We arrived at the end of our incredible venture – but we’ve only just begun.

We made it. We did arrive in Napa and were welcomed by the most amazing line-up of Irish Music, friends, family, and supporters who had gone to extraordinary length and efforts to make this a really special occasion. It was really overwhelming what our friend in Napa had managed to do with the help of her friends – a raffle, food, beautiful wine from the valley, the music – extraordinary.

All this despite the fact that somehow, and I have no idea how we had managed to do this, we had brought the Irish weather with us. For the very first time in months, more than seven months to be precise, it rained in Napa. So the beautiful outside venue in Yountville Park had to be moved indoors at just a day’s notice to the equally beautiful Lincoln Theatre on Yountville. Sadly, not everybody could be contacted about this change and posters put up in the Park notifying people about the change had been taken down by the authorities to keep the city clean.

For me, yesterday was the longest cycle of the whole tour, 130km. I was met by a cyclist at the Golden Gate Welcome Centre at 8am who was going to ride with me to Fairfax, where I was going to hook up with three cyclists who had come from Napa the same morning to ride with back to Napa. When we arrived in Fairfax, she decided to continue on with us to Napa. These people were professionals. It was an amazing, really fast, beautiful cycle through valleys and across mountains in record time. What a finish.

In Napa we met my two co-cylists and our support car and together cycled the last 10 miles up to Yountville and the Lincoln Theatre.

The cycle is over. But – We’ve only just begun.

Today, Pádraig went to the funeral of a friend, and the most exceptional man I’ve ever had the privilege of having known, Martin Naughton. When we met, through the intervention of mutual good and close friends from the swimming community, he taught me in a very short period of time what it would mean for Pádraig for us and for his friends to adapt to his new life.

There were three rules in Martin’s life:

He was a champion for independent living and self-determination for people with disabilities, their human right to live a life with dignity and respect.

Today, at his funeral, there were so many people in wheelchairs at the church they didn’t fit in.

Tonight, I am staying with relatives of one of Pádraig’s friends in their house just beside the Golden Gate Park. It’ll be an early start tomorrow meeting some other cyclists to go to Fairfax and on to Napa from there. My two co-cyclists and our ‘tour manager’ are staying with a close relative north of San Francisco. We’ll be meeting up on route tomorrow to finish together in Napa.

We had a busy day today and received an extraordinary welcome in the United Irish Cultural Centre.

I feel like as if I should be sleeping but, at the same time, I find it hard. So many things are happening, perhaps more now that our cycle is coming to an end.

There’ll be loads of time for reflection.

Even now I can say that I have learned an awful lot. About priorities for the work we want to do for the An Saol Project, about relationships between people spending a lot of time together in relatively small spaces, about cycling along for hours spending huge amounts of physical energy.

Never before have I been aware as I am now that life is not endless, that time for humans is not limitless. Never before have I been aware as I am now that time for us merely mortals is one of the most precious things we have at our disposal. And, of course, each other. Of both I experienced a lot. Kinda curious whether and how this incredible cycling experience will influence my life for good.

What do you think?

Updates on the cycle are on fb.me/AnSaolFoundation

Today, a senior manager of SAP, one of our sponsors, welcomed us in their headquarters in Palo Alto. We talked to him and some of his staff about An Saol and the work we are doing to change the way survivors of severe Acquired Brain Injury are being looked after. We talked about the cycle and that we were doing it to raise awareness and funding for An Saol.

Then he told us a story that he said had inspired and moved him tremendously.

Its about two Buddhist (American-born) monks, Heng Sure and Heng Chau, who made an 800 miles pilgrimage moving by three steps one bow, from South Pasadena to Ukiah, California, a journey that took them two years and six months. They, at the tail end of the Beat Generation, undertook this incredible pilgrimage from 1977 to 1979 to achieve world peace. Only about 20 years later did they publish a book documenting this incredibly journey, together with excerpts from newspapers, some photos and, above all, the letters they had written during this journey to their teacher.

When they set out on their journey, they did not want to talk about it. They, themselves, did not seek out any publicity (though they got loads of it).

For them, there were two stories about the journey. The one that was visible to the world, to the eye, the one that people could see every day, over two years and six months, on the streets. Then there was the ‘inner’ story, the inner journey, the experience they made and had not shared with anyone else, except with their teacher in letters they wrote to him every day.

