EPISODE 20
The Pedaling Polyglot
Roger Levy, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, considers himself a scientist of language and a polyglot, speaking five languages fluently and many more conversationally. In this episode, Roger will share the sounds and flavors from his six bike tours across three continents. Since Roger also happens to be a longtime friend, I was his partner on two of the six tours. On his solo adventures, Roger enjoyed the delicious breakfast offerings in Taiwan and ended each day of riding in Scotland in a pub and perhaps a whisky distillery. He also trained with the Stanford University triathlon team and discovered the bicycle-friendly country of Rwanda. Everywhere he went, Roger bravely took on the roads, the weather, and the language barriers he encountered.
Episode Transcript
Gabriel: Polyglot: a combination of the Greek words “poly,” meaning “many,” and “glotta,” a variant of “glossa,” meaning “tongue” or “language.” The term is used to describe someone, such as today’s guest Roger Levy, who can speak more than three languages.
Sandra: You’re listening to the Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast, you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about their most memorable bike touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.
Gabriel: Hello cycle touring enthusiasts! Welcome to another episode of the Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. Roger Levy and I have been friends since we met as freshmen at the University of Arizona thirty-three years ago. Today, Roger is a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s a leading researcher on human language, working at the intersection of linguistics, psychology, and artificial intelligence. In the last few years, he’s researched how large language models like ChatGPT seem so humanlike in how they use language and how they still fall short. In addition to being a scientist of language, Roger’s a polyglot. He speaks five languages fluently and is teaching his two-year-old son Mandarin. In this episode, Roger will share the sounds and flavors from his six bike tours across three continents. On two of the tours, I was his riding partner. From enjoying the delicious breakfast offerings in Taiwan, to training with the Stanford University triathlon team, to ending each day of riding in Scotland in a pub and perhaps a whisky distillery, Roger bravely took on the roads, the weather, and the language barriers everywhere he went.
Gabriel: Roger, thank you for being a guest on the Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. This is really cool.
Roger: Thank you for having me.
Gabriel: I don’t remember the first time we met, but it must have been freshman year in college at the University of Arizona, because you were staying at the Honors dorm, and I wasn’t. Our mutual friend Ian Larkin was there, and I think I was visiting Ian, and I met you in 1991, something like that.
Roger: That has to be right. That’s right. It’s an exact occasion, but of course, that’s got to be right.
Gabriel: Yeah, incredible. And then since then, we’ve seen each other so many places and had so many experiences together. It’s incredible to think about.
Roger: We were housemates for quite a while too, at various times.
Gabriel: Yeah, we were housemates at the University of Arizona, and later on, we were roommates at Stanford. It always seemed like you were going to end up in academia, and you did. So very briefly, can you just tell us what you did?
Roger: We were in the University of Arizona together from 1991 to 1996. I majored in mathematics. At that time, it was becoming very popular for undergraduates in the US to spend some time studying abroad. There was a new scholarship that became available, and it was pretty easy to get the first year, and I got one of those and spent a year in Singapore in 1994-95, and that completely changed my life. It was much more different of a place to spend time in than any other country I’d been in. Such a linguistically and culturally interesting and diverse place, a wonderful and a wonderful experience. I was already a passionate traveler, and I traveled a lot in Southeast Asia during that time, and it kindled in me a deep, deep passion for studying languages at that time. Most of all, Mandarin Chinese, but also Japanese. I was in an intensive Mandarin class as part of what I was doing in Singapore, and actually most of my classmates were Japanese. That led to really a change in what I thought I wanted to do professionally, and I was still in an exploratory period intellectually, but I thought I really wanted to spend more time learning more Mandarin and spending more time abroad, and so that led to me to spend a year in Taiwan after graduating from college and then a year in Japan after the year in Taiwan. And that was the beginning of the path to what I do now, which is I’m a scientist of language. I got my PhD in linguistics at Stanford, and I spent a lot of time as a professor at the University of California San Diego in the linguistics department, and now I’m a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. My work combines my original interest in mathematics and formal approaches to doing science together with linguistics and psychology, so I’m sort of at the intersection of AI and linguistics and psychology together in cognitive science, and I try to understand what we hear and read, how we turn that into meaning, how we convert our thoughts into words, phrases, and sentences to communicate to each other, and how we learn both our native language, and to a lesser extent, I also sometimes look at how we learn new languages and contexts. But that all sort of derived from this passion I discovered of just learning languages. I’ve spent a long time working on it, and one thing about this is that as you get better at specific languages, you also sort of can get better at learning new languages. It’s like a meta-learning kind of thing.
Gabriel: You actually have connections, before we hear your story, to people in two previous episodes. There was an episode that we did called “Two Canadians Rolling Through Cuba” with Jim and Susan Allman.
Roger: Great.
Gabriel: Yes, you and I toured in British Columbia, and we went to see Jim and Susan. Do you have a fond memory from that trip that we did together?
