EPISODE 27
Take the Long Way Home
Eric Matthes, author of the bestselling Python Crash Course, embarked on a life-altering, year-long bicycle journey around the United States in the late 1990s. This episode dives into that fascinating period in Eric’s life, when he interwove bicycling with his other passions: programming, teaching, and writing. Eric candidly shares his initial struggles, including a pivotal near-knee-destroying trip to Niagara Falls that almost ended his touring career before it began. Successively more challenging outings culminated in his 14,216-mile Seattle-to-Alaska-via-Florida circumnavigation. Hear about Eric’s cross-country adventure, including his memorable time riding alongside his friend Sara, scary moments in the south, and encounters with bears in the north. Discover how this transformative experience shaped Eric’s path to becoming a successful author and his unique perspective on overcoming life’s obstacles, both on and off the road.
Episode Transcript
Eric: I finally figured out, like wow, I don’t have to end in Seattle. Like, the road doesn’t end there. I could just keep going north and that’s when I figured that I would extend the trip to Alaska, which was really funny because I’m still heading south on the East Coast, and people are like, “Where are you headed?” I said, “Alaska,” and they’re like, “Why are you going south?”
Gabriel: You just heard Eric Matthes talk about one of the biggest decisions he took while circumnavigating the United States by bicycle. Eric did extend his trip north to Alaska and went on to settle in the town of Sitka for 20 years. Today, so many years later, Eric shares how he built up the confidence to spend a year living on a bicycle and the profound influence that time had on the rest of his life, including overcoming obstacles to write Python Crash Course, which became a bestselling introduction to the Python programming language.
Sandra: You’re listening to The Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about the most memorable bike touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.
Gabriel: Hello cycle touring enthusiasts! Thank you for tuning in to another episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. Although I am by no means a professional software developer, I have been programming computers both professionally and personally my entire adult life. In elementary school, I wrote my first computer program in a language called Logo. I made the on-screen cursor, which looked like a small turtle icon, move around the screen to draw shapes. From those humble beginnings followed varying levels of experience with Fortran, C, assembly, C++, and Java. Some years ago, wanting to learn this language everyone was talking about, Python, I set out to do it the old-fashioned way: with a book. But which one? Today’s guest, Eric Matthes, is the author of Python Crash Course, the book I used to port my knowledge of other computer languages to Python. However, Eric is a guest on the podcast today, not because he’s a bestselling author, but because I listened to a talk he gave in which he mentioned, completely in passing, that at one point he spent 13 months straight living on a bicycle. The conversation quickly returned to Python but I was intrigued. Eric’s website gave a very brief description of his route, in which he appears to have started in Seattle, circumnavigated the United States, and ended up in Alaska. Well, I just had to find out more. So, Eric, thank you so much for being a guest on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
Eric: Thank you for the invitation. It’s really nice to speak with you.
Gabriel: And let’s get this out of the way at the beginning. What is the latest edition number of Python Crash Course?
Eric: It’s on the third edition currently.
Gabriel: And roughly how many copies has it sold?
Eric: Oh boy. I stopped paying close attention. It’s hard to track because of digital copies and whatnot, but probably two or three million.
Gabriel: Wow, okay. Do you ever wonder, “How did I get here?” Because I’m wondering that myself.
Eric: Very, very much. Yes.
Gabriel: So, how did you get here? Can you give us a little bit about your background? How does somebody end up where you did?
Eric: Yeah, I think that is a really interesting story, especially in the context of bicycle travel. So when I was listening to your introduction, at first I wasn’t sure if you were talking about me or reading your own story. My earliest computer experiences go back to the like ’70s and ’80s. To be clear, I was born in 1972. My dad was a software engineer in the Boston area. And so my first experience with the computer was, he had a kit computer with a keyboard that didn’t have a case and a bare cathode ray tube and a bunch of wires. And so he taught me BASIC and I remember writing a number-guessing game on that system. That’s what got me hooked on programming.
Gabriel: Hmm. Yes, I should have put BASIC in my list.
Eric: Yeah. But I learned Logo as a kid in elementary school, because that’s what we were all exposed to back then.
Gabriel: Yeah, awesome! Did you do the turtle graphics?
Eric: I sure did. Yeah, I can still see it moving around the screen.
Gabriel: Cool.
