I’m sitting in the Houston airport at 10pm waiting on our connecting flight to Beijing surounded by a bunch lovely, sleepy—presumabley—chinese people. It still hasn’t really hit me that I’m about to bike across countries whos cultures and languages I am pretty much completely unfamiliar with, in weather conditions that will push my body in ways it has never been pushed  before. 

Last night Marnix and I watched The Way Back with our dad. Its about a group of gulag escapees that are forced to travel from siberia to india to escape communism. Througout a large portion of the movie these unprepared refugees hobble across 500 miles of the gobi desert on foot. Most of them make it.  This feet in mind, combined with the fact that we will be on bikes and have allocated a ton of space to water and sunscreen, I can’t imagine it will be all that bad of a struggle across the 500 miles of the gobi’s edge we’ll be traveling along. 

Hmm… I don’t think I have updated the public with our current tentative rout. Well, I’d love for some help with that… I’ve spent sometime looking at maps and after a few more minutes on the floor of the airports I’ve decided it looks something like this:

    

  

and ends up being about 4000 miles. 

We wanted to keep our options open.   But we also want people that know these areas better than we do to help us come up with the best options!

That reminds me, I have people to thank (and appoligize) too. 

First of all, I have to thank my brother for doing this with me. As he mentioned in his post a couple of ago, we have wanted to travel on motorcycles together ever sense we watched Kino’s Journey. We’ve both gotten pretty into cycling sense then and I’ve built most of my school projects around products that encourage biking. Infact, I started off planning this trip with one of my house mates of three years and very good friend Uriel Eisen. We have worked on multiple bike related projects together and gone on a few multiday trips. He is a complulsive builder, a mechanical genious, and has inpired me to do more than I ever would have had I not known him. He’s the reason I ended up making half the bags for this trip. Without his, workshop, and experties I don’t know what I would have done. He couldn’t make it on the trip because he is busy having money thrown at his start up water filtration company, Rorus inc.

In addition to Uriel, I have to thank Rachel Chiaverella and Danny Kaufman for not completely tearing me a new one for spending more time in class reading bike touring blogs than I did on our capstone design project—which was also about bikes. Sorry guys! 

I need to thank Maggie Burke, Uriel’s lovely partner, for excitely helping me make my first bike bag ever right before our trip through the tnga. 

Julie Charles—who I met at a random art festival through another magical friend—was a god send in teaching me as much as she could in two weeks about Chinese language and culture. Our lessons culminted last wednesday night in a Chinese themed dinner with two other native manderine speakers Shang Wang and Bilei(sp), a bottle of bijou, and a collection of my other close pittsburgh friends. 

Jon Potter gave me the deal of a lifetime in teaching me how to paraglide and was just a good heart to get to know over the past few months. Fingers crossed that I’ll get to do some flying on this trip. I owe you big time, Jon. 

Corinne Clinche—who also couldn’t come on this trip because she is the CEO Rorus inc—could have made me feel like a little crap for doing this instead of the amazing social good projects she works on every day. Instead she has pushed me and encouraged me and worried for me. She not only helped me feel right about my choice to go on this trip, but also is the reason I’m bringing a helmet. You make my life better in ways I can only begin to put into words.

I need to thank my mom for being so supportive, worried and excited about this trip that she has probably spent more time looking at gear to bring than I did while procrastinanting my final projects.

My dad, for always having a level head about these things, and not being a worry wort like some of my other parents.

And everyone else for being so excited and supportive every time I bring up my trip. I can’t whipe the stupid smile off my face everytime you introduce me to a new person as the guy who’s biking across china. 

This trip is going to be a lot. I’ve been told that it will make me grow in unimaginable ways. If we don’t kill eachother It’s going to build on the bond I have with one of the coolest older brothers a kid could ask for. 

It’s time to baord my flight to Beijing. I can’t believe this is actually happening.

Good bye America.