Obviously, traveling this many years (7 1/2 so far) is having profound affects on us but not in ways many would think.  These changes are not static but instead happening slowly, as we experience more of the world and constantly reevaluate our values.  Peering deep into ourselves is the true journey instead of the superficial line we draw on a map.

When we were on temporary trips the simplicity and freedom of a bike tour was a vacation from our regular lives of working, and surviving the rat race.  Looking back at the years leading up to our departure we wonder how we juggled all the complexities of modern life.  There were bills to mail, cars to fix, schedules to keep, bosses to impress, and a million other things to get done before the end of the day, month, or year.  We used to say, “There aren’t enough hours in a day to do all the things that need to get done.”  Now we have far less things to worry about and feel like we have all day to see what will come our way.  After several years of living a simple life on bikes with our possessions being limited to what can be carried we have evolved into a very simplistic yet open minded way of looking at life.  Everything is beautiful in its own basic way and the great weight of worry and stress has been lifted from our shoulders.  We are free to explore, learn, and drift.

Before this trip we needlessly complicated the world around us by over analyzing everything until we found faults and became angry.  Traveling has caused us to make peace with our surroundings.  For example, in our own country, instead of seeing good and bad politicians and political parties we see a democracy and a healthy debate.  Instead of seeing National Parks that need infrastructure upgrades we see pristine mountains.  Obviously if everyone were like us nothing would get done but we have never wanted everyone to be like us.  This is our dream and our reality; we have made it as painless as possible.

Another big change we have noticed is our growing freedom from “want.”  During the years on the road, visiting rich and poor alike, the idea of “I want” will never be the same.  We used to walk through stores and fight the urge to buy all the things we thought we wanted with that little piece of plastic in our pocket that promised immediate gratification.  It was stressful to want something, ponder the consequences, and use restraint to deny the purchase or, give in to our desires and buy it and often feel guilty later.  So many people in this world live on a fraction of what citizens of developed countries consider the bare essentials and yet find far more happiness in their lives.  The most content people we have met in our travels all have a clear sense of the difference between want and need.  After riding in their countries and staying in their houses we have learned to open our minds to new perspectives.

The answer is not to make or borrow more money in order to have more possessions because acquiring material things will never satisfy wanting more.  There will always be something else to want.  The secret to happiness is to be content with what you have and not want things you can not afford.  It is much more fulfilling to feel fortunate when your work has earned enough to cover all your real needs and have something left over for extras.  It is a shift in perception from agonizing over wanting something like a new TV to being excited when the household’s finances have gone so well that you can have something extra.  The TV is no longer wanted every time it is passed in the store but rather an unexpected reward for a job well done.

This many years on the road have taught Cindie and me to throw away the big list of things we would like to own and be content with what we have.  We now find happiness in the simple pleasures of life and don’t seek our identities in the things we own.  It sounds so simple and idealistic but the results have been monumental.

You can experience the places we have been to with thousands of pictures, Cindie’s daily journal, videos, and learn how our future travels unfold by visiting our web site wwww.DownTheRoad.org

Reasons to travel or not to travel
by Alastair Humphreys

I remember sitting on top of the Simplon Pass in the Alps. The view was fabulous, the world lay all before me. I loved my life on the road. I was good at it, it was comfortable and -at long last- I was earning a few hundred quid here and there with the occasional published article.
I was living the dream, and I was earning enough to keep on living it.

From that pass I could, had I wanted to, turned around and cycled to Australia. It would have been a great adventure.
I thought of Heinz Stucke, the Godfather of long-distance cyclists (40 years on the road, and still going), and I thought of all that he had seen and experienced.

And yet I did not turn round and ride off towards Tasmania. I decided not to “do a Heinz”. I decided to drop down the northern side of the pass, towards France, England, home, and The End.

