I’ve been home three weeks now, and I’ve noticed that I have a well-developed eye for porta-johns, stealth camping sites, and motel signs. Even in a car, my mind registers hills and the width of the shoulder on the road. I have a thousand things to do, but I’m restless and bored.
I get out on the bike several times a week, and it’s a thrill to ride without the heavy load. Friendly farmhouses and stealth-campable woods are everywhere; I now realize why I thought the trip was going to be easier than it was.
Mornings are the best for riding, while the sun is still on the rise and the day has not yet wiped the haze from its eyes. I ride on country roads so quiet the diminutive Mennonite girl wearing a flowered dress and rubber barn boots at a farm I pass can ride her tiny bicycle up and down the road with no worries.
My route takes me between fields of corn growing tall and close to the road. I emerge from the corn-walled hallway and pedal up a rise to a view that steals my breath in a gasp. I stop to gaze across wooded valleys folded into miles of rolling farm fields and softened by the morning’s mist, and the beauty of this place I live makes me want to weep.
After traveling for so long, when every day is a new place and nothing is ever familiar, coming home is a relief. Everything is where it always was, and there’s no need for maps. And yet, on an early morning ride, when the day’s thoughts are still drying their wings in the sun, the familiar can surprise. Seen through a traveler’s eyes, even home is new.