Roger: Oh my gosh, yeah. I have very fond memories. So this was in 2017, and I was at a conference in Vancouver, and I had recently bought a new touring bike. We had talked about meeting up for a tour, and we did it. We used Google Maps and Ride With GPS to map out the route, and it took us out of Vancouver and through sort of like a counterclockwise loop that involved a number of ferries around British Columbia onto Vancouver Island. Very fond memories. I also have sort of painful memories. I was extremely ambitious, and we just did a very large number of miles, or kilometers, per day. I think it was the first day of that trip, I just remember that it took us through the middle part of the first island. Effectively, it was like a steep rock hike, and somehow we were supposed to do that on our bikes, and I just completely pooped out and Gabe, I remember you being much more successful in climbing parts of it, but it was a really serious set of – especially the first two days – we were doing like 90 miles a day with fully loaded bikes, and I just remember utter, utter exhaustion at the end of the day. That is actually a prominent part of my memory of that trip. I mean, the scenery was just amazing, and we stayed with your friends, and it was just really fun. I mean, it’s always so much fun to go biking with you. That was a great experience.
Gabriel: Yeah. So there’s two things I remember. Number one is that we were still using Google Maps for bicycle navigation, and several guests have commented, Google Maps is not your friend when you’re on a bicycle, because it’s just not made for it. We had looked at this road, and we had seen, this is a straight road. So usually you imagine a straight road is perfectly flat, but this was just some kind of fire road or something that went straight up a mountain. So it was straight, but it was not flat. And then I also remember, as we were on Vancouver Island, Google had routed us some way, but it wasn’t possible to get through. Remember, we got to this huge gate?
Roger: I remember.
Gabriel: Yeah, it was like out of Jurassic Park or something in the middle of the forest. You have this massive gate, and we tried to get around it.
Roger: In fact, actually even getting to the gate, it was supposed to be a road, but basically we sort of had to ride through a largely grown-over path in the forest. Yeah, we were like, hit this gate, and like, can we go under the gate? Like what could we do? Eventually, we gave up, but it’s hard because this was not an out-and-back trip. This was a loop. In order to get to where we were going to stay, like it was a very long trip already, even if we didn’t have to do detours and stuff. To get to the end of that, like to actually get where we were going, you know, you sort of, like, panic because, oh, we have to turn back, and then we have to find another route and we like, you know, don’t have internet at that particular moment, and so it’s all going to be guesswork, but we eventually turned around and, you know, obviously it worked out.
Gabriel: I’m not sure we tried going under that much, but we definitely tried going around and it didn’t work. It turned out to be like the watershed for the whole area.
Roger: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like a public utility type plant.
Gabriel: Yeah, they were definitely serious about not letting people in. So Google Maps misled us for sure at that time. So anyway, never used Google Maps again after that.
Roger: Like in major cities, like it’s usually pretty okay, but yeah, like once you get outside, and also I think like outside of the US is probably worse then. I’ve had weird experiences in different parts of the US too, outside of cities with Google Maps for bikes. Yeah, I agree.
Gabriel: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. Google Maps does have that bicycle route layer, which is pretty good in cities, but like point to point, stay away.
Roger: I actually use Ride With GPS whenever I can, which I think is a little better, but it does have some of the same problems, still. Because of my wife Stephanie’s work, I’ve spent some time in Rwanda. Rwanda is a wonderful place for cycling. Took my road bike and I, like, mapped out a day trip, and like the first part of the day trip out of the capital took me through these muddy roads, through villages that were in the outskirts of the capital city. It was, like, so muddy that my brakes got completely clogged up with mud and then these happy children are, like, excited to see me. They don’t see weird foreigner on a road bike very often. They want to touch the bike and it’s really fun and great and they were awesome, but it was also like, I can’t even move the bike. And I had to walk at the rest of the way outside of the village and then clear the mud out, spend a lot of time doing that and it’s like, okay, well, that was fun, but I’m not sure I would have… like if I had known that that was going to be what it was, I might have rerouted.
Gabriel: Yeah, I mean, if you’re on a road bike and kids can walk alongside you and touch your bike, then yeah, you’re going pretty slow at that point. But how cool that you got the bicycle in Rwanda.
Roger: I’ve had some amazing cycling experiences in Rwanda, yeah.
Gabriel: It’s all been day trips on your road bike.
Roger: Those have all been day trips, yeah. Last summer, summer 2023, we spent a few weeks there and I got connected with a guy who was the level to join the national cycling team. He had gotten a little older and had a child and so he wasn’t quite at that level anymore, but his work was doing bicycle tours for people and… first of all, he was unbelievably amazing. In fact, he had this story of this 1,000 kilometer race that he would do every February. It was like on a gravel bike, 1,000 kilometers nonstop. So basically like how quickly can you do it? No sleep for days.
Gabriel: Oh, wow. Do you remember the name of this gravel bike race? Is it Race Around Rwanda or something?
Roger: It is called the Race Around Rwanda, yeah.
Gabriel: Okay, perfect.
Roger: Yeah. Amazing, wonderful guy. Innocence’s his name. He was at that level and that was very fun, and he took me on some amazing trips and I just remember, there were these parts of these dirt roads where I’m struggling and he’s like riding a bike that’s not even really designed for the roads and he’s just chilling out while I’m like struggling up these dirt roads. It’s very funny. Rwanda is a wonderful place for cycling. The number of paved roads outside of the city is not that high, but the ones that are paved are actually quite high quality. You just have to be careful about big trucks, because they don’t have much of a shoulder, but the quality of the road is actually very good. It’s a beautiful scenery, mountainous, so you get all sorts of climbing and an amazing place to cycle.