If life on the road is so precious, then why did I decide to end it? It is still something I often ask myself (often during morning rush hour on the Northern Line…)
Here then are some of the Pros and Cons of coming home:

PROS: Good things about coming Home

- The instant pleasure I felt from stopping travelling was that of returning to a sweet, lazy life. I was so grateful for fluffy pillows, a fridgeful of food, a roof, lights and tap water. It felt good to be home! (This ease, of course, is what eventually becomes the greatest ‘Con’ of stopping and what drives me to get out there again…)

- Stability. I love putting down some degree of roots. I enjoy knowing where I live, knowing the area, knowing people, knowing the history, and seeing the place as more than just the instant, present tense snapshot that you get when you are only ever passing through places.

- Relationships. Friends, family, relationships: being a lone wolf for over 4 years made me realise that I am not, in fact, a lone wolf! Ultimately I treasure a few deep bonds more than the wonderful variety of brief encounters the open road exposes you to. Thinking of Heinz, it was this aspect in particular that made me feel I should go home rather than riding on into my twilight years.

- Diversity. To my surprise, one of the things I appreciate most about having stopped riding is the diversity of my life now. I thought that it was through travelling that I would find variety. But my life is no longer just about the ride. Books, running, music, friends, libraries, sport, holidays, cooking, camping, cities… In some ways there is more variety to my life than when I was away striving for spontaneity and diversity.

- What was the point of the journey if not to prepare me for life? Before I began my long ride I felt that it would BE my life. Now I see the ride as a phase to help me live the rest of my life to the best of my ability. I am enjoying trying to transfer the lessons from the road to all that I do now.

- Cycling round the world was awesome. The best days of my life. But I did it for over 4 years. That’s a long time. It’s time for something new now!

CONS: Reasons I still pine under a full moon for the Open Road

- Freedom. The freedom to ride where I wanted, when I wanted. Sleep where I wanted, eat when I wanted. Free to BE whoever I wanted to be, for in each new town I arrived in I was a blank canvas, a fresh start with no history or future, just a present tense and a bike.

- Unpredictability. To never know what is round the next corner. Literally or metaphorically speaking…

- Simplicity. To have all my worldly goods in 4 panniers, and to carry all that I owned on a bicycle. That is something I miss. I also miss the mental simplicity of those days as well. The lack of mental baggage.

- New Friends. To form fast, fierce, magnesium bright friendships with extraordinary people. To treasure those brief days and conversations in the knowledge that once they are gone, they are gone for ever. Out of each other’s lives and on down the road.

- Other things that flow into my mind so fast now that it makes me realise how conscious and aware I am of the things I chose to give up: fitness (proper, 8-hours a day on the bike, iron-hard fitness), frugality, changing landscapes, camping, sunsets, rivers, dreaming of “what’s next”, always learning…

- And the strange satisfaction that comes through having a hard time, sleeping on stones, eating dull food, being hot/cold, feeling tired or anxious and yet knowing that these are, without a doubt, the times of your life.

All in all I see my years spent cycling round the world as incredibly precious. I know I will never have days like those again, and in some ways I feel my life has peaked now they are over. And yet, if I turn all the lessons and privileged experiences I bore witness to, then I sense that I am brilliantly prepared for making sure that the rest of my life is not spent in the shadow of my days on the road…

Tim:
We have traveled through 22 countries on 4 continents, North and South America, Asia, and Australia, but this is only a quarter or a third of the places we want to visit.  We still have a long way to go.  In our near future we will visit India, The Middle East, Africa, Europe, and beyond.  We have no plans to stop traveling.

Tim:
We have been on this bike tour since March, 2002, over 7 ½ years.  As said by the Grateful Dead, “What a long strange trip it has been.”

Tim:
I had bike toured quite a bit before this trip including several shorter excursions and a long solo tour through the Americas.  Cindie started touring with me on a few short trips before this big one and basically hit the ground running.

