June 17, 2016

Tomorrow I start my transcontinental bike ride.  Finally!

But first tonight I will see my 18 yo nephew, Max, graduate from high school.  He is already well beyond high school, but tonight at 8pm is the ceremony in which we honor him and his Roosevelt HS classmates.  This will be fun and I'm really looking forward to this event.  This fall he will be at Western Washington University in Bellingham.  Great school and fun town.  Congratulations to you Max!  I love you!

We have had a great stretch of summer weather here in the PNW.  However, ride Day 1, is not looking so good.  That is why I have fenders on my bike and lots of rain gear.  But we should have a dry evening and dry Sunday as we pull into Astoria.

Here is how the next two days will go:

Saturday June 18, 5:30 am Steve and I chug up the hill from our house in Edmonds and zoom into Seattle.  We will need to manage the Seattle Rock 'n Roll Marathon in the morning but we should be fine getting to Pier 54 in order to catch the 7:35 sailing of the Seattle to Bremerton Ferry.  At the Ferry terminal, we will meet up with Beth, Colleen, and Heather.  We will sit inside the ferry and enjoy a dry 1 hour sailing to Bremerton.  Once off the Ferry, next stop is Shelton to meet up with Chelle, Ben and Karen for lunch.  Then finish with day by riding into Friends Landing RV park for camping, shower and awesome dinner that Chelle will provide.

Sunday June 19, we will hopefully enjoy a northerly tailwind and ride on into Astoria.

Right now I'm excited and nervous.  There will be lots of obstacles like wind, heat, rain, hills, flat tires, broken chains, tired legs, etc.  However, I feel I have been planning my whole life for this adventure.  I can't wait to see if I can do it and actually have no doubt that I can.  It will be one pedal stroke at a time, one day at a time.

So, before I crank out of here tomorrow, I truly want to thank my spouse Chelle who is an amazing support and never let me get too wigged out about anything or everything; my sister Tamara who put the wheel in motion and upended her life for this to happen, and my brother and law Loren who is such a good sport and will be so handy on the trip.  Also, I want to thank all of those riding to Astoria with me.  You all are awesome and strong!  Finally, I want to thank all of our financial and emotional supporters.   You all are amazing and truly helping to make my dream come true!  I love you all!

Final Countdown...

Sunday morning June 12.  Less than a week until I leave on my big adventure.  I have been enjoying my time off from work getting everything wrapped up and ready to roll, oh yes also training.  I will do a final long prep ride tomorrow of about 60 miles.  Then spin and insanity Tuesday and Wednesday.  I will take two rest days before I leave.

Today, will be the walk through with my sister and Loren with the Aliner and the van.

Thursday, I take Apollo to his summer foster, Susie.  He will have several doggie friends and a beach to play.  I will miss him terribly but he will have a good summer and I will see him again in September.  I hope he remembers me!

June!!!

JUNE!!

Wow 2 weeks from the start of the ride.  Logistics are starting to work out and come together.  Please check the GOFUNDME page and help sponsor us and the Alzheimers Association.  https://www.gofundme.com/bikeadventure

The Alzheimers association will be her Friday to interview and post some pictures on the website for the Washington State Chapter.

More later and the days get finished with all the tasks that need to be completed.

Pedal on!

May flowers and sunshine

Wow, it is finally May and we are now about a month and a half away from departure.  The weather has changed for the good and we even have had a couple of very hot (for Seattle) summer like days to assist my training.

Here are some update:

1.  I have found a foster for Apollo for the summer.  After significant contemplation, we have decided it would be best for him not to endure this trip and to have a stable home.  He will be staying with a high school girl and her mother near Gig Harbor.  Susie fell in love with Apollo upon meeting him and calls him the "Gentle Giant".  She lives in a safe gated community and it is a 5 minute walk to the beach, he loves the beach.  Plus he will have several dog friends that he can play with.  Susie is already planning a birthday party for him and has invited his new friends.  I will need to get him a bow tie to wear to this event.  I will take him to Susie on June 16, stay with him for some time to help get him settled in.  Then I will drive away with tears in my eyes fore I really love my dog.  But these will be good tears cause this will be much better for him and therefore me during this trip.  I already look forward to getting him back to Edmonds in September.  On a side note, Pipi will be very happy he is gone for the summer.  Man does she boss him around!

