"You can never be anywhere except exactly where you are supposed to be."
It can be difficult to begin any story because we are all a sum of all of our experiences at any given moment. You cannot get here without already having gone there. This seems to be as much of a cosmological phenomenon as it is my own personal experience. Everything you have ever said or done, sown or reaped, has led directly to the person you are as you read this.
In that manner, the beginning is much farther back than I want to begin. My fascination with computers and logic began in the early 1980s, and my potential for wandering has probably always been there. I began making notes on climate change in the late 1980s and have worked either directly or indirectly online during at least some portion of all the years since around 1990-- well before the Internet as we know it today had more than barely begun to evolve. Likewise, the cause-and-effect which set my wanderings into motion follow a winding path back through the turn of the century.
Instead, I think a good beginning would be in the town of Green Cove Springs, Florida. It was there that I built the first bike rack, there that I first seriously looked at the 2-wheeled nomadic lifestyle as a possibility. But even then there are flashbacks to earlier pertinent moments, like the bike named “Fugitive” was a gift from Mark, and how I’d known Mark and Elaine since somewhere around 1997. But Green Cove is a good place, and the year would have been 2011.
The name of the Tour grew out of a conversation with a young lady named Ashley who I’d first met through a mutual friendship back in the days of MySpace. She was--and probably still is-- a huge fan of Lewis Carroll’s Chesire Cat. Since I was only following a potential itinerary, the routes I would take were of little consequence, and so Chesire Cat’s statement to Alice was equally true for me: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.” The route would change many times before I got back to NE Florida, but that one sentence summed up the reason every time.
It was the day after Memorial Day. There had been fireworks for the holiday the night before and a public festival all over town. Holiday roads frighten me, and I was literally loaded with as much as I could carry on the bike. Postponing my departure until the following day seemed prudent, and was seconded by a deputy sheriff-- and that, too, is a story from before the beginning. My last stop before being officially on the road was a Dollar Tree, and my first stop on departure was an old railway line crossing the driveways into the parking lot.
I was overloaded. I am always overloaded, but that first time was too much. I packed photographs and a couple of nice novels. Paper memorabilia of all types was first to get sorted out. I couldn’t bring myself to give up the box containing my only hardcopies of short stories and prose and poetry from over 30-odd years, but I could discard all manner of thinly pressed wood. I had to. Less than 200 yards from where it began, I bagged up nearly 20 pounds of things I HAD to do without and tossed it in a dumpster.
Lightened that much and still overloaded, I set out on The Lewis Carroll Library Tour. My mule was an old store-brand “Fugitive,” an off-the-shelf 26” mountain bike. My phone could send texts, but it was a flip-phone with no other benefits. I had a plan for getting a laptop for my work but hadn’t gotten one yet. “Digital Nomad” was a term for the future even though living mobile and working on the road was what it was about even in the beginning.
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