Santa Barbara

I love Santa Barbara! I'm finally in Southern California! Yesterday I had a lot of time to think about a question that has been coming up a lot lately from people asking me about this trip. It's a question that I acknowledged at the beginning of my journey, but never really took the time to inspect. And so finally I gave it some thought. The WHY. Why are you doing this? Why are you riding your bike so far? Why are you going solo? I almost don't want to answer this question because the thought of WHY has never really crossed my mind. It was just something that I knew I wanted to do. But why did I want to do it? And why by myself? The beginning of that answer is that I wanted to set out to accomplish a physical challenge, see new parts of America, and push myself by myself, to be stretched physically and mentally and to rely on my courage, spirit, and drive to move forward. The more in depth and fundamental reason is that I believe that in life the route that we take influences the events that happen. The way we travel through time, the people, places, and experiences that we come into contact with are all a part of a linear set of events that will be determined by our choices, and our attitudes. So smile and you'll start to feel better. Get on your bike and ride up a hill and you'll know that you can do anything. Build up yourself in a positive way and you will attract positive people and come across positive experiences in your life. Better yourself and you can be better to people that you love.

So much of my life is planned. For once I wanted to do something that although I had a direction (South), I had no idea what would happen along the way. There was no way to predict. And now that I'm almost done I have to say that I still don't have a total understanding of what it is that I've accomplished. It's too big right now. And I'm loving it!

And on that note, I must exit this chair because I totally burned my butt at the beach today. Man, that's going to smart tomorrow as I ride to Ventura.