An attempt to narrate a cycle tour for three months from Paris to Dakar with my best friend Sheila with whom I will share most things. How to facilitate and enhance the emotions and inner life that we will both enjoy in the heightened atmosphere of free time overseas without constraint of family or means, while burning along on our lightly laden velos.
Some things befall my waking mind in the wee hours, seeing the travel plans as I do this time through the eyes of a female partner on the road:
how much male hutzpa is being revealed as I encourage the cleaning of bicycles?
or suggest the perfect positioning of two bebaggaged bikes when parked against a lamp post?
or struggle with imparting what's obvious to me but still mystery to the significant other until it all actually happens.
Reliant as I'm on the well timed riposte should I err on the side of chauvinism, it's the urge to save us both from some well imagined disaster that keeps me extolling the nerdish.
Things like knowing where in four stuffed panniers everything is roughly. Years of cycling overseas makes for unfashionable solutions. Labels and pack from bottom to top the same way every time. Then the advantages become clear, one can lean the bike against soft bedding rather than bust the technology, or when the sudden alpine freezing rain catches one, the raincoat lies close to hand in the outside pannier. Simple consistencies form a comfortable backing board for the glorious and excitingly unfamiliar which is after all why one packs at all.
This of course may be pedantic anathema to my travel companion who is sure to want to let go of the very ideal of tidy. How else to enjoy time off? And then there's the mobile shoe cupboard which will be needed after Milan's seduction of the feminine foot. Dilemmas which have never been a part of my previous solo touring.
On the upside my companion who has excellent taste and a fine understanding as regards cuisine will be introducing us both to the rarer aspects of gastronomie and forming no doubt a subtle cornucopia out of nothing to grace our previously spartan metal cups.
Love will be amongst us both in all it's varied selves and the gasps at daily wonders will be simultaneous and feed our memories for years to come.
tidy shoes all the way monkey!
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