Oh, hello old friend!

Oh, hi friends!

I just made three typos trying to get out “oh, hi friends!” My fingers are rusty! That’s what happens when you leave your computer at home. 

During 10 days in Portugal, we stayed in nine hotels; biked 20-30 miles a day through farms and fields and beaches and salt marshes, highways and and roundabouts and gravel roads, met goats and horses and cats, drank dozens of espressos, all while ultimately cycling from the eastern border next to Spain, all the way to the lighthouse at Cabo de São Vicente, the southwesternmost point of Europe, appropriately nicknamed “the end of the world.” (If you have Instagram, here's the whole Story complete with a lot of grilled octopus.)

Uh. Whaaaaat?

It was the trip of a lifetime. (I’m half Portuguese btw! How did I not know my people made such amazing pastéis de nata?!)

I don’t feel relaxed so much as…clearheaded? When your entire day’s goal is to reach your next destination, everything else falls away. 

We have 44 kilometers to go…there’s a 16th century church coming up…take a right under the railroad onto a gravel road…oooh, look, chickens!!!

You reach the next marker and the next, until finally, somehow, you’ve arrived.

(And when you’re on your bike all day, you can’t do anything else — I completely tuned out of all work and all email, except for the three messages I sent to my mom and dad!)

But I keep thinking about meeting with the folks who gave us our maps and GPS before our first day. They handed over each day’s route and maps to hotels and said, “I know it looks overwhelming now, so just go step by step.”

And that’s what we did.

And here’s where we landed.



So many things can look overwhelming at first. 

But let’s figure out first where we’re headed.

Then let’s go day by day.

Then kilometer, um, mile by mile.

Let’s notice checkpoints along the way. 

And finally, when you're ready, or perhaps even when you're not, let’s get on our bikes — and begin.

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Thanks, as always, for reading.

Love, Kara