Gabriel: It does sound good. It’s the first time we mention mainland Africa on this podcast. Hopefully, in future episodes, we’ll get somebody who’s done some touring in Africa, but so far that’s been a place where none of the guests have been. Yeah, so speaking of other episodes, I wanted to then mention the second connection that we have to the podcast from previous episodes, and that is the episode “AIDS/LifeCycle: The Best Week of the Year,” with Meg Schutzer.
Roger: Yes.
Gabriel: Roger, you were my riding partner on that trip. That was in 2016. That was a supported charity ride, so a little bit different than most of the things we talk about, but what are some of your fond memories from that trip?
Roger: Oh my gosh, that was an amazing experience. Yeah. I guess this is already familiar to your listeners, but the AIDS/LifeCycle ride has been around for something like 30 years now, and it’s a big charity fundraiser for two charitable organizations, one in San Francisco and one in Los Angeles. So San Francisco to Los Angeles, one week, 545 miles. As you say, it’s supported and it has an amazing turnout. I remember them saying there were 2,400 cyclists or something like that, and then also, like, hundreds of support staff, and it’s quite an experience. I’ve never been on a large-scale organized group-supported ride. Two things stand out to me. Notably, one is just when you’re at that scale, it’s a big caravan. You’re basically all caravaning together on your bikes down the California coast. Sometimes inland, a lot of it’s on the coast. The other thing to mention is just the community aspect of it. I think neither of us knew how rich and wonderful the community is. This is an HIV/AIDS community support and awareness event. Even though it’s very meaningful to so many people, there were many, many people on the ride who basically had never done anything remotely at that scale of riding before, and they had trained all year to do it, and then they’re able to do it, and it’s incredible for them, and that’s brought together to everybody. Memories of that are so good. Also there’s a lot of fun that people are having. Many of the rest stops are these themed rest stops, so they’re these groups that self-organize and they’re like, “We’re going to do something fun at the rest stop.” So there were several of those that I remember. Maybe the one that comes most prominently in mind is the Quinceañera rest stop. Do you remember that one?
Gabriel: Ah, yes, the drag show.
Roger: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they got all these guys in drag, doing their Quinceañera party and super fun, nice themed snacks and stuff.
Gabriel: And that one, the setting was incredible because it was at the old San Miguel mission, I think.
Roger: That’s right. Yes, that’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things that’s funny about it is that that’s a lot of riding, but that was the easiest 545 miles I’ve ever ridden. You couldn’t really go too fast because of the caravan aspect of it, and then they’re all the stops. So it’s just, like, you’re on your bike all day and then you’re taking a lot of rest for a week. And I think we adapted to it more and it got easier and easier actually, although we were getting more and more fatigued. That was an amazing trip.
Gabriel: And you don’t have to worry about Google Maps or taking a wrong turn. Everything is so well marked and so well planned. Anytime you’re starting to get tired, there’s a rest area for snacks. It is a long way, but it goes by pretty quickly, compared to when you’re on your own and you might have all of these other challenges, you’re definitely shepherded through.
Roger: Yeah, I still have a t-shirt from that and people always ask about it.
Gabriel: Yeah, I have the same t-shirt and I still wear it sometimes and I definitely get comments on it. Sometimes from people who have ridden it different years and it’s fun.
Roger: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s cool.
Gabriel: Great remembering some of our rides together, but the bulk of today’s chat is about your solo trips. So I’m curious to hear about these because I wasn’t there. So what rides would you like to talk about today?
Roger: Sure. Yeah. So I was doing some recounting for myself of the multi-day tours that I’ve done in my life. And I think I count a total of six. Something feels missing if I don’t get a good multi-hour bike ride in on the weekend at least once every week. I haven’t done that many multi-day tours, but I’ve done several and so I count six. The first one was in Taiwan and this was in 1997. So just as a little bit of background, when I finished college in 1996, I received a Fulbright scholarship to go to Taiwan for a year and do intensive Mandarin Chinese study in National Taiwan University in Taipei. That was an amazing experience in many wedding ways. Taiwan is a wonderful country. Taipei is a really fun city. The people are nice. The food is amazing. Taiwan is also a really beautiful island. At some point during the summer, there was a couple of break weeks between classes and I decided to traverse the island. In fact, there’s a word for that in Mandarin, which is huan dao, which means to basically circle the island, a literal translation. And so I did that. Taiwan is not that large of an island. The geography of Taiwan is interesting. So Taipei is at the north edge of the island and the center of the island is extremely mountainous and rocky. And then on the western side of the island, especially like sort of the northern two-thirds of the western part of the island is sort of more flat and agricultural and most of the people live there. And then the eastern side of the island is sort of more rocky. It faces, of course, the Pacific Ocean. And it actually is very reminiscent to me of the California coast just south of the Bay Area, sort of going into Big Sur. I went counterclockwise. So, starting on the eastern side of the island. Of course, Taiwan is also a major maker of bicycles. When I first got to Taiwan, I bought sort of like a hybrid mountain-ish bike. And I basically rode that all around Taipei. So I had a lot of experience biking around, a lot of experience navigating with traffic, but I had never done a multi-day tour before. I bought a tent, I bought panniers, you know, it was the 1990s and Taiwan was a middle-income country at that time. So I was, like, getting these things for like $10 and put them on and just set off on my own. No special gear, really. I would just find places to put my tent day after day and navigated my way down the east coast of the island. I knew some people at different parts of the island, so I got in touch with them in advance and let them know I’d be coming. And it was a really cool experience that I had these random meetings with people. And at that point, my Mandarin was good enough that I was pretty conversationally fluent. This white guy biking down the coast of Taiwan attracts some attention. There were some very funny days during that trip.
