Co-CEO of @launchableinc, Creator of @jenkinsci, Advisor of @CloudBees. Loves start-ups, coding, photography, LEGO, cross-stitching, and bridging US/JAPAN
I wrote the trip as short essays: part ride report, part food, language, photography, history, time, and borrowed life.
The series starts here:
https://t.co/caAiBhU4gC
In Provence, Marseille’s heat, noise, harbor, prayer, smoke, soap, food, and cold river water all arrived in one overwhelming day.
In the Alps, Col du Galibier was not victory. It was breath. One turn of the pedals, then another, with strangers climbing beside me.
Around all of it were the smaller things that made France real:
asparagus, supermarket traps, missing kitchen tools, sea bream in someone else’s kitchen, ordering bread without pointing, and taking 6,000 photos while still missing what I most wanted to keep.
In the Loire, a late train and two travelers taught me the value of leaving room for chance.
In Bordeaux, rain and a rail strike ruined my perfect route, then led me into a wine cellar I would never have reached otherwise.
There was no real reason it could not happen.
It was just my own inertia.
So the fantasy became a plan: live in one place each week, cook, work a little, and ride out into whatever was nearby.
Friends would join here and there. The trip became larger than cycling.
I did my own Tour de France.
Not the race. Obviously. Just me, a bicycle, four rented homes, and the roads I had only seen on TV.
At first it was pure fantasy, the kind you say out loud just to enjoy the sound of it.
Until I realized the embarrassing thing: