Day Ten-

I repent my earlier hubris- mosquitoes are the true rulers of the unclaimed lands.  This truth is thrown in my face every single night as I lie in overheated exasperation, locked away in my tent.  Too much has already been written about these barbarians, but in my life- they force me to withdraw to my tent rather than take time to draw what I see.  They make me think twice about whether I cook dinner or just eat my quinoa raw.  And last but not least, the make this page dificult to transcribe onto a computer because I am too busy sscratching.  That said, I still find myself in beautiful locations every night, whether forest or field.

A Story:
Yesterday, I tried to cycle a new record for myself, and top 100 miles.  This is called a century day (or some such language, I haven't seen enough other cyclists [two] to get the lingo down) and my record so far has been 89 miles.  This day was going well, including a stop for ice cream, and a perusal of a library in my brother's college town.  I have been seeing less and less blackberries, but fortunately I have been moving into wineberry country, a treat I have not had before.  At mile 70, however, my rear tire started to go flat, slowly.  It has a tendency to do so, so I ignored it for the time.  I felt the press of time and so I began passing by things I would normally stop for- interesting skeletons, deer sightings, and good berry patches  Then I realized I had left my maps at a water stop two miles back.  At the same time as I retrieved the maps, my front tire deflated.  Deflated myself, and wet, I decided this day was not the day to make a century, and I found a decent campsite next to a tractor-trailer loading facility.  It was a wet camp, but it had a great wineberry selection.  I decided that the world had stepped in to slow me down, and force me to eat berries.  I complied.

The next day I worked to patch both tires, only to have both valves break at the seam to the tube through some yet unknown error of mine or simply age.  I still had my spare, but for those of you unfamiliar with bicycles, they necessitate two wheels.  I sat for a while by the road, before resigning myself start walking my bike on the one wheel to a bike shop in Frenchtown, 10 miles away, and hope someone with a pick-up would give me a ride.  I did find some nice folks in a car, but they were also broken down, waiting for AAA.  We consoled each other for a while before a very nice cyclist named Peter swung by and gave me an extra tube.  I am constantly amazed by the  interest and generosity of people once you get them out of their cars or homes.

Looking out over the Delaware

On My Phone:
I still think that it is unbelievable that I can be in my tent outside Nowhereville, PA in a thunderstorm and can check my email.  For those of you who didn't see in a picture I haven't figured out how to put up yet, I brought with me a smartphone, whose intellect has cause me to dub it "The Oracle."  It is my wee scrying glass into the technological world, and when thunder crashes overhead and I am dry but for the grace of nylon.  I can see some of my wilderness teachers shaking their heads if they knew, bit I can see others saying "yeah, use what you've got!"  This trip isn't meant to be like the others, adventures into wilderness.  This journey is me trying to figure out how I can live simply, carefully, without abandoning other parts of who I am.  Both times I did the Kroka Vermont Semester, as a student and as an instructor, I put my outside life on hold.  I want to experiment with integrating two (apparently) disparate parts of my being.  So there is another reason for this trip.  I have a sneaking suspicion a lot of paragraphs on this blog will turn out that way.

So far I have gone 460 miles, and I'm at the New Hope Library in Pennsylvania.

In other news, the last few days' highlights:

• Talking with Peter, a retired German man from South Africa who has cycled over 50k miles, and was travelling from Florida to Maine.  
• Seeing a black bear in a corn field
• Seeing more fawns in a day than I have in the rest of my life.
• Eating wineberries for the first time!