Gabriel: I want to hear about that. First though, Taiwan has come up in a couple of episodes. Currently, there’s incredible infrastructure for bicycle touring in Taiwan. Two things: One, I’ve learned that there’s this blue line on the road that goes the entire coast. In Asia now, there are these various long blue lines that make sure you never take a wrong turn on the national cycling route. The coast of Taiwan is one of them, so there’s this long blue line. And then also, because Giant is a Taiwanese company, they have set up all of these shops all around the island, and you can simply get a bike in one shop and you can tour and then you can drop it off at a different shop. It’s all very well organized. How was it in the 1990s in terms of bicycle infrastructure? I imagine a lot has changed since then.
Roger: I had no idea about any of that. That’s incredible and awesome. No. I don’t remember any blue lines and I don’t remember any obvious Giant shops to go to on the route. No. And I should say that I didn’t do a complete circumnavigation of the island. I stopped in Tainan. That’s about two-thirds of the way down the coast on the west side. I decided to stop and I just took the bus back because what I had read was that, really, the remainder is much more trafficked and the scenery is not as good. And I was sort of ready. I had done that for 10 days, which that felt epic at the time. Now, I think if I go back, I haven’t calculated how far I went per day. I think it was not very far. You know, I don’t think I was going very far every day. It was not a particularly high-end bike and I don’t think I was that well trained of a cyclist at that point. But I had the advantage of youth. None of that, I don’t think, was there, but that’s such a good idea because it’s an incredible place to bike. It’s just so beautiful. But that’s really valuable because also I did have to sort of dodge trucks some of the time on the road. They didn’t expect me. I didn’t encounter any other people doing what I was doing. Maybe they were all going counterclockwise and so were just at different points. That’s brilliant that they’re doing that.
Gabriel: Yeah. I’d love to hear, what’s one funny thing that happened on that trip?
Roger: When I was about two-thirds of the way down the East Coast, there was a storm, okay? And people were looking at me and they’re like,”Where are you going to stay?” I’m like, “I got this tent,” and they’re like, “There’s a storm coming.” I was like, “Oh!” And so I got to this village and I was like, “What am I going to do?” It was summer, so school was not in session. But there was this empty schoolhouse and I just climbed in the window of the empty schoolhouse and slept inside one of the classrooms overnight and it was a pretty bad storm. But I was fine. I did probably all too much of that kind of thing in my 20s, both on bike trips and other kinds of adventures.
Gabriel: Yeah. And in the morning, you just climbed back out and kept riding.
Roger: Speaking of the morning, one of the amazing things about Taiwan is Taiwanese breakfast. Oh my God. All these wonderful things with these yotiao, it’s literally called oil sticks. They’re like non-sweetened horizontal donuts. It’s like non-sweet churros.
Gabriel: Yes.
Roger: You can put them in like sesame bread and there’s soy milk, amazing breakfast food. The food in Taiwan is just amazing.
Gabriel: I’m glad you’re talking about food.
Roger: I just want to say food is one of the highlights of cycling tours for me.
Gabriel: Yes.
Roger: Because you can eat anything you want and you’re just going to burn it off. So to me, it’s like a central part of the whole thing.
Gabriel: Absolutely. It’s one of the great benefits of it and you don’t have to feel guilty about anything. Anything else from that tour that stands out?
Roger: Maybe about a quarter of the way down southward in the island, there’s a place called Hualien where they do marble mining. I had visited there earlier on an organized trip where we went on a hike and I went back and I actually cycled into the canyon a little bit. It’s extremely scenic and beautiful and there’s like a stream or a small river running down the canyon. The other thing I just want to emphasize again, people are so welcoming and fun-loving there. It’s just wonderful, wonderful that way. Obviously, like within any country, there’s more variation across people in the country than there is variation across countries. But, nevertheless, there’s levels of like welcomingness just by default in populations and Taiwan is just really, really good that way. And that was true throughout the year when I was there and it was equally evident in my trip on my bike and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s such a fun place.
Gabriel: Sounds good. So you said there were six tours. What was the second one?
Roger: The second was a short one and I actually don’t have super-strong memories of it so I don’t know that I’m going to spend time on it. But it was the next year. It was in 1998 and I was living in Japan for the year, in Tokyo. I had the same bike. I brought the same bike from Taiwan to Japan. It was sort of on the north coast of Honshu, the main island of Japan and I took a train out there and then I biked around for a few days and it was nice and beautiful. And it was a shorter trip and I don’t think I have super-strong memories of it quite the same way. Maybe it was because it wasn’t the first trip and it was still quite far back. Because it was on the north coast of Japan, you’re talking about the Sea of Japan, right? Between Japan and North Korea, South Korea and Russia. I just remember experiences of biking on that coast and looking out and thinking, I’m looking at North Korea. That’s the next land that one would hit if you just went in a straight line in the direction that I was looking at. You’re far north and so even in the summer, it’s not that warm. That was a kind of intense psychological experience. That was maybe the most intense memory. It was also very beautiful. It was a little flatter where I was. It’s still very scenic and wonderful. It was a great trip. But it was shorter.
Gabriel: Okay. What’s the next one?
Roger: So the next one, unless I’m forgetting something, we have to skip all the way forward to 2015.
Gabriel: Oh, wow.
Roger: And this was in Scotland.
Gabriel: Nice.
Roger: The backdrop was that I took sabbatical in 2013-2014. I was at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, which is in the hills behind Stanford, in the Bay Area. And I decided I’m on sabbatical. I had recently gotten tenure, so it felt like a big milestone professionally. The center that I was at, they encouraged people not only to do their academic work on sabbatical but also to do some kind of personal growth kind of thing. And I sort of had my eye out on the idea of trying to do a triathlon. Just as context, I was never really that athletic. So I did these bike tours, but I wasn’t a cyclist-athlete or anything like that. Turned out that anybody with a Stanford affiliation was able to train with the Stanford triathlon team. So I did that. And I sort of had the vision that maybe one day I’d eventually be able to do a triathlon. And it turned out that I was able to do one much sooner than I was able to do, and I really liked it.
Gabriel: Okay. Hold on. I got to stop here. Since you speak a number of languages and are so interested in languages, I completely admire how you can be in a country and just start speaking in this country’s language to whoever it is. And you may not understand everything that they say, but you’re so fearless about it. I am the opposite. I really don’t want to talk to anybody until I’m fluent. And it just brings back so many memories.
Roger: Yeah.
Gabriel: We’ve been so many places together over the years, Roger. We were in Russia together.
Roger: Mm-hmm. Yep.
Gabriel: And I just remember you speaking Russian to all these Russian people. Totally fearless, which is amazing. And then with the triathlon team, I was at Stanford also when you were on sabbatical. We were there together.
Roger: Yes.
Gabriel: And I just couldn’t believe a person with zero triathlon experience would just approach the Stanford triathlon team and just say, “Hey guys, can I train with you?” I mean, I could never do this. I would not be ready to do it until I had a ton of experience, but you were fearless about that too, which is unbelievable. And you did it.
Roger: Yeah. The willingness to make a fool of oneself has many advantages in many situations.
Gabriel: Yeah. Maybe that’s my problem. I don’t like making a fool of myself.
Roger: Yeah. I think you’ve done pretty well yourself in language learning.
Gabriel: I’ve done okay. Let’s hear about your Scotland trip.
Roger: Okay. Moving back, so this is June 2015. I had this workshop and I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to reserve about eight to nine days for a bike tour.” But I didn’t bring a bike. At this point, I didn’t actually have a touring bike. I’m like, “Well, maybe I can rent a bike.” I managed to do that. I left my luggage with a friend, found a bike shop that rented me this rather janky hybrid bike with all of the stuff that I needed for touring. It was an incredibly good price. Really nice shop. Really good people. But the bike was a little janky at the end. So for example, like the saddle, you control the tilt of the saddle, the forward-backward tilt of the saddle…
Gabriel: Right.
Roger: There’s basically like grooves that prevent it from moving. But like that whole assembly was just a little bit janky. And so like during the ride, the seat would suddenly tilt back in the middle of me climbing a hill. It was all fine, but it was an interesting additional challenge. So June sounds like a great month, but actually June is either incredibly buggy or quite cold in Scotland, it turns out. The weather conditions didn’t feel good. And for various reasons, I was having a very hard time psychologically getting into this trip. I mapped out a route and then I missed the train that would take me to the starting point in the Scottish Highlands. And I was like, “What am I going to do?” So I took a different train to a different starting point. I also didn’t bring a tent this time. I was like, “I’ll just stay in B&Bs or something.”
Gabriel: When you say buggy, you’re talking about the midges?
Roger: Yes.
Gabriel: Oh, God.
Roger: Yeah. Yeah.
Gabriel: Midges are tiny flies that thrive in Scotland, especially in the Highlands. They swarm in the early morning and in the late evening during the summer months. The females bite and they’re in full force in June, I guess.
Roger: Well, they can be. In fact, actually they weren’t for me.
Gabriel: Okay.
Roger: And that was part of what dissuaded me from doing the whole tent, bikepacking thing. Like, I don’t want to deal with the bugs. I hadn’t done a bike tour since 1998.
Gabriel: But what brought you back to it? Is it just that you were in really good shape now after the triathlon?
Roger: Well, there was another part of it, which is that I had been in Scotland in 2005-06 in Edinburgh. And during that time, we did a number of road trips around the Scottish Highlands. And I thought it was just spectacularly beautiful. That was sort of when the idea of doing bike tours was not so far in the distant past for me. And I always thought this would be a great place to do a bike tour. I had that in mind. And so I thought, “Oh, I have time to do it” in 2015.
Gabriel: I see. So it was from your year there that you’d put it in the back of your mind. Like, “If I ever do a bike tour, this is a great place.”
Roger: Yeah. You know, because it’s sort of like the distance town to town is not as big as a lot of places in the US, and beautiful scenery and also wonderful people.
Gabriel: And then there’s the Whisky Trail.
Roger: Yes.
Gabriel: Sorry, but I need to pour myself a wee dram when talking about Scotch whisky. Okay, there are five whisky regions in Scotland: Speyside, the Highlands, the Lowlands, Campbeltown and Islay, spelled I-S-L-A-Y. Islay is a small island located off the west coast of Scotland that has nine active distilleries. Islay is known for whiskies with a peat smoke aroma, such as Artbeg and Lagavulin and Laphroaig. Fun fact: During his bicycle tour in Scotland, Roger bought me a small plot of land, one square foot, near the Laphroaig distillery on the south coast of Islay. Cheers, Roger.
Roger: Absolutely there’s the Whisky Trail, yeah.
Gabriel: So where did you go?
Roger: So I took a train – instead of where I was originally going to go – I took a train to Oben and started off there and I sort of like, you know, on the fly, sketched out a plan. I was going to cycle southwest from Oben and then there’s a ferry that takes you to Islay of Laphroaig and Lagavulin and other distillery fame. Islay is known as the island of very peaty whiskeys. It was very daunting, I will say psychologically, because I hadn’t done this multi-day thing for a long time. I didn’t have like a set, here’s where I’m going to stay. And I wasn’t on such a great bike and the weather was just like cold and stormy. And so for example, the first day that I was going to take the ferry to Islay, the ferry got cancelled because of weather. It was a total bummer, you know, I didn’t have a very long bike ride and then I just sort of felt holed up in this random town. But then the next day I was able to take the ferry and I had several wonderful days on Islay, definitely visited many distilleries. I found a rhythm in my experience in bike touring in Scotland that I will share because I found this rhythm very helpful. So Scotland has a network of youth hostels and the thing about the youth hostels is that they’re very predictable. So you know what you’re going to get in the youth hostel. I started off by staying in B&Bs, but actually I found the youth hostels better, because you knew exactly what you would get and they had all the things you needed for days on a bike tour, including obviously a bed to sleep in. Also there’s social, get-together rooms so you can hang out and talk to people. And then crucially that they have a room for drying stuff. At the end of the day, I would be totally dirty and totally sweaty. I would wash my clothes by hand and then I would hang them in the drying room and I knew that they would be totally dry the next morning, which is very, very useful. Whether you’re going to wear them or you’re just going to put them back in your bags, you don’t have to worry about them. That was extremely useful to know that that would be there. There’s two other pieces of the structure of the tour on a daily basis that I figured out that I was able to rely on. One is during the day, like you could visit distilleries and it was sort of a fun, interesting break. You know, you would like do a distillery tour or you would like try sips of various offerings that they had. They usually had some kind of food as well. And it was just a fun thing to do and it was very thematic. I also came to appreciate the differences and the styles of Scottish whisky, and that was a lot of fun. And then the last part is the pub culture. The youth hostels are usually in some kind of town and there’s usually some kind of pub. This is June, so the days are very long, so I could bike very late. And then I would get to a pub and I would have a hearty Scottish meal. You don’t think of food on that island as being that great, but actually there’s really good farm-to-table-style tradition in Scotland. Very, very good food. You could have a drink, have a beer. And sometimes there would be music, you know. There would be these traditional Scottish folk music sessions. I had very, very good experiences. So those sort of components I was able to figure out, like, I could rely on those and string them all together almost every day. And that was a really, really fun trip at the end.
Gabriel: I think the pub culture is really cool in Scotland. I just have one problem and that is that I can’t actually understand what someone is saying to me. Every time I’m at a pub in Scotland and someone turns to talk to me, It just sounds like, “No, I reckon they just say I’m not that cool. It is right where I’m going. Alright?” And I just, I really cannot understand them. This makes it less fun.
Roger: Well, you have to remember I had lived there for a year.
Gabriel: Right.
Roger: So that helped a lot. One thing for your American listeners to realize is that interestingly – this is me now wearing my professional hat – there is more variation in the Englishes on the British islands than there is across all of America. And the reason for that is simply that America has been inhabited by English speakers for much less time. And so there’s just been much more migration. There’s what’s called a leveling of the accents. So the accents sort of blend together and you get average American English. Obviously, there is geographic variation in the US and accent most notably in the South, but also say in Boston here where I live now. And there’s also variation among different communities within a particular location, but it’s less. So the English on Islay is rather different from the English in Scotland. I mean, obviously, there’s another dimension there in Scotland, which is that, of course, the indigenous language is Scottish Gaelic. And so that’s an entirely different language family. Sadly, English has encroached a lot on most parts of Scotland, although there are vibrant Gaelic-speaking communities still, and there is also a language revitalization movement there. We’ll see what the future holds, but I think that the prospects are better now for the future of Gaelic than it was before. You see this everywhere in the world when another language comes in and starts to be spoken in a particular language community, the indigenous language has an influence on the way it’s spoken. And so there’s some of that going on in Scotland. But the other dimension is, once again, even just like village-to-village variation, because for most of history, up until say 200 years ago, people just weren’t that mobile. You couldn’t compare it to now. There would be interaction between villages, but people would just not spend that much time outside of their village, and the conditions were set for local variation over decades or centuries in how people speak to develop and persist.
Gabriel: Super interesting.
