The Big Trip Delusion

The Tour Divide isn't getting any closer. Neither is your driveway.

Find a spot 10km from your kitchen, and go.

I know a guy. You know him too. He’s been telling me about the Tour Divide since 2017. Not the route. The attempt. The year he finally does it. The year the kids are old enough, the year the renovation is done, the year his knee stops doing whatever it’s doing. He has a spreadsheet. He has a folder of saved routes ten gigabytes deep. He has a Surly that hangs in the garage on two J-hooks with a thin coat of dust on the top tube and a slightly flat rear tire.

He has not slept outside since 2014.

This is the type. Once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it. The Big Trip Guy. The man whose ambition has eaten his practice.

The Type

He shows up at every group ride and every bike-shop counter. He’s wearing a Tour Divide t-shirt he bought at a fundraiser and a face that says he has thought about this longer than anyone in the room. He’ll talk to you for forty minutes about Aquamira versus the Sawyer Squeeze. He has the elevation gain north of Helena memorized. On his phone is a topo screenshot of the Gila section he has cropped and rotated and saved to a folder called “GDMBR Final.”

He has not, in the most boring sense of the word, gone.

What he has done is plan. The planning is the comfort. The planning is the place his mind goes when the rest of his life feels stuck. He has built a small interior shed where the trip lives, and he visits the shed often, and the shed is in better shape every year. The bike is in worse shape every year. The body that would have to ride the bike is in noticeably worse shape. Only the shed gleams.

I am being unkind here on purpose. Not because I don’t recognize him. Because I do.

The Load-Bearing Fantasy

The Big Trip is, for most of the men who talk about it, a load-bearing fantasy. Its job is not to happen. Its job is to sit in the back of the head, getting bigger and more elaborate, while the actual life keeps moving without challenge. The calendar app, the drywall, the quiet decline of the cardiovascular system. None of it gets touched.

As long as the trip is The Trip You Are Going To Do, you don’t have to find out whether you are the kind of person who actually does it.

That’s the load it carries. The trip is doing structural work in a man’s identity that the man cannot do without it. It tells him he is, on some untested axis, an adventurer. A capable person who has not yet completely settled. He gets to stay that man, in his own head, as long as the trip stays in front of him. The minute the trip happens, one of two things becomes true. Either he did it, in which case he has to find a new place to keep his identity. Or he did not do it, in which case he was never quite the man he was telling himself he was.

You can see why he keeps the trip out ahead. You can also see what it costs him.

Why Nobody Goes

The sub-24-hour overnighter calls this bluff, and that’s why people don’t do it.

It calls the bluff by removing every excuse. You don’t need three weeks. You don’t need a thousand dollars in new gear. You don’t need to train. You don’t need to have your affairs in order. You need to leave your house on a Tuesday afternoon, ride for two or three hours along a road you already know, find a piece of ground that isn’t being actively used by anyone else, sleep there, and ride home in the morning. The whole thing, start to finish, is shorter than a binge of the show your wife is watching without you.

There is no version of your life in which you do not have time for this. You have time. The thing you do not have, when you sit with it long enough to be honest, is the willingness to find out.

Find out what?

Whether you can fall asleep on uneven ground without losing your composure. Whether your knees will hold you for one easy day and one easy ride home. Whether you actually like being outside, or whether you have just been telling people you do. Whether the silence at three in the morning, in a field you’ve never seen in the dark, is a silence you can be in.

The S24O is, on paper, a bike trip. In practice, it’s a small audit of the man you’ve been telling yourself you are.

Deposits and Withdrawals

The math on Big Trips versus Little Trips is not what the Big Trip Guy thinks it is.

He believes he is saving up. That one mythical fortnight on the Divide will compensate, somehow, for the years of weekends spent on the couch. He believes the trip will be a deposit so large it covers the deficit. It will not.