Eric: So to keep it, you know, aligned with bicycling, those early childhood experiences were part of what led to this, because I got a bike as a kid. I grew up in a part of southern New Hampshire, Nashua, which is right on the Massachusetts border. It’s about an hour from Boston, which is one of the tech centers for a long time. Growing up, yeah, I don’t ever remember not knowing how to ride. I do remember learning. I remember crashing a bunch. And then my dad sat on the bike to ride with me and my feet were on the pedals and his were in the air, and it worked. And I thought I was riding, and then he got off and I crashed again.
Gabriel: So you learned how to ride at an early age, and then what?
Eric: That first bike was a one-speed, little kids bike. Coaster brakes. And then, around middle school age, probably 10, 12-ish, I wanted what we called a 10-speed back then. Basically, back then kids would branch out, into either you got a BMX bike or you got a 10-speed. And so I chose a 10-speed, because I liked covering distance. Today, Nashua, the town in southern New Hampshire, is kind of like a suburb of Boston. It’s quite busy. Back then, when we gave people directions to our house we would say, “Follow this road, get off the highway, and then turn left where the cows are,” and that was part of the directions to our house. And then it became, “Turn left where the cows used to be.” And now it’s, “Turn left at this street sign.” But what that meant for me back then was, I had a friend, named Danny, who also liked bicycling, and we would just, during summers, probably like five days a week- ish, we would get on our bikes and we would ride for an hour or two in any direction, whatever direction we wanted, and then we would spend the rest of the day trying to figure out our way back. And we’d go to ice cream shops, we’d go to quick stops and eat the junk food that teenagers like to eat. We got to know our back roads and I loved that. I loved going out as far as we could. I loved not knowing exactly where we were. I loved seeing what people were doing in those places and I loved the exploration of trying to find a way back. My favorite kinds of things were, like, running into old cemeteries, finding old stone markers from when those roads were first built, from horse paths and whatnot.
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s very cool. But all of these trips were just out and back. Nothing overnight yet.
Eric: Right. And so another transition that I found was, around the time I got a driver’s license, I saw that most of my friends stopped riding their bicycles. I learned to drive, started driving but I didn’t put my bike away when I got a driver’s license. It’s interesting to have this conversation decades after most of my travel. I can really look back and see how bicycling is interweaved with other parts of my life. I remember high school being fairly easy for me academically. High school was not easy socially, but academically it was. And I did not know what I wanted to do with my life. All I thought as my plans for life in middle school was, “I’m gonna have a garage with seven doors and it’s gonna have seven different sport cars, one for each day of the week.”
Gabriel: Oh wow. Okay. I saw one-car garage with seven doors and I thought, “Why do you need so many doors?”
Eric: I had a chemistry teacher in high school, and he was the first teacher who really didn’t care if your academic life was easy or hard. He just presented difficult, challenging academics, and would support you and whatever you needed to get through that. And then it became a really different experience to have somebody that truly challenged to think, and so he’s one of the teachers that truly influenced my critical thinking skills. When I went to college, I started as a chemical engineer, because I liked chemistry, but I wanted to apply it, and I quickly found that chemical engineering, engineering in general, felt to me like solving other people’s problems. So I switched to physics, because it was the class I took that most felt like I was just learning to understand how everything worked, from the smallest to the largest things, literally in the universe. Because of that I wanted to be a particle physicist, but I didn’t want to be a student forever, and I realized that I would be a student, probably into my 30s, before I could ever do that kind of work. And so I looked for some way of getting out of being a student for a while, and I found teaching I. found the challenge of reaching everybody in the classroom as intellectually stimulating and more satisfying for me than hard science. I graduated college and I moved to New York City to start teaching and I took the subway to work but then I realized, like, “Ooh, I could probably bicycle this distance.” And so I started bicycle commuting in New York City. And it was about five to seven miles, depending on which school I was teaching at. But I started a bicycle commuting and loved it because it was just an active, energetic way, mentally challenging, stimulating way to get to work each day. Kept me in shape, kept me on a bicycle. So, to get to the overnight stuff, when I started teaching, I started having spring breaks and summer breaks, and so it was the first time in my life where I really had nobody telling me what to do. In college, I had read a book called A Walk Across America by a guy named Peter Jenkins, and he had graduated college and didn’t know what to do. And he wanted to see the country so he walked across the US. And I loved that story, I loved the idea of traveling across the land slowly, and I wanted to do something like it, but I didn’t want to spend years at a time at it. I realized that bicycling was that middle ground, between car travel and walking.
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s a common theme on the podcast, that so many people on their own realize that the bicycle gives that perfect balance between distance covered and ability to take in your surroundings.