What prompted this extended journey?  That is a good question and impossible to answer in a couple paragraphs.  In a nut shell; the idea for a long trip developed slowly during the years before we left.  I had enough experience so, the biking and camping part was easy for me to picture but Cindie had trouble envisioning a traveling lifestyle and talking her into it was challenging.  After all, I was asking her to give up her successful career, sell most of her stuff, and trade the home she loved for life in a tent living on the road.  The details of how I talked Cindie into letting go and leaving it all behind can be found in Chapter 1, of our first book “The Road That Has No End, How we traded our ordinary lives for a global bicycle touring adventure”.  If you are interested in reading this chapter I have included a link below.

http://downtheroad.org/Publishing/1TheRoadnoEnd/Free_Chapter/1Background.htm

Cindie:
When times get tough the battle goes from physical to mental.  I learned early on in the trip if I convinced myself I couldn’t do it well I couldn’t I also learned  if I convinced myself I could do it then I could, I call it my “ I can” attitude and it has gotten me through the toughest times.

I have always been curious about the world, other cultures, different foods, and with my geology background a desire to see different landforms such as glaciers, mountains and deserts. So for me curiosity to see what is around the next corner has always kept me going.  In addition, as the trip continued my own confidence in my physical ability increased and the knowledge that things always work out; maybe not the way it was originally planned, but still it works out.

Tim:
While it is true that the vast majority of days on our tour are wonderful there are always those bad days that stick out and, in terms of weather, a couple come to mind.  In the fourth month of the trip we rode over a pass in Michoacán, Mexico and got caught in a hail storm. The hail came down so fast it filled the vents in our helmets and by the time we got our tent up I was in the early stages of hypothermia.

A few years ago we endured seven days of solid rain in Diamond Head, Australia.  Cindie took advantage of the situation and did our taxes on the computer entirely in the tent but everything became so wet that mold and mildew set in.  We learned that bad weather comes with not only intensity but also duration.

Just recently while camping in Nebraska City, Nebraska we hid in our tent during one of the biggest electrical storms I have ever experienced.  All we could do is hold on to each other and hope the lightning didn’t strike us.

In regards to what we do to overcome adversity; like most people we try to work together as a team and just grin and bare it.  I believe the best thing to do in stressful situations is to remain calm and try to think your way out of it.

We continue traveling because gaining this kind of international experience and knowledge is worth more than anything a career has to offer.  Even if we won the lottery we would continue our tour.  We would, of course, upgrade our on bikes and living standard but, none the less, we would still spend our millions cycling around the world.  This lifestyle is exactly what we both want to be doing, even on our limited budget.

Cindie:
The most jaw dropping experience I will always remember was watching the Perito Moreno glacier in southern Argentina drop huge blocks of ice the size of a house into the water below.  The sound of cracking ice gave us a split second warning and then “baboom!” The ice crashed into the water below causing huge waves to crash against the lake shore. It was truly mesmerizing.

Tim:
While in Malaysia we were lucky enough to go to our friend David’s niece’s wedding.  This was a real Tamil Indian wedding.  I borrowed clothes from a man they called “two meters” (I am 6’4”) and Cindie borrowed an Indian style pink dress. We experienced the music, food, and dress as a member of a Malaysian Indian family.

I will always remember the two months we rode across the barely inhabited top of Australia on the longest and straightest dirt road I have ever seen.  This was not the hardest route in Australia but was hard enough for us because of the remoteness.  We spent our days enjoying a true wilderness and nights camping near creeks.  Sometimes the lack of excitement and distinguishing features is the most beautiful.

Cindie:
We were in the Andes of South America, it was a long day of climbs and descents and Tim got three flats and the last one was on a steep hill and on a bit of a blind spot so I had to wave trucks around Tim while he fixed his flat, and then it started to rain. I was nothing but miserable.

Tim:
The things that I wish I could forget but never will are seeing political oppression and extreme poverty.  For example, Vietnamese officials are paid to walk around internet cafes and read what customers are writing on their screens; this invasion of privacy makes me want to scream.  During our nine months in China we had numerous cops’ knocking on our door asking for our papers or telling us it was illegal to stay in our hotel. At times, we were forced to move to a state approved hotel that was licensed to accept foreigners.  I meet the people living in these countries and love their food, religion, and culture but also feel sorry for them.  If people are paid to read my email, how much privacy do local citizens have?

