Jay’s Note: This is part fifteen — the last one — of a running two-week adventure log for RAGBRAI. Each day I’ve been posting a journal entry and some pictures from our trip that began in Virginia, landed us in Iowa for a bike ride, and is now getting us back to the East Coast. Part fourteen is here.
Woke up at 6am again, which still counts as sleeping in. Another lazy day at Starved Rock — but also, a planning day.
I had a few cups of tea and opened my Full Focus Planner. Started plugging in the conferences I’m speaking at for the academic year and the travel that comes with them, then extended out some yearly goals. After that I did some work on the systems side — my personal website, the Fourfold website — trying to get the machinery in place that will run my day-to-day this year without needing much intervention from me. This is something I try to do every year: clean the slate, put new stuff on deck. There’s something about doing it from a cabin instead of a desk that makes the whole exercise feel less like administration and more like drawing a map.
Then we went for a hike to St. Louis Canyon and met a few kind hikers along the way. The kids remembered the area — remembered the lessons about sandstone we taught them the last time we were here, back when the same trail took three times as long on smaller legs. Boy, they’re fast now. We got the whole thing done in probably a third of the old time, which is one of those measurements no planner tracks but that tells you more about the passage of time than any calendar does.
Sarah’s parents visited in the afternoon. We showed them the cabin we’ve been staying in, then had lunch at the lodge restaurant — nothing fancy, just a burger for me. The kids got to catch up with their grandparents, which is important, and was nice. Then the pool: Sarah caught up with her parents while I swam with the kids and played our favorite game again, pass Marc.
Back at the cabin I generated the yearly calendar — the one that overlays every day off across the year: kids’ schools, our school, holidays, travel for work, travel for fun, all of it on one sheet. Also an every-year ritual. This year looks particularly busy, heavy with conference and work travel, especially in October and May. Better to know that now, from a cabin in July, than to discover it in October.
Tomorrow we head home — a night at a Marriott in Dayton, Ohio, then bombing down through West Virginia into our adopted hometown of Lexington, Virginia. And that’ll conclude this series.
I’m very grateful for this trip. It helped me connect with my family through doing fun, hard things together. It reminded me that I can’t let myself get too comfortable in any one place, or doing any one thing — that I need to schedule more getting-out time, and start inviting the right people along on more adventures. It loosened me up a little again, put a new light on the fun that’s available in an ordinary day. And it surfaced a smaller, stranger lesson I didn’t expect: my offices — home and at work — need to reflect my personality again, so that I feel comfortable and creative in them. Two weeks of living out of a trailer will teach you exactly how little of your stuff you need, and exactly which parts of it you miss.
I don’t know when the next series starts. But there will be one.