Eric: Yeah. Well, one of the reasons I appreciate you doing this podcast is, a lot of people in my life had no relevant experiences like this and so when I brought up the idea of living on a bike for a while people were like, “You can’t do that. It’s dangerous.” And so that book about this guy walking was really helpful for me because it was one data point where like, yes, it is possible. And then, I was working at a camp in the Appalachian Mountains for a summer in my older teen years, and somebody passed through on a bike, and I was like, “Wow, you can live on a bicycle.” Those two points were validation to start doing the actual travel. So my first overnight was, I lived in New York City and I rode up to the Catskills and took a couple days of hang gliding lessons and then took a bus back.
Gabriel: Oh wow, okay. Hang gliding. Interesting.
Eric: Yeah, it was my personal reward for making it through the first fall of teaching. I think I did it over Thanksgiving or something. Because I had the idea that I wanted to bicycle across the US in the summertime, but I wasn’t sure I could go from like a three-day trip to a two-month trip. So I planned a week-long trip from New York City to Niagara Falls, and I planned to do it over spring break, which was around April-ish back then. This was around 1996-ish. I did the trip but it was brutal. There’s a region of New York called the Finger Lakes, and it’s where the Canadian ice sheet was growing southward in the last ice age, and it carved out some deep valleys in the middle of New York State. That’s where the Finger Lakes are, the Ithaca area. And so I was crossing that region and I didn’t know anything about gearing a bicycle. The hills were small; I don’t call them mountains. They’re like two miles up, two miles down, but they’re steep and sustained, and so I just destroyed my knees. It was snowing. We got like two inches of snow and I remember taking a hotel one night because my right knee wouldn’t work and I was covered in snow and the roads were slick.
Gabriel: Good reasons to get a hotel.
Eric: Yeah.
Gabriel: The Finger Lakes, it looks like the individual fingers of a hand, really, this succession of hills and valleys where there are lakes one after the other.
Eric: I just listened to the episode with Steve… I’m forgetting his last name… the BEHEMOTH.
Gabriel: Oh. Steve Roberts, from the “Adventures of a High-Tech Nomad”
Eric: Yes. And he said something about how we have such vivid memories of short periods of time and less vivid memories of longer periods of time in our lives. And I have such clear memories at that time at that hotel. It was one of my first real lessons about bicycling that stayed with me for life – bicycle travel – because I seriously considered taking a bus back home to New York City and kind of giving up on this bicycling at that point. I knew I didn’t want to destroy my knees for life just to travel a little bit on a bicycle. I woke up and I could walk around and I realized, “Okay, I’m gonna just try it see if I can move and cover ground, not hurt myself, and see if I can just make that end destination.” And so I… I tooled around the parking lot. I ended up riding by, like, pushing down on my right knee and then pedaling with my left leg. I did end up finishing that trip, got back to New York, and read about bicycle gearing and outfitted a bike for a cross-country trip, and really never had that level of struggle for physical riding again.
Gabriel: So it came down to you were pushing gears that were just much too big?
Eric: Yeah.
Gabriel: You didn’t have the low gears?
Eric: Yeah. When I think about people preparing these trips these days, there’s so much resource where you can read about how other people have set their bikes up, you can see video tours with their bikes, all kinds of things. So back then when I was trying to set up my bike, it was like finding a few printed articles, visiting a bike shop, starting to learn about what gears you could use on your front chainring and what cassettes you could get for the back, and so I did piece together something that made the hills much more manageable with a loaded bike.
Gabriel: Yeah. Again, it’s hard to imagine nowadays the difficulty that one had acquiring this kind of information without experiencing it themselves.
Eric: Yup.
Gabriel: Now there’s almost too much information, but that’s a different issue. Back then, yeah, you had to subscribe to a magazine or go to the library and try to find something or, yeah, talk to your local bike shop. It was a very different way of acquiring knowledge. I like this build up to the cross-country trip which is great. It also lets people know that if they’re about to quit, they’re not alone.
Eric: Yeah, absolutely. And so through all this, I had learned programming from my dad at a young age, and I always just played around with it. So programming was a nice way to satisfy whatever curiosity I had. Learned about something in a math class, write a program to visualize it. So, throughout my life I’d just play with programming. I always had programs I was working on, and as a teacher I would just start to teach intro programming classes whenever I could fit it into the curriculum. So all this basically, teaching, programming and writing – writing came into my life because I met a friend in college who was journaling. And I didn’t know anybody who wrote in a journal, and so I just started writing in a journal, and found that it helped me process my thoughts. So all these things were just weaving together through that period of my life.
Gabriel: The foundation was being set. Okay, good, we’re starting to answer the question, “how did you get here?”
Eric: Yes. Oh my gosh. It’s therapy, right?
Gabriel: Well, and it’s interesting, because there’s still a fair number of similarities between our lives, as I listen to your story.
Eric: Yeah.
Gabriel: Okay, you’ve done some shorter trips, you’ve set yourself up.
Eric: Yeah. So I had done that trip to Niagara Falls. It’s interesting to see but I’m guessing most of your audience can relate to that feeling of getting to these destinations that we choose and then it’s an overwhelming feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment and sadness that that lifestyle is over for a little while. I finished the Niagara trip, came back to my apartment in New York City, went back to teaching the rest of the year, figured out how to set up a bicycle properly for a travel, long-distance travel with a load. And so that summer I flew out to Seattle and bicycled back to New Hampshire. I really wanted to make it back to the East Coast. I really wanted to complete this trip in the summer, and I had to get back by mid to late August. I think I started like July 1st or June 29th or something, and I really wanted to reach the East Coast by mid-August. So I was intimidated by the Cascade Mountains. If you start in Seattle and head east, you go through some foothills that are nice but then you very quickly run into these four- or five-thousand-foot passes, and I was remembering the Niagara experience and worried I’d just like collapse three days into the trip. But it turns out I had geared my bike appropriately and the passes in the West are longer and bigger, but they’re less steep. The roads are better. And so, I got to that top of that first pass and just literally felt on top of the world. A few days into the trip, I started meeting people who were better bicyclists than I was. They had raced, they had ridden more athletically than I had, but they were less prepared for the actual travel. So I found myself really comfortable with traveling on a loaded bike, and I did a hundred-mile day and I was like, “Wow, this feels really good.” And then I started just, like, pushing mileage, because it felt so good, and at one point in that trip, I think I did eleven straight hundred-mile days.
Gabriel: Wow.
Eric: Yeah. And got to the East Coast well ahead of schedule, and kind of sad that it was over. But again, very satisfied that it had all worked out and just, I left that trip wanting more.
Gabriel: In a previous episode, called “Big Harry Audacious Goal” with Alan Gilbert, he does also a cross-country trip, but it wasn’t his preference to do it alone or to do it fully loaded, so he ended up doing it with somebody he met. He had his wife in the SAG vehicle and he was riding a racing bike. The difficulties he faced made me realize that that’s a big achievement. You’re telling me that you rode a hundred miles a day, fully loaded, no support? Is that right?
Eric: Yes it is.
Gabriel: Wow! That’s impressive.
Eric: I did a lot of 60-, 70-, 80-mile days, but those 100-mile days felt good. I went north at the Great Lakes and then through parts of Canada and back into the US. And I found myself at this gorgeous spot, gorgeous lake in Ontario and I wanted to stay for a day but I had nine straight days of 100 miles, and I was like, “I may never, in my life, do ten days of 100 miles again.” I wanted that number so I left the next morning and ended up doing eleven days. I still think about that lake.
Gabriel: You haven’t been back, I guess?
Eric: No, not to that lake.
Gabriel: Wow, that is incredible. Was there a single setback that you suffered in that journey or did you just say, “Oh well, I better get riding across America. Here we go.”
Eric: If you over-prepare for some things, then the actual thing can be easy sometimes. I was teaching in the Bronx and I was living in Manhattan, Upper West Side. And so I would ride from the Bronx to Manhattan but instead of going right to my apartment, I’d cross the George Washington Bridge and, like, ride in New Jersey and then come back to my apartment.
Gabriel: Make a little detour.
Eric: Yeah. So I had a ten-mile baseline every day, but I would add 10, 20, 30, 50 miles. Yeah, so I was doing 100-plus-mile weeks.
Gabriel: You’d commute via Philadelphia.
Eric: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I had this really solid base for the physical work, and I grew up camping in the mountains, I worked in the mountains for a couple summers, so I was really comfortable with just outdoor living. And on a bicycle, if you’re on a paved road in the US, unless you’re specifically seeking out remote places, you’re going to see food sources and water sources every day. I kind of came away from that feeling like the Northern US in the summertime for bicycle travel, it’s kind of playground: mountains, lakes. I swam every day. There were hard parts. I didn’t have a good rain jacket, I got soaked at times. But no, I really didn’t run into any major obstacles on that trip.
