I just finished 2 Years on a Bike. Overall I think it was a great dose of wanderlust - a big, hardback book with great print quality. I'd watched the 2-hour long movie on Youtube which was great. My worries about the book having 0 new content were unfounded, there was a lot of excellent extra detail.
Some reviewers noted that the author had maybe "too much" detail around his relationships over the 2 years. I disagreed - while there was a little bit of jealousy on my part that this guy was basically living my dream of biking around and sleeping with various models I think he covered them at an appropriate level without bragging.
The other chief complaint was if he was pure enough in the endeavor. There was plenty of shipping of supplies to the next cities, taking occasional side trips in cars, and long breaks in cosmopolitan cities. I think perhaps some of the folks complaining about that haven't done bikepacking in truly rough terrain over a 2 year period.
There was a lot of honesty about how miserable parts of the trip were, and how by the end he was essentially burned out on natural beauty. When you're stuck in an office for 10 hours at a time it's easy to forget that if you've seen breathtaking mountains continuously for 2 years, by the end you'll just be breathing pretty normally.
Finally from a culture war angle my other concern was that since all the people who get to do this are fucking hippies with trust funds that there'd be a lot of junk in that vein. Not so much! Or at least at a low enough level to be truly benign.
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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, and also flipping through whatever vaguely Christian books happen to be in arm's length.
I just finished 2 Years on a Bike. Overall I think it was a great dose of wanderlust - a big, hardback book with great print quality. I'd watched the 2-hour long movie on Youtube which was great. My worries about the book having 0 new content were unfounded, there was a lot of excellent extra detail.
Some reviewers noted that the author had maybe "too much" detail around his relationships over the 2 years. I disagreed - while there was a little bit of jealousy on my part that this guy was basically living my dream of biking around and sleeping with various models I think he covered them at an appropriate level without bragging.
The other chief complaint was if he was pure enough in the endeavor. There was plenty of shipping of supplies to the next cities, taking occasional side trips in cars, and long breaks in cosmopolitan cities. I think perhaps some of the folks complaining about that haven't done bikepacking in truly rough terrain over a 2 year period.
There was a lot of honesty about how miserable parts of the trip were, and how by the end he was essentially burned out on natural beauty. When you're stuck in an office for 10 hours at a time it's easy to forget that if you've seen breathtaking mountains continuously for 2 years, by the end you'll just be breathing pretty normally.
Finally from a culture war angle my other concern was that since all the people who get to do this are fucking hippies with trust funds that there'd be a lot of junk in that vein. Not so much! Or at least at a low enough level to be truly benign.
Recommend it if you can shelve your jealousy.
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