Roger: Even in some parts of England, there’s no other indigenous language for hundreds and hundreds of years going back. Nevertheless, there’s lots of village-to-village variation. That variation persists today to a considerable extent, although that is continually being leveled by mobility, migration, and also the effect of mass media. One funny anecdote about that is, during one of these road trips in the Scottish Highlands, I remember staying at a B&B, and then in the morning, they’re very good in terms of like offering breakfast options. So you get up at the B&B, you have breakfast, and you’re like, “I feel like granola this morning.” Now, granola is not a thing there. Muesli is a thing. The B&B host looks at me and is like, “Granola?” And I was like, “yeah,” I describe what it is, and he’s like, well, “We have muesli.” And so I went out with muesli, and then when he brings out our food, he plops down this bowl of muesli in front of me, and he’s like, in a Scottish accent, which I’m not going to be able to render properly, but… “Here’s your granola.” Little anecdote, linguistic anecdote from my trip in Scotland.
Gabriel: That is good. So it sounds like one of the challenges of Scotland, touring there, is the weather. Considering your ferry was cancelled due to weather and that you mentioned the drying room as being awesome, I do take it that you were rained on a fair amount?
Roger: Oh, I was rained on a lot. Yeah. And you know, it’s funny to think about that because I was rained on in Taiwan and Japan too, but in the more recent years before this trip, it was California, the Bay Area and San Diego, where I was doing all this triathlon stuff and biking. And so I was not used to being rained on that much. And so, yes, the weather definitely battered me some. First of all, you just bike through some of it, and I also got good at ducking out when the weather really got nasty and going to a store or a pub or a distillery and just hanging out there and waiting for the weather to pass.
Gabriel: Yeah. Going to distillery is an excellent antidote for bad weather.
Roger: Yeah. But definitely there were many hours of like soaked socks.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Roger: I think an important part of getting good at long distance cycling, whether it’s like a single day or a multi-day thing is gaining the tolerance to bike in your socks while your socks and shoes are soaked and do it long enough until they just dry out on their own. You have to be able to tolerate that.
Gabriel: You have to be able to tolerate quite a bit. Luckily you weren’t affected by it, but I do have something against swarms of flying insects. We talked about the midges, these crazy flies. You have to be able to tolerate that and it’s just so annoying.
Roger: Or outride them.
Gabriel: Or outride them, yes. Such is the life of the touring cyclist. Anything else from the Scotland trip that’s worth mentioning?
Roger: Well, after Islay, I came back to the mainland. There’s a big difference in Scotland between the Eastern and Western sides in terms of geography and the weather. And so I wanted to get to the Eastern side and in order to do that, I took this train over to Rannoch Moor, which is this very, like, small desolate stop. And then I biked east. It’s a very long, thin loch that is called Loch Rannoch. And that just goes and goes and goes and goes. The feeling is very different. It’s a high-elevation bog and it was just misty and very low population and it just felt very, sort of this almost spooky, otherworldly feeling. And I biked a long, long way. Like basically one whole day was just biking east along that loch and farther and farther and eventually getting to the end of it. And then at the end of the day, it took me to this town called Pitlochry. There was another distillery there and a pub and I stayed there and then I took the train back to Edinburgh. That was an intense and interestingly different experience. You know, that’s one of the neat things about these trips is that it’s the same trip, but you just have these very different feelings and experiences. And I think it’s one of the things that makes cycling such a great way to see the countryside, because you’re traveling fast enough that you can cover a lot of ground, but you’re also traveling slow enough that you really are steeped in it. There’s nothing separating you from the environment, like when you’re in a car. I’m sure this rings true to you that you can just get all these different experiences and you’re just so close to the world when you’re on a bike and touring.
Gabriel: Yes, and I’ve experienced what you described, being on this lonely road with mist or fog all around you. It’s eerily quiet. It’s so beautiful and for a moment or maybe a whole day in your case, you feel like you’re the only human around. It’s such an incredible experience to be in that isolation. All you hear is the whir of the chain and the gears. It’s totally cool and it’s something that you just can’t experience in a car ever.
Roger: Yeah. I should say one other thing is that on my professional Twitter account, the background photo is from this trip. It’s a photo I took of a very famous location called the Queen’s View, sort of near the end of that day. On my way to Pitlockery, there’s a lookout point and you’re looking west and it’s just this winding river and it’s just incredibly scenic, so that was a very memorable moment in that trip. I’m sure there are many, many photos that one can find on the Internet of the Queen’s View, but the one that’s on my Twitter account background page is the one I took.
Gabriel: Very good. And then you say that there’s a big difference in terms of climate from the east and west, so the west is more exposed to the Atlantic Ocean.
Roger: Yeah, and as a result, it’s rainier. Much more rain on the west. So for example, Glasgow and Edinburgh, not that far away from each other, Glasgow is on the west coast, Edinburgh is on the east coast, Glasgow is much, much wetter and grayer. I mean, Edinburgh is pretty gray, but Glasgow is much more so. There’s some mountainous terrain in between. Not so much between Glasgow and Edinburgh, but once you get a little bit farther north, that higher terrain that I was going through from Rannoch Moor is part of that.
Gabriel: So that was tour number three. What’s the next one?
Roger: Tour number four was AIDS/LifeCycle, and we already talked about that.
Gabriel: Okay.
Roger: And then tour number five was a tour across the state of Massachusetts that I took with my now wife, Stephanie, in early summer 2017. We took a train outside of the Boston area and then basically traversed most of the state of Massachusetts east to west on bikes over the course of three days.
Gabriel: And this was Stephanie’s first experience with touring.