In a much lesser way, my experience during this cycle has been similar. There are two stories, the visible and the inner one. An in a way that is perhaps how everybody’s life works: there is the outside, the social life, and there is the inner experience, what I often think is the deep, deep loneliness inside that can be shared on only very rare occasions in the most intimate moments of total exposure of vulnerability (or strength), but is mostly my own.

The only ‘salvation’, in a way, from this loneliness is that I have experienced, especially over the last three years, that ‘no man is an island’ and ‘every man is a piece of the continent’ – that no matter “for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”. It’s the experience that humanity is shared.

So life, as long distant ‘pilgrimage’ or a never-ending cycle (in any sense of the word), is something we’re in together which is why we help each other out, especially if one of us is in trouble.

At the and of our meeting the executive we had met with played us a youtube clip with a song sung by Heng Sure, She carries me. And he said that he is planning to make an Oscar-winning movie out of the story of these two Buddhist monks, their long inner and outer journey for world peace.

Updates on the cycle are on fb.me/AnSaolFoundation – not for world peace but for a much smaller and, hopefully, easier to reach target.

Another day of mountains and really heavy head winds. I am absolutely shattered. We passed by some amazing scenery, not just alone the coast, but inland, above all. Half Moon Bay is so close to San Francisco that it was too expensive to stay there overnight. We’ll start the Half Moon Bay to Palo Alto leg early tomorrow morning – the route crosses some steep mountains, and we’ll need to be there by 12 pm to meet some friends in SAP.

I’d love to write more, there are so many things to write about, but I’m falling asleep…

Woke up at 6, getting ready for our next leg of the journey, from Half Moon Bay to Palo Alto.

What is my thought for the day? – We’re slowly getting nearer the end of this cycle. The day after tomorrow, we’ll be arriving in Napa, stay there for Sunday and leave on Monday to come home. I’m thinking of all I gained and all I lost over the past days while we were cycling. It’s not a straight forward ‘account’. And I’ll have to think about this a little bit more – but I’m getting the feeling that this trip has been a bit like what life offers us in general: gains and losses. It always depends on us what we make out of it and how we look at it.

We are Dreamboaters. Wasting time of what could have been or should have been is not our thing. It’s about what will be. And we know where we’re heading: down the river and into the wide ocean. Into the wild.

“It’s not always necessary to be strong, but to feel strong.” There we go – for another day!

Ní neart go cur le chéile – We found this great Irish saying in The Poet and The Patriot yesterday, *the* Irish Pub South of San Francisco. There is no strength without unity.

Santa Cruz is the town I never lived in. But would’ve like to, had I discovered it earlier. We have been talking to people who tried to live without touching money – not without money, but without *touching* money. And surprisingly managed to do so for months. We met people without credit cards, mobile phones, TV and radio. The news they needed they heard in their community. They consume goods produced in their neighbourhood, they wear clothes that are made by their neighbours, they have no cars (but re-cycled bicycles), and get services from people who they provide services to in return. Combine this with the amazing climate, the ocean on one and the mountains on the other side and you’ve got pretty much everything you need for a good life.

I couldn’t stop thinking that the people we met were very much like Pádraig and many of his friends I’ve had the privilege to get to know a little bit over the past three years and a bit. Just slightly older:) So imagining a world without fast food chains and a without a throw-away culture is after all not only the thing to do, it’s possible to live in such a world, to create it for yourself and your friends. It might not be perfect, it might not work 100% the way you want it, but you can get pretty close to it.

I have constant doubts about doing this cycle. Whether this is the right thing to do. And I suppose, I’ll never know. What I do know is that I’m learning nonstop on this cycle. I’m learning that my body is still able to do pretty amazing things. I’m learning that three ‘old guys’ and an equally ‘old tour manager’ can get along brilliantly on an impossible adventure, with all their different personalities, warts and all, because they are good people doing a good thing.

Most of all, I’m learning that people, that we can live the life we choose to live. We don’t have to follow what mindless advertising is trying to drum into to us. We can make choices. We can show others that there are alternatives to a culture where just about everything seems to be disposable, measured in terms of purely monetary ‘return on investment’, where people become line items in an accountant’s spreadsheet. Where billion dollar companies don’t pay tax and hoard their gigantic profits in remote island states instead. Where the injured and the sick are managed, instead of being cared for.

