To clear any confusions I might have created, let me clarify how I’m organizing this virtual bike trip.
I sleep every night at my home in San Jose. Everyday, I take my bike out and ride it around my neighborhood. Usually in the morning, about 10-15km, to switch into the work mode. In the weekend, I ride further out, and a trip can go up as much as 50km. I use an app called “Runkeeper” to keep track of these activities, and it gives me the total distance I traveled since the beginning, among the other things. As of now, that’s 2623km.
I then use Google Map to figure out where I would be if I had traveled from my home for 2623km through I-80 to east, and right now I’m about 20km to Lincoln, Nebraska. I use the opportunity to look around the area, sometimes dropping into Street View, sometimes reading Wikipedia articles, to try to imagine myself actually biking in that region. Every once in a week or so, I create a blog post out of it and post it here. It’s fun, and it’s a great motivator to keep going.
Somewhere deeper in my psyche, I must be trying to make up for the fact that I cannot travel, when traveling has been such an integral part of myself for such a long time. It gives me one more joy to life.
I’m not sure how far I will manage to go. I-80 will go all the way to New York City, and that’s 4700km away, it’s quite a distance. OTOH, I’m more than half way there, and it’s starting to feel like a realistic goal to me. We’ll see.