Extreme poverty is a heart breaker.  From a car or bus poverty stricken regions can be seen with safety and speed; and the option of looking away.  Riding a loaded touring bicycle through an impoverished area is an immersion into a very depressing way of life.  I will never forget cycling past scenes of entire families, including toddlers, picking through trash piles looking for something to sustain them, there is no hiding, turning away, or gas pedal to hit.  The incredibly sad and defeated expressions on people’s faces are unforgettable.  On a bike we are not protected in a steel cage, we see, hear, and smell everything whether it is disturbing or not.  On a bike we are not passing through; we are there.

Tim:
The very first trip/s I suggest doing a loop from your house.  This avoids a number of logistical problems like transportation and navigation.  The first few times on a bike tour there are enough new things to learn and get used to that it is best to keep the rest as simple as possible.

After a few trips in your backyard I recommend the first long ride be something in your home country.  For example, an Australian might do the Great Ocean Road; Germans could do the famous bike trail down the Rhine River.  The idea is to do one of your countries favorites and avoid the culture shock of international travel. For people in the USA (I am American) I love and highly recommend the ride down the west coast, starting in Astoria, Oregon to San Francisco or Santa Barbara, California.

After all the above experience you are ready for international travel.  I personally think this world would change for the better if more people traveled internationally and saw their home country from abroad.  Have fun and don’t forget to write.

Cindie:
If the tourers are a couple I would suggest they ride together at the same pace. There are a number of ways to do this, learn to draft and redistribute the weight between the bikes until both riders can ride at the same speed. I have seen numerous couples traveling together where the man is miles ahead of the woman, the woman is on a death march to catch up and when she does her partner is ready to get going again. This isn’t very fun for the slower rider.

Tim:
Everybody has a different style of touring and what they hope to get out of it.  That being said, we have met bike tourists disappointed with how their trip was going or turned out.  These frustrations usually are in two areas; distance and budget.

I often hear people complaining that they are somehow behind schedule or need to catch up.  Their ambitious schedule probably came about in the months leading up to the trip when maps and guide books were being studied.  What seems doable on paper often falls short in the field.  Feeling behind schedule causes travelers to miss side attractions or unforeseen opportunities to absorb more of the local culture.  A schedule that requires a trip to be fast can turn a voyage of discovery into a death march watching only the shoulder of the road pass by.  We personally prefer no schedule at all where we are not going to the next place until we are tired of the one we are at.  Time is the gift that leads to discovery.

Also, in the planning stage it may seem romantic to just live on a shoestring budget but, here too, idealism and reality can be different.  In terms of money, less is seldom better, and a higher budget can lead to additional and often wonderful choices.  Museums and restaurants are great for understanding the places you travel and a hotel room during a bad storm goes a long way in making the trip more enjoyable.

Some new bike tourists I meet run out of money towards the end of their trip and start charging everything on a credit card.  Cindie and I have always hated credit card debt so ending a trip this way seems disastrous to us and the people ending their trip this way seem frustrated and often feel guilty that they fell short of their expected budget.  The solution, of course, is to save up a bit more before the trip.  Easier said than done I know but still good advice none the less.

So, in summary, I like to tell first time bike tourists take your plan with your allotted time and halve the distance and double the money.  It is a bit of a tongue and cheek reply which really means, especially on a first tour, scale back how far you want to ride and the number of days you ride each week and add as much additional funding as possible.

Tim and Cindie Travis have no jobs, no children, few bills to pay and get around everywhere on their bikes.

For the past 7 ½ years, the Prescott, Ariz., couple has cycled through 24 different countries on four different continents. This week, they were making their way through Central New York and stopped to be interviewed on the Erie Canal Path near Jordan while waiting out a rain storm.

The couple — he used to be a special education teacher, she worked as a geological consultant — get by mainly with the proceeds from two, self-published books they’ve written about their travels and ad sales from their Web site, downtheroad.org. The Web site is constantly being updated with new entrees and to date boasts more than 20,000 photos of the couple’s travels.

“We always get to see something new every day,” said Tim, 43. “It’s like constantly being at a university. Every day is like a science fair or a field trip.”

The couple has been married for 11 years. Cindie, 48, joked she should have “seen the writing on the wall” when their first date was on bikes.