Tell everybody. Tell your family and your friends, your politicians and your employers, what kind of life, what kind of society you have chosen.

This is, admittedly, a day late. The cycle from Big Sur to Monterey, and the evening in Monterey didn’t leave any time nor energy. The cycle was good, all are well. More updates about the next stage coming up soon.

It’s a book, it’s a movie, it’s the story of Jack Kerouac, a 1962 novel written by him, in which he trades as the fictional character Jack Duluoz, in which his spends some time in a cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, that was owned by his friend and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Last night, we spent in a cabin on top of a mountain in Big Sur, in the middle of nowhere. Following a day of tremendous ups and downs along the Pacific Coast, overlooking the foggy coast line.

Beauty, and nothing else.

Today, it’s our wedding anniversary, the first we’ve spent apart. The first time also that I heard what Pádraig thinks and feels about his new life: that he is accepting it, knowing how limited and difficult it is sometimes and that his biggest trouble is dealing with the loneliness.

Big Sur is beautiful and a place that would have been top of his list of nice places, I’m sure. He would have loved this cabin in the middle of nowhere on top of a mountain. But today, in my thoughts, I’ll be at home with Pat and Pádraig.

Nathan Fillion once said, “I like to say there’s certain things you can’t take back: One of them is ‘I love you,’ and one of them is bullets.” Today was the first time in my life I had direct contact with bullets.
We were cycling along when I heard this noise you hear when cars pass across loose stones on the road, or sewage covers – babang babang… Listen.

When we realised the noise was coming from the road, we turned off the Freeway into an entrance on the side of the road and found what I had heard about but had never seen. A shooting range.

What kind of people would spent their Saturday afternoon with mufflers on their ears shooting at targets that remotely look like people with guns that are used by special forces in war zones with each shot costing maybe 20-30 cents?

They were terribly nice people. They promised to put up information on An Saol on their Facebook site. They congratulated us on the good work we are doing.

How often have we been told to ‘bite the bullet’? To endure (and accept) the unavoidable situation of our injured loved ones and that of our own difficult situation.

We won’t accept that. Instead, we will have a shot a changing what should not, in the first instance, ever have become reality.

And this bicycle ride will teach us how to make it happen. Not because we come across all sorts of strange things, including shooting ranges, but because we go beyond of what at least I thought I was capable of doing, with friends I never spent more than a few hours with at a time.

Tomorrow will be a big day, up Big Sur, up at 6 am in order to make it. We’ll give it a shot.

I had my doubts. Now I know. I should not be here. This is no country for old men. It’s a country for young people. Freewheelin’. Surfin’.

And there, in the middle of it all, am I, cycling through what must be one of the most beautiful parts of the world. Trying to raise awareness and money for An Saol in California. Trying to cycle 1,000 km with my two friends. Sweating in the heat. Getting a sore back side. Being so tired and exhausted each evening that it’s almost impossible to gather my thoughts.

I am thinking how much Pádraig must have enjoyed it when he was here one summer on his first J1. He probably said it, but I don’t remember. Or maybe I was too busy to listen. Now I’m thinking it should be him traveling up from Hollywood to Napa, going to the out-of-this-world beaches, enjoying the sun on his skin, listening to the sea, the music, the people.

Someone wrote to me that Pádraig was the original ‘Into the Wild’ person. If I think what all of this means … The point is that he should be doing this trip. And so he will. This thing about Alaska I’ve been on for a long time is not a pipe dream.

What I’m doing here these days is good, at least it’s meant to be good. An Saol and the An Saol Project is reaching people who will share it with their friends, they will spread the word here in the US. And who knows? These two weeks of being in a country for young and beautiful people doing the impossible might help making the impossible possible.

(And really: I’m not so old – and neither are my two co-cyclists and friends!)

An important reason for our cycle is to raise funding for the An Saol project.

Today, we passed the €5,000 collected by 52 people supporting the #GreatAmericanCyce II!

Some of the scenery today was spectacular – so was the filming. Look at this!

There’s loads  to write about but I’m too tired to write much tonight, another of these nights when I’m falling asleep as I’m trying to gather my thoughts and putting them on ‘paper’. That’ll have to wait for another day…

Here’s the first sign of Napa: