Tom hit the dog and went down hard.

He was right in front of me, but I actually had time, as I swerved around the wreck on the wet mountain curve and looked for flat enough place to park the motorcycle, to think: And here I thought getting robbed two days ago in Cuenca would be the low point of our trip.

“Adventure travel” seems packaged and safe until you’re in the pouring rain in the Amazon jungle with an injured buddy and a bike that won’t start, a satellite phone that won’t work, and a 20,000-foot Andes mountain looming between you and a warm bed.

Read the rest of the story of my Ecuador trip on Medium.com …

During our motorcycle trip, Tommy and I were trading for shitter lit One Man Caravan, the account written by Robert Edison Fulton, Jr. about his 1932 motorcycle trip around the world. I finally finished it this week and can now vouch for the veracity of its concluding sentiments:

I’m alone in a diner in Butler, Indiana, eating potato soup and an
egg salad sandwich and drinking coffee.
I considered one last beery lunch, but I’m already dazed from four hours of pounding into a hard and rainy headwind.

Scout has been counting the days until tomorrow, so I’m determined to get to Chicago tonight.

But I’m not home yet, and I'm still thinking about last night’s party at Tom’s
boathouse, on Lake Erie.

Though it was organized as a homecoming thing, there wasn’t
any ticker tape.

People don’t care about other people’s travels except as a
jumping off point to talk about their own travels. So the more exotic the
travel, the less they care.

And to Clevelander, Nova Scotia is exotic. (To a Chicagoan
too. I had to show my life insurance agent an electronic map to prove that traveling
to Nova Scotia didn’t mean leaving North America.)

So we talked about other things: a fire at a prominent
Cleveland bar, a federal investigation of Cuyahoga County politicians, and the locally relevant topic: how guys
got their fingers cut off. (At one point in the party, there were three guests
with missing digits. Cleveland is a tough town.)

It was a Thursday, so everybody was gone by midnight.
Tommy and I took the dog and a bottle down to the beach and talked about the
trip—the high points and low points, what the whole thing had meant, what an insufferable know-it-all dick Tommy really is, and how it all came to a head one night
on a pool table in Binghamton, New York ….

Now that that writing is done, the trip is finally over.

I’m
squarely back into the disorganized daily churn of ambition versus money, small
pleasures, regular chores, pointless guilt, bad habits, familiar worries, self-doubt,
occasional panic, exceptions to rules, special favors, other people, tight
schedules, awkward moments, boring mornings, unplanned-for joy and the
whispering hint of a toothache.

What I miss about the trip is the way it organized my life:
Gave it a focus—the broad focus of the years and months and weeks of laying the
groundwork at home and at work, logistical planning, emotional preparation.

And then the daily doing: Wake up, drink coffee, get on the
motorcycle and ride. Take spontaneous detours, or stop only for gas: your call.

The journey was a happy, easy place to live.

Home, I must acknowledge, is where the real adventure
is.

But I'm not selling the motorcycle.