Back from the big big world. First day back home in Dublin with Pádraig and the family. First night’s sleep in a familiar room. Still pretty exhausted from the flight and the cycle. Still not yet fully ‘here’. Trying to share the experience of the past two weeks and a bit with people who ask how it was in the way the ask “how are you?” but who, I suspect, won’t quite understand what this journey was like – even if I tried to explain it to them, something they don’t really expect, and don’t want me to do.

Really, who wants to sit down and listen to stories and thoughts about 11 days of cycling up the hills and down the hills, along the coast, through dusty fields, in sunshine and through foggy, humid patches?

Being away for just over two weeks doing this cycle with my two friends and our ‘tour manager’ was a drastic brake from being here with Pádraig, the family, and all the people calling to the house regularly. It was far too involved to be a classic ‘holiday’, but it provided me with a reminder of what I’ve been ‘missing’: people, scenery, surroundings, all not really familiar, all offering different perspectives, all interesting, all challenging.

Tonight I feel that Pádraig needs to come along next time. To travel. To be on the road. To see, hear, smell, touch – different stuff. Not the stuff in his room or the house or down the road. Not the familiar. But the strange and beautiful, the ugly and nerve-racking, the new and the challenging. The world is bigger than what we experience day by day in our familiar surroundings. It’s, as Emilia said in one of ‘our’ songs from 1998, a Big Big World.

So much for the city. Tell me that you’ll dance to the end. Just tell me that you’ll dance to the end. Hey hey you’re The Monkeys. And people said you monkeyed around. But nobody’s listening now. – Just don’t go back to Big Sur, Hanging around. Lettin’ your old man down. Just don’t go back to Big Sur. Baby, baby please don’t go.

The Thrills hit the nail on the head with their lyrics for their song Big Sur. We’ll dance till the end.

Wth a clearer head, I’ll think about what we have achieved with our Great American Cycle!

In the meantime, I am so happy to be back home and Pádraig was happy to have me bi

We’ll be going to the airport a little later today and fly home.

But the most amazing, truly inspiring homecoming is that of David. After eight years, he returned home, accompanied by his family and an amazing motorcycle escort of friends. What a turnout! Pádraig was proud to be part of the the welcoming party!

Congratulations to his parents who struggled hard to make this day happen. It is so good to see that, eventually, the HSE supported them in their efforts to bring David home. What an achievement!

More pictures and updates on the Homecoming: https://www.facebook.com/The-David-Cahill-Rehabilitation-Fund-549534718410598/photos/

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.