Gabriel: Okay. Well, very good.
Eric: You know, it was a period of my life, I let go of a relationship. At the time, I was dating someone and I remember her asking what I was planning to do for the summer and I said, “I think I might bicycle cross-country,” and it hadn’t occurred to me that she might not support that. And she asked, “What about our time together?” And I remember thinking, like, “Oh, no!” That relationship did not last much longer, and looking back, it was going to go that way anyway. The bigger point for this is I was totally free. I was supporting myself, had a low cost of living. I wasn’t making much as a teacher, but my costs were pretty low, because I was sharing an apartment with two other people. Back then, you could find apartments that were affordable in different parts of the city. After that cross-country trip, I went back to teaching. I still really enjoyed teaching, so it was kind of this mix of super fun living in the summer, hard work, challenging, satisfying growth, come back to, like, really satisfying teaching work, with some time to figure out where to go next. So what I wanted to do, I wanted to ride from Alaska to South America. I wanted to go from Prudhoe Bay to Tierra Del Fuego. And I wasn’t quite ready to quit my job and take on something like that. I really liked the distance of crossing the US. I liked how it fit into my teaching lifestyle, so I decided to do another cross-country trip but make it harder. So I planned for the next summer to go from San Francisco to Georgia, which is basically crossing the Southern US. So I did that Southern US leg the following summer, just as a summer trip. Didn’t quit my job or anything, and that was hard. It was hot. I remember, like, 114 days in Moab, Utah. There was 111 miles of no water in the desert through Nevada. Slept outside Area 51 and saw flashing lights in the night. Got to the Mississippi. Crossed the Mississippi and then headed south into, like, Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia. That’s, yeah, super interesting socially. That’s when I did start to get things thrown at me while riding and feel less safe in certain parts.
Gabriel: What was thrown at you?
Eric: I think it was a bottle at one point, and that probably happened a couple times. Most of them were just scary encounters. People clearly not wanting me around. Fortunately, it never led to anything. And it was hot and humid, so I was just like drenched and sweat all day long, and then sleep sweaty in a tent at night. Think of it as 95-degree days and 95 percent humidity, looking back. That was I think what we call Type-2 Fun.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Eric: It was not nearly the playground of the Northern US, but it’s what I wanted. I wanted that more challenging kind of travel and it worked. I got to the beach in Georgia and I wonder how many of your listeners have had this experience. I, like, I remember vividly sitting on the beach watching the tide, and then like kind of shook my head and the water was around my legs. And I’d kind of gotten into this little mental trip of trying to figure out how to cross this thing that was in front of me. That summer had been one long series of, like, oh, no, this thing might derail my trip. How can I get past it and figure out how to deal with the desert and the the heat and mechanical issues? And I got to the ocean and had a little profound personal experience. That trip was interesting to go back to. So I went back to teaching, still loved teaching, but now it’s like, okay I have two US cross- country trips under my belt. I can probably bicycle wherever I want, as far as I want. That’s when I decided to quit my job and and live on a bike for a year.
Gabriel: Okay.
Eric: So I started to plan the Alaska to South America trip, and then I got a call from a friend named Sara from college, who finally had space in her life to do a trip, and Sara is such an important person in my life, because she was a one person who said, “Yes, you should go live on a bike,” instead of, “You should go get a master’s in education.” She had grown up on the lake in Maine, she was more of an outdoors person than I was at that point. So she called me up while I was planning the South America trip and said, “Hey I want to ride across the country. Do you want to join me?” I was like, “Oh, no!” Here’s this person that has been so formative in my life, wanting to do a trip together, but I’ve already been across the US twice. Should I do that? should I go to South America? And I realized I wanted the time with her more than I wanted that South America trip, but I also really wanted to live outside for a year. And so, the compromise I came to was, I would do the cross-country trip with her, but when she went back to her life after across the US, I would keep going and I would circle the US. And so, I did quit my job, I did give up apartment, I got rid of most of my stuff, put a few things in my parents’ house, and lived on a bike for a year.
Gabriel: And the first leg of it, and again by “leg” – this is now a 3000-mile leg – but the first leg of it was with Sara.
Eric: Yeah. So we planned to go from Seattle but end at her parents’ house. End at the house where she grew up on this lake in the middle of Maine. And I pushed back against that plan for a while because, like, how can you like travel that far and not go to the Atlantic Ocean?
