out for a weekend on the bike by yourself, you'll likely never take a solo trip.

Denmark’s capital contains 237 miles of wide, dedicated bike lanes. To keep riders safe, most of them are elevated and buffered by curbs from car traffic. By 2019, more than 60 percent of the city’s commuters and students made their daily round trips by bike, up from 36 percent in 2012.

His ideas came to him whenever his mind could escape from his day-to-day responsibilities. In the shower, an infrequent errand trip without his two children, even on the exercise bike when he didn’t have the evening news on to distract him.

Riding a bike through all this is like navigating the collective neural pathways of some vast global mind. It really is a trip inside the collective psyche of a compacted group of people.

This trip is about simplifying life and minimizing luxury.

And,” Eileen continued, “it turns out that Ted is married to Lou, and Ed is married to Sue.” Abby felt her eyes get wide. “Wait, what?” “They swap,” Eileen said, with a smug-looking smile. “On the bike trips. They told us all at brunch, before we went back. They say it keeps things fresh and exciting.” “Oh my God,” said Abby. “So they’re swingers? A foursome?” “A polycule,” said Eileen, pronouncing a word she most likely hadn’t known before the trip.

When Walter had come to see Lina’s show, five years ago, he’d taken a secret trip to see Carrie and ask her a question. He told her, without words, I’m ready now. She lived, like a graduate student, in a neighborhood that felt like a vacation. Blooming flowers. Bamboo blinds, music coming out onto the sidewalks. She kept finches in a white painted aviary and rode her bike to the university library. But she’d sent him back to his life.

Then I had one of those odd shifts of focus and looked down at my bike, and my dusty, worn gloves on the handlebars. We were in the greatest place in the world, but what had it taken to get here? Quite a bit. Learning to ride, getting a driver’s license in high school. Acquiring tools, learning to change flat tires and clutch cables. Gaining dirt experience and going to dealerships to shop for the right bike. Installing knobbies and handguards and a skidplate. After years of youthful indigence, moving through a series of jobs that finally allowed you to afford a truck or a bike trailer. Learning to read maps and cross rivers in deep water. Finding helmets and enduro jackets and motocross boots that fit. Getting a passport, paying your bike registration, learning a smattering of useful Spanish.… And living long enough to have friends who were crazy enough to do all these things, as well. People you could count on who’d gone through the same lifetime of motorcycle connections that had brought us to this perfect spot in time. As I put my helmet back on, it occurred to me that you are never more completely the sum of everything you’ve ever been than when you take a slightly difficult motorcycle trip into a strange land. And make it back out again.

Have fun when moving. Play tennis with a friend. Jog with your dog. Go on a bike ride and explore your surroundings. Have a kayaking trip with a group of friends. The less it feels like exercise, the easier it will be to make it a permanent part of your life.

I grew up in the 80s, a small-town girl with big dreams from a town called Pitt Meadows, just outside of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I come from a humble home, where it was common to hear, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Which is code for, “don’t say anything unless it’s something agreeable.” AKA, “don’t stir the pot!” Just a mild form of dysfunction for a highly sensitive girl like me. I learned to keep my thoughts inside, as it might not be the popular opinion. My parents were married in 1967, still in love today, which says a lot these days. I was raised, middle class, at a time when technology was in the infant stage. We received our news from television and the newspapers. We had our adventures outside in nature, riding bikes and daily trips to the store where you could buy 1 cent candy still, wearing seat belts wasn’t mandatory and smoking anywhere was considered normal. We had telephones with cords attached to the wall. If we wanted to talk to our friends, we dialled and they answered, without checking to see who was calling first.

Kedging Let’s admit it. It’s not easy to keep doing exercise six days a week, year in and year out. Sometimes we falter, sometimes we slip off the bike, we get bored, and sometimes we need help. We all do. So Harry and I have come up with just the thing: “kedging.” Originally, it was a nautical term: When sailors were becalmed and drifting toward the rocks, they would literally pull themselves forward (using a small boat to set a small anchor) to get out of danger. They called kedging. It’s what you have to do when you’re tempted to say “the hell with it” and never exercise again. For our purposes, kedging means climbing out of the ordinary by setting a terrific goal for yourself (with a reward at the end) and working like crazy to get there. Make a long-range plan, maybe with a group of friends in some wonderful place, and then do it. It’s demanding but fun, like signing up for a serious “adventure trip.” Maybe one of those great bike trips in Europe, or a white-water rafting adventure, or a yoga retreat, or maybe a week at an interesting spa. Think about walking or running for a cause and get a friend to train with you. Most of these “kedges” mean training beforehand. But the training and anticipation perk us up and give shape and purpose to our daily training. And there’s that great reward at the end. The Rich Hours

On day three I am very excited to attend one of our special excursions for which you pay extra. We are going to get off the boat early in the morning in Bermuda, where we will be given bicycles. We will ride our bikes around the island with a guide to a special secluded beach where we can swim and have rum swizzles and then we will be taken back to the ship by a party boat. Sounds pretty good, right? That’s what I thought, too. I wouldn’t shut up about it. For weeks before we left I bragged about how I had chosen the best excursion. It was fun and fitness combined! It was a great way to see the island! My husband and I wait at the designated pickup point at 8:30 A.M. No one else shows up. A quick check of our itinerary reveals the heartbreaking truth. The bike trip was yesterday. In my excitement, I memorized it wrong. I cry. I cry like a three year old who just wants to take her toy cash register into the bathtub. I cry in a way that reveals that I’m not finding the rest of the cruise that fun. This is definitely the low point of the trip, until the fire. Oh yes, there’s a ship fire coming in this story. Wait for it.

Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.

The transformative nature of road trips: On the Road (Jack Kerouac, 1957): Heralded as quintessentially American, On the Road captures the restless Beat movement and subsequent 1960s counterculture. Blue Highways (William Least Heat-Moon, 1982): Personal anguish sends the author on a three-month soul-searching road trip through the forgotten corners of America. The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (Luis Alberto Urrea, 2004): Socially engaged in a way that Steinbeck would have endorsed, The Devil’s Highway details the trials of twenty-six men who attempt to cross the Mexican border into southern Arizona. “Go Greyhound” (Bob Hicok, 2004): Hicok’s poem speaks to the feelings of loneliness and exhaustion that often plague travelers, as well as the relief that comes with shedding a turbulent past. Easy Rider (1969): In this classic film, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper cross America on bikes. Thelma and Louise (1991): Two working women set out on their own, with unexpected consequences. Bombón: El Perro (2004): A struggling mechanic begins to turn his life around when he adopts a dog, who accompanies him on his escapades.

Take a trip to a local park; map a bike ride through a scenic trail; plan a trip to a local beach and stroll the shore at sunrise.