2.  The trip is going to more likely take me 10 weeks to get to Yorktown.  After checking blogs, highway maintenance, weather, my muscles, etc I think I will be arriving into Yorktown by Labor Day weekend.  Chelle will come out and meet me at the end.  We will say good bye to Tami and Loren who will fly home.  Then Chelle and I will start the drive back to west coast which will take about 2 weeks.  So, those who are planning on meeting us along the route, account for our estimation to be about a week later than originally planned.  I will also be in touch once I start and get used to the riding.  This will help guide my pace.

3.  My Grimes bike is now going to be a Niner.  Just needed a smaller frame which does not exist in the Grimes line of frames.  So Franco is going to send the Niner to me and I will get the parts switched over.  I still will have a great bike to get me across the country.

4.  Training is going well.  Last weekend I rode 70 miles and felt good.  I read training a great suggestion on the Adventure Cycling Association forums.  One guy posted "only ride so much each day that you do not feel you need a rest day.  If one rides too much and feel a rest day is necessary, time to cut back a bit."  My average will be 70 miles a day which is very doable.

So, May is a very busy month.  I am having an RTA (Ride to Astoria) planning meeting on May 18 at Karen's house with those going with me to Astoria.  I will officially leave west coast on June 20.

Thanks to everyone who have supported the trip on GoFundMe!  I truly appreciate this act of generosity and kindness.  Today I will call the Alzheimers Association to get them in the loop about my trip.

More soon.

Laurie

Armpits and Aluminum by Max Taylor

I remember off-white painted walls, and dull fluorescents. Stucco and old pain. It was not a good building, this place. People had a tendency of fading away, of sweeping their humanity underneath the cheap carpet.I was younger than I am now when I visited my grandmother in her Home. Not her home, where my grandfather lives in Wichita Falls, Texas, but the place she stayed once she couldn’t take care of herself- once she forgot most of the things that made her a person. It was called the House of Hope, which even now seems like a cruel twist of the knife. This was the place in which my grandmother died.  

She had this way of cocking her head and making vague little affirmations, as though she couldn’t really understand what was happening but wanted to appear confident. She was aware that something was wrong, that she should be able to remember the name of the woman in front of her- nearing the end she forgot my mother and much earlier than that she had forgotten me.

That doesn’t surprise me- with the vast distance between our two worlds, we were never incredibly close. She, the wife of a good christian, homemaker and docilely submissive. I, a young and burgeoning atheist seattleite. There are pictures of her holding me, and I cannot help but wonder what she thought of the tiny, squirming body in her arms. I will never ask her.

My grandmother cooked for her husband and daughters their whole lives, so we originally thought her Alzheimer’s had come from the aluminum in her cooking pans. For years afterwards I remember using this natural deodorant that smelled vaguely sappy and wouldn’t do a whole lot. We were careful in the kitchen.

You can imagine our relief when we found out that it instead had come from within- an incredibly rare gene passed on to her by her mother. That feeling only became more pronounced once we understood that it could be passed on to my mother and her siblings the same way. The gene that killed my grandmother is called “Presenilin 1”, and it’s a rather unusual one, as far as the world of genetics goes. Alzheimer’s is usually associated with the very old- doddering men and women forgetting where they are- but Presenilin 1 isn’t quite the same. As a gene mutation it expedites the process, and so the eventual buildup of plaque in the brain begins in the early fifties, rather than the average age, which is decades later. My grandmother began to show recognizable symptoms when she was fifty three. A lot of things about my mother’s mother began, then, to make more sense- the difficulty she had with performing certain actions, or recalling incredibly simple memories.

We got scared, and we got tested. Well, I didn’t.

My aunt Laurie was the first to get her results back.  This summer she’s biking across the country, and I think she understands the relevance of this. It’s her way of saying that she hasn’t lost to this. Her defiance of the plaque that will eventually build up within her brain. She’s fifty three this year, and we act careful. We try to let go of our clenched teeth when she forgets the keys or some other minutia. Alzheimer’s is the sleeping giant we tiptoe around.

I didn’t enter this equation until last year, when I sat on my deck with my mother and her husband Loren. We were waiting for the call from the man who had run the tests on my mom’s blood. Sitting there, I contemplated the branching paths of my future. Presenilin 1 is an autosomal dominant gene. This meant that if my mother had the gene, there was a one in two chance that I did as well. I didn’t want to be selfish; I knew that in the next few minutes I would have to be a beacon of support, but the idea of having a semi-permanent expiration date slapped on me was to say the least, fixating.