Time does not work that way and bodies do not work that way and marriages do not work that way. A man who has not slept outside in eleven years does not arrive in Antelope Wells in his fifties as a bikepacker. He arrives as a tourist with expensive gear and a body that has forgotten how to be uncomfortable. The first night out, he will lie on his back in a Tyvek bivy and stare at the stars and discover, somewhere around 2am, that his own body has become a stranger to him. The second night, he will ride forty kilometres in the wrong frame of mind and pull a ligament in his knee that should never have been a problem. The third night, he will be on a flight home, telling his friends the route was harder than it looked.

The man who did forty S24Os over those same eleven years arrives in Antelope Wells as somebody else entirely. He arrives as a person whose body knows how to lie down on rocky ground and sleep, whose hands know how to thread a tarp guy line in the dark. His nervous system has been exposed often enough that one more night out is just one more night out.

The Big Trip is a withdrawal. The S24O is the deposit. There is no order in which a man can do these in the wrong sequence and have it work.

The Practice Is the Trip

There is no separate skill called bikepacking that you train for in the gym and then deploy on a long trip. There is just leaving the house with your bike loaded and being outside until morning. Do it once and you’ve done the thing. Do it forty times and you are the thing.

The Big Trip Guy is the man who has read every book on swimming and has not gotten in the pool.

We like to think the time we spend reading and watching is a form of training. A slow accumulation that will pay off when we finally go. It isn’t. The reading is fine, the watching is fine, the saved routes are fine. None of that is what the trip is made of. The trip is made of being outside. Of waking up cold and figuring out how to get warm. Whatever amount of this you have done, that’s the amount of bikepacker you are. Whatever amount you have not done is just talk.

I’m sorry. I know that’s a hard thing to read on a Sunday morning with coffee.

One Self-Promoting Interruption, and Then We Go

I wrote a book called Train, Pack & Ride. It is meant to be the last thing you read before you go, not another thing you read instead of going. You’ll find a kit list inside, a packing routine, and the unromantic mechanical detail that turns a daydream into a ride. Read it once. Use it to pack the bike. Put it on the shelf.

If you want it, it’s there. If you’d rather just go without it, that’s better.

Pick a Tuesday

The actual work is in the calendar.

Pick a Tuesday. Not a future Tuesday, when conditions will be better. They won’t be. Conditions are never better. The kids are never older in the way you mean. The knee is what the knee is. Pick this Tuesday or next. Tell the people in your house you are leaving after work and coming back the next morning. Put on the bags that are already on the bike, or the bags that should already be on the bike. Ride out of town along a road you have ridden a hundred times. Find a meadow, a treeline, a logging spur, a point where a power line cuts through hardwood. Find a place you’ve ridden past forty times and never stopped at.

Sleep there.

Pack a burrito. Pack a candle. Pack a paperback you’ve been meaning to read. Bring the bivy you bought in 2019 and have used twice. Bring nothing else. The thing you are doing is small enough to be done with what you already own.

The first time you do this, you will discover something deflating. Almost nothing happens. You ride out, you eat the burrito on a log, you watch the light go, you sleep poorly the way everyone sleeps poorly the first few times, you ride home. You will not have an epiphany. You will not become a different man. You will, however, have done the thing. And the second time you do it, you will sleep slightly better, and the fortieth time, you will sleep like an animal that has remembered it is one.

This is the deposit. This is what the fantasy was pretending to be.

Smaller Doors

The Big Trip Guy is, in the end, a sad figure, and I want to be careful with him because I am occasionally him. He has confused the size of a thought with the size of a life. Lazy is the wrong word for him. He has let the imagined trip get so large that the real trip can no longer fit through the garage door.

The way out is smaller doors. One Tuesday. One bivy. One meadow ten kilometres from the kitchen.

Then another Tuesday. And another. And another.

The Divide will still be there when you have done thirty of these. Or it won’t, and it will turn out that thirty Tuesdays in your own quiet country were the actual trip you needed all along, and the Divide was a coastline you painted on a wall to keep yourself company. Either of those is a better outcome than the one you are currently living, which is the one in which the bike is in the garage and the trip is in the shed, and they are getting further from each other, in the dark, every year you don’t go.

---