Roger: Stephanie was game to try new things and push her limits. So she had never done a multi-day bike tour. She had only recently even gotten a bike, actually. She had owned that bike for less than a year. It was not a fancy bike. It was just like a hybrid bike for getting around the city. I carried all the luggage. I had recently bought a touring bike, the one that I took to Vancouver with you. And so that was a legit touring bike. It was a Trek 520. And I loaded both the front and the back racks, so I carried all the luggage. And we set off. We didn’t do a huge amount per day, but we were carrying a lot of stuff, and Stephanie was totally new to this. So we were probably averaging about 35, 40 miles a day, but it was a substantial ride. And it was really cool. And I had never seen a lot of Massachusetts up close like that, so it was really neat.
Gabriel: How did Stephanie react to all of this? What were her impressions as a first-time tourer?
Roger: It was a big… it was revelatory, I think, for Stephanie.
Gabriel: Okay.
Roger: The whole like climbing sustained hills thing. You don’t think of Massachusetts as a mountainous place, right? But once you get close to the midpoint of the state coming from the east, you’re climbing up. There’s a bit of a plateau, and we had to climb up that plateau. And that was hard for both of us. I was carrying all that luggage. Stephanie just didn’t have that much experience, and she was on a hybrid city bike. And so there were some recriminations at the tops of the hills for, “How could you do this to me?” She always got over it really well, and she was a good sport. We had a lot of fun. It was a really, really fun trip. She enjoyed it enough that she actually arranged for us to do a day trip basically where we biked Cape Cod. We started in Plymouth, which is north of the start of Cape Cod, and then we biked all along Cape Cod during the course of a day, and ended in Provincetown for my birthday in 2017. And there’s a rail-trail for part of that trip, but that’s a 90-mile trip. For her to go from zero to a three-day bike trip across Massachusetts, and then a 90-mile one-day trip out to Provincetown along Cape Cod, I consider that pretty impressive.
Gabriel: Yeah, and it’s fun that I have a few friends now that are cycling, and they’re getting their partners involved also in some multi-day touring or cycling in general. And that’s a lot of fun to see. Generally, it’s a good shared activity for partners. And I like that you kept it to three days, because in case something goes wrong, it’s good to not commit to too many days the first time around.
Roger: This is a good point, yeah.
Gabriel: I’d like to maybe cover this in a future episode, but there’s another supported charity ride that is on my horizon, which is the Pan-Mass Challenge.
Roger: Ah, yes, the Pan-Mass Challenge.
Gabriel: If you do the full event, it’s a two-day event, and it also ends at the tip of Cape Cod in Provincetown.
Roger: I’ve done parts of that ride, and it’s great. It might be in the future one day for me. I could totally see that happening. Maybe the year that you do it should be the year that I do it.
Gabriel: That would be great.
Roger: Yeah.
Gabriel: So what’s the last trip? That’s our trip together.
Roger: Yep, that’s the last trip. It sort of blows my mind that I haven’t done one since.
Gabriel: Yeah, it blows my mind too, because that means that you’re long overdue for another bike tour of some sort.
Roger: Yeah.
Gabriel: Is there anything else at all that we haven’t covered from any of the trips?
Roger: I think we did a pretty good job. This is about multi-day bike touring, but I also just want to say that Gabe, you have been such an important part of my own personal development as a cyclist, both through inspiration – I remember you doing the Tour de Tucson when we were in college, and we were all just very impressed – and then my first century bike ride was with you, also the Tour de Tucson in the fall of 2014. We also did the Santa Barbara century ride. You know, that was a lot of fun. So we’ve had a lot of fun cycling experiences together, and I’m very grateful to you for being an inspiration to me. And I think this is really cool that you’re doing this podcast. And I hope we have more ventures together in the not-too-distant future and that your podcast will still be going at that time. And so that we can recount those in a future episode.
Gabriel: Well, thanks, Roger. That’s really nice of you to say. And thinking about this episode, like I mentioned, I realized how many shared experiences we have over the, gosh, now 33 years that we’ve known each other.
Roger: 33 years. Yep.
Gabriel: When you say, for example, that you did road trips in Scotland in the car. I thought, “Yeah, I was on one of those. We took a road trip together. I visited you there.” And when you mentioned your year in Taiwan and Singapore, I thought, “Yeah, I remember.” It’s like, “Oh, yeah, Roger.” You know, back then there were still these things called letters, and I would receive a letter, a written letter from you, with some updates and things like that. And it’s incredible how things have changed in this time. And yeah, we’ve gone through… we’ve gone through it all together from marriages, divorces, kids, more kids. So it’s been wild. And yes, I hope once that the time is right that we can do something else because that was our last. That was your last bike tour, and of course, that means it was also our last joint bike tour. But this episode has inspired me that we could maybe do a tour together in Asia or we can do the Pan-Mass challenge. So there’s lots of opportunities in future years for more shared memories. And I love your idea. If the podcast is still going, it can be documented there.
Roger: Yeah, well, hopefully we’ll have at least 33 more years to fit it all in together.
Gabriel: That would be amazing.
Gabriel: The transcript for this episode is available on the Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You’ll find a link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeier for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you.
Gabriel: She liked it. What queen is that?
Roger: Queen Isabella and Queen Victoria, I believe, were fond of it.
Gabriel: Really?
Roger: Well, this is the Internet aiding my memory.
Gabriel: Okay, I was going to say.