The phone rang, and I watched my mother pick up the phone, and crumble. We held her as she spoke to the other line, her body calm. She was a doctor, she knew how this worked. She had delivered a verdict like this many times before.

My birthday is on the eleventh of March. I will be eighteen in less than a month, and as an adult my first act will be to have my blood drawn, and sent to a lab to be tested for the presence of Presenilin 1. I’ve thought about whether it could be better just not to know. I know that I could never live like that. My body is mine, and I couldn’t close my eyes to something that might be a part of me- and it’s interesting, because it’s not cancer. People know what to do with cancer, how to feel about cancer. A young man with cancer is a tragedy, he gets to make a wish. A young man with Alzheimer’s is an outlier, a ticking bomb that takes decades to go off.

I’m a poet by nature, and I find a lot of tragic beauty in Alzheimer’s. It’s almost a theatrical device, it’s so perfect. It’s not dirty or gruesome, like some torture porn movie bought for cheap. Alzheimer’s is a tasteful fade to white, an art student’s wet dream, losing individual part of yourself, chunks of your life and the relationships you’ve formed in them. Faces, voices, touches. What it tasted like to have someone bite your lip on purpose. Feeling old leather inside of a closet. Being drunk and dancing. Being drunk and making mistakes. Falling. Climbing. Singing out of tune but feeling wonderful. I’m so afraid of losing that, and I’m terrified of the next thirty days.

And sometimes I hate my grandmother because she died and forgot what I looked like, but still managed to stick around for my eighteenth birthday to give me a present. Somedays I feel like a schroedinger’s cat, and the moment I open that box the four walls in my brain will fall and all of my life will pour out like old soup. Most days I just feel itchy.

But I’m proud too. Of my grandmother, who suffered for a long time but didn’t know why, who did the best that she could. Of my aunt, who still manages to be more hardcore than anyone I’ve ever met- who climbs mountains and eats trails for breakfast. And of my mother, who has a hard time being good enough for herself but is sure as hell trying harder than you are to be a good person. Who succeeded a long time ago but will never stop trying. Who makes me proud to be her son and proud to share in her struggle.

I don’t know how to end an essay about Alzheimer’s on a happy note- it doesn’t bring people together, or summon up any revelatory knowledge. It just sucks. This whole thing just really sucks. There’s love in me, and I feel it and I try to give it as often as I can. Alzheimer’s doesn’t change who you are- it just takes it from you.

This is something I wrote awhile back. It’s about all of this.

Alternate Names for my Grandmother

1.     wife of Joe

2.     dead wife of Joe

3.     ex-wife of Joe

4.     a Good Christian

5.     breather of rustbucket dust and aluminum scrubbing pans

6.     femininity restrained

7.     wife of Gooder Christian

8.     A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND

9.     jar with label- “Linda-good till the last drop”

10.  THE LAST DROP

11.  unfortunate, unintentional regifting

12.  from her to my mother and my mother to me-a ladderbacked plastic slide that crumbled beneath us

13.  or did she sharply snap?

14.  you’re Synapses         slowed down

15.  you’re Disease                        is in me now

16.  i know it’s not your fault but it's your face i see when i pound walls at night

17.  couldn’t remember my face- hers is fading now

18.  i think she had a nice smile           the days she knew she had a mouth.

APRIL!!!

A beautiful final week of March helped me put in some outside road miles.  Keeping up to date with my training schedule.  Hopefully the April showers will not make my April training too miserable.  We will see.

We are about 2 1/2 months from departure.  Looking at the calendar and the miles I'm now thinking tht I will finish is Yorktown VA Labor Day weekend.  I think this will take more like 10 weeks to cover the 4500 miles.  I will know more once the effort commences and I see how the legs do with the daily miles.  One thing is for sure is that I'm stubborn and I will push to achieve my goal.

So, for today, I will go for a run with Apollo.

Excited!

Go Fund Me link

Here is a link to the GoFundMe page.  Check it out!  We welcome support for the trip.  Help us buy a tank of gas, breakfast, propane for the travel trailer, etc.  All proceeds from trip will be donated to the Alzheimers Association.

Thanks!

Laurie

Go Fund Me