Day Seven
End of the Road
Woke up with a lot of feelings.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
On the last day, I woke up to the sound of roosters. And rain.
It was 5:45am. The call to prayer was blaring, a rooster was crowing, and as I lay there listening, I could make out the pitter-patter of rain on the roof.
Shit.
I sprang up and we quickly moved the bikes under cover, hoping they’d start. Then we went back to bed. What was the rush. It wasn’t a race, after all.
Eventually, we got out of bed. And eventually, the bikes started. And we were off, heading up one more mountain, on our way to finish the Monkey Run.
I’m glad it was raining. Because I was crying.
It started when the odometer clicked onto 4590km. I had done about 1100 of them. We were driving down a road, what looked like wheat fields on either side of us. It might well have been Nebraska. But it wasn’t Nebraska. It was Morocco. And I was there, doing something entirely and completely out of my comfort zone, riding a toy motorcycle in Africa! It’s always special when you, in the moment, realize and understand that this was a pantheon memory in your life. When you become self aware enough to understand the importance of the moment, in the moment. And there, at kilometer 4590, puttering through a foreign land, I did just that.
We took the long way. We wrapped around a ridge line and through a mountain pass, in and out of the clouds. We rode through our last mud pile. We saw a herd of goats cascading over a hill. CHILDREN tormented us for the last time (but boy was it a doozy. A homemade bow and arrow was involved.
And then we pulled over, cracked open the cans of beer we had saved for just this occasion, and drove across the finish line.
It was, and might forever be, the coolest thing I’ve ever done.
All told, we covered roughly 1140 kilometers over seven days. We ascended to over 8,200 feet. I crashed three times, Danny more than that. We had no major break downs, no major fuck ups. We were helped by strangers, drank beer in a dry country, and saw more of an incredible country than 99% of the people who travel to it.
As hard as it was to do, it feels easy now. Life is simple when your objectives are simple. When there’s enough danger to focus you. When there’s exhilaration and exhaustion. I’m ready to go back. I miss the Cous-Cousins, the Aussies, Rachid and Ismail. I miss those dusty , windy pistes. And most of all, most desperately, I miss that tiny bike.
