Today I set off for an 18 day, 800 mile tour around Oregon. I'll start from Portland, head down the Willamette Valley, cross the Cascades at the McKenzie Pass, weave out to Pendleton, follow the Columbia Gorge to Hood River, and then return to Portland via Lolo Pass. There are a lot of thoughts on my mind right now, but this is one is at the top:
It's going to be hard.
I have hundreds of miles and thousands of feet of climbing in front of me. It'll be hot, and lonely, and I'm fully expecting to regret ever embarking on it at one point, or another, or both. So why go?
When John F. Kennedy made the case for a manned mission to the moon at Rice University in 1962, he said:
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..."
So while my trip is a few hundred thousand miles short of the moon, I'm still inspired by what Kennedy said. It helps me remember that hardship leads to meaning, and what is travel besides a search for meaning?
I'm going to try to post each day during my trip and you can follow along here.