Cycling adventurist, bikepacker, travel writer, photographer, speaker, professor of philosophy. Route designer of the VTXL, the Green Mountain Gravel Growler beer tour, the Silk Road Mountain Race course 1st edition, and many more.
Category: Central America
Guatemala Sounds
Boys break dancing in the square. Kid asks me where I am from. I tell him USA, New York City, he says, concentrated earnest, “so you have a pistol?” Deflated when I tell him I don’t.
Antigua Bike Co-op
Antigua, Guatemala—Brian, who hails from Iowa and has lived here for a few years, runs an impressive little shop right near the parque central.
“This is Guatemala”
We laugh about this being our last night on Earth, “but this is Guatemala…,” he says as if that explains, well, I’m not sure what, either that we lived or that we almost didn’t.
Trajectory
Nearly sixty miles on dirt today. Pre sunset I sit in front of a tienda sipping another coke, sideways conscious of my vacant look.
Guatemala Postcard
A town with a church with a square on a hill on a Saturday night. Happy subsonic excitement. Follow the families walking up cobbles, cars maybe washed special and scooters, tuk tuks—probably not called that here—a parallel street.
Tikal
Stepped sides, block over block, instantaneous vertical then a flat rest then another effort skyward. Psychologically, existentially not a gradual steady slope. So the dominant sensation from the architecture at Tikal is of gathering one’s […]
Going light
Matt’s traveling light: a tarp, no sleeping mat or bag, just a sewn up the side fleecy sack and tiny fleece blanket he ended up buying somewhere ago anticipating Highland chill.
Guatemala Postcard
Jungle sleep a duplicity, the implications that one is cold are neither right nor quite wrong, roll over to tug a cover a chill shoulder only to realize in the fog that there is sweating. […]