They later got married in a drive-through chapel in Las Vegas, arriving on single bikes and leaving on a tandem bike, she said. Their honeymoon was a 2 ½ week, cycling/camping trip on San Juan Island and the Olympic Peninsula in the state of Washington.

From early on, Tim talked about traveling around the world on a bike. Four years into their marriage, (March 30, 2002 to be exact) they took the money they were saving to buy a new four-wheel drive vehicle and headed instead down the driveway of their Arizona home en route to Mexico.

They cycled through Mexico, Central America and eventually through most of the western side of South America. They started on their first book, “The Road That Has No End,” in Bariloche, Argentina, staying there for several months. They made their way back to the states and finished the book nearly a half year later.

In November of 2004, they flew to Southeast Asia, landing in Bangkok, Thailand. They spent 18 months cycling through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam. They then made through their way through China, spending eight months in that country. From there, they headed back through Tibet and into Thailand and Malaysia, where they started writing their second book, “Down the Road in South America.”

From there, it was off to Singapore, and then to Australia, where they stayed for a year. During one, two-month period, they got their water each day from crocodile-infested rivers, the husband said.

“You had to use your head and not get close to (deep), murky waters,” he said.

They then traveled to New Zealand, staying eight more months.

The two travel relatively light, carrying everything they need on their bikes. Cindie said her load weighs about 25 to 35 pounds and includes her sleeping bag, clothes, some paperwork, toiletries, a mess kit and mini-computer netbook. Tim’s load weighs about 70 to 90 pounds, and includes the tent, sleeping bag and pads, his computer and various other items.

Cindie said they often camp, but occasionally they’ll stay in motels, particularly if the weather is bad or they need a break. They also stay with friends when they can.

Their typical day on the road kicks off with a breakfast of oatmeal and granola with coffee. For lunch, there’s peanut butter sandwiches or “a Subway sandwich or something like that.” Dinner is usually something like pasta with vegetables or rice with vegetables. Sometimes the meal comes from a nearby grocery store.

“We’re not refrigerated. We can’t take cold things,” she said.

From New Zealand, the couple flew to Alaska, where they finished their second book in July 2008. Their Alaska travels included a seven-week stay with Cindie’s twin sister, Cherie. From there, they traveled through Canada and back home to Arizona, where they spent the winter with friends.

Tim said it was scary at times cycling through the Canadian Yukon, seeing grizzly bears and black bears nearly every day. “The first thing they tell you is to first get in your car .¤.¤. we couldn’t do that,” he said. “Every night was a challenge.”

They went back on the road this spring, traveling eastward across country. They recently arrived in New York and just finished visiting relatives of Cindie’s in Endicott.

“You just have to let go,” she said. “We miss having a dog, things like that. But we’re seeing (and staying) with family (around the country) a lot more than we used to. Most of our friends are on the net.”

She explained that she and her husband get by on about $10,000 to $12,000 a year. They have few bills and rent their home in Prescott, which covers their taxes. They have some money set aside for retirement and haven’t had to touch that. Finally, they’ve had few health problems on the road and have money set aside for emergencies, she said.

“I’ve had things like Montezuma’s Revenge and Tim has had parasites (in his stomach),” she said. “He once wrecked his bike and had to mend his knee. I’ve also had shingles. That was hard to get rid of.”

Tim said he and his wife will continue traveling as long as they are able.

“We’ve been doing this for so long, it’d be kind of hard picturing me working for someone else again,” he said. “Too much freedom is dangerous.”

More on Tim and Cindie Travis:
- See their Web site or email them at cindie@downtheroad.org. The couple’s two books, “The Road That Has No End,” and “Down the Road in South America,” can be ordered from their web site.

- The couple is traveling toward Albany this week. They’re scheduled to give talks about their travelsat 7 p.m. Sept. 2.. at the Sanford Library, in Colonie, and at 7 p.m. Sept. 3, at the Saratoga Springs Library in Saratoga Springs

from

http://blog.syracuse.com/outdoors/2009/08/ride_of_their_lives_prescott_a.html