Gabriel: You were saying, if she didn’t do it she might regret it, and then she was like, “Oh, that’s okay.”
Eric: Right. Yeah.
Gabriel: Oh, alright, alright.
Eric: And it didn’t matter too much to me, personally, because I knew I was planning to to go down the East Coast afterwards, and I’d touch the Atlantic at some point.
Gabriel: Well, you need to tell her about the tradition, about you dip your wheel in the Atlantic and then you dip the wheel in the Pacific.
Eric: Yeah, we did that. So we dipped our wheels in the Pacific and did our Pacific swim, and then crossed the country, and it was actually the right call, because the house that she grew up in was on a dirt road along this lake in the forest. And so, it was a pretty profound experience to go from these like two-lane highways to a one-lane unmarked paved highway to this dirt road. And her dad had set up this finish line across the driveway, so we actually got to break the tape, drop our bikes, and jump in the lake that she grew up in. And her dad still lived in this little cottage by the lake and so he had cooked us this big, massive breakfast on a wood stove. We jumped in the lake, we were soaking wet and cold, and went inside, this massive, perfect bicycling travel breakfast. So, yeah, it was a window into her life that was really sweet to see. And then we dipped our wheels in the lake and she was right. That was a perfect ending for the trip for her.
Gabriel: That’s cute! You dipped the wheel in the lake. That sounds very quaint, all the way around.
Eric: You know, I spent a couple days at her house and went to the movies and time with her dad and whatnot. And it was this really weird mental time for me, because we went to Seattle to Maine. I didn’t want to repeat my route entirely, so we had the goal of going as far north in Canada as you can on an east-west road. So we went Seattle to the Great Lakes and then we jumped into Canada and went through a town called Shibogama. You basically head toward the Great Lakes, cut through at Sault Sainte Marie and basically shoot north as soon as you can, and do this big arc around Northern Quebec and then drop down into Maine. I loved it. Sara did not like it, because it was just rainy every day. That part of the country just is cloudy and rainy most of the time. And so, I had had the sunny days of travel. We didn’t know it was going to be like that and she was like, “We could be in beautiful late-summer New York.” That was challenging.
Gabriel: Was your relationship with Sara strengthened through this shared experience? Because I always say the same word, “intense.”
Eric: Yeah.
Gabriel: To cycle with someone for so long and especially since it sounds like you were just friends. And that is an interesting dynamic.
Eric: Yeah, I appreciate the honest question. I had had crushes on Sara at points in my life. It was somewhat mutual at some points but never worked out. But we had a rock solid foundation of friendship. We were just friends for that trip, and in some ways I was madly falling for her during that trip. We’re living this perfect lifestyle together. But I was also clear that, like, I had lived this bicycling lifestyle before and she hadn’t, and I didn’t want to cloud that with relationship stuff, and she had this guy that she was involved with, and you know we’re both in our 20s and sorting all that stuff out. It was a really beautiful time of friendship, of just exploring the world together and living that travel and, yeah, hard to find words to describe it. Looking back, we handled that pretty well and we are still friends and it’s all good.
Gabriel: That’s great. I’m glad that you were able to handle that situation.
Eric: Yeah, so that time with Sara was really nice. You meet people in your 20s, you get to know their stories, and then you go spend time with their family and like, all those stories just get so much more grounded. So she was starting to transition back into regular life and I was mentally and physically getting ready for going back to traveling on my own. Riding away from her house was so hard, because I knew I was going to miss her so much. And it was just this perfect tension of, like, I was really looking forward to traveling alone – I just love that lifestyle – but I loved spending time with her, and I knew I would never get that kind of time back in life, probably. So we’re in the middle of Maine, and I started riding away and in reverse. Now I’m going a driveway to a gravel road, to a small road, to a bigger road. She and her dad were going out to do something that day and so I kept running into them at intersections and stuff and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this like goodbye and transition is just getting dragged out.” And so I remember sitting on the side of the road just like bawling, and not even, like, relationship stuff, just like the intensity of that transition. But my plan was to bicycle to Baxter State Park, climb Mount Katahdin. I grew up as a hiker as much as a bicyclist. One thing is I miss while bicycling is not hiking as much, so I climbed Katahdin as a way to transition from that shared trip to a solo trip, and it was perfect. I bicycled in one day from her house to the base camp for Mount Katahdin. For anybody who isn’t clear, Mount Katahdin is the northern end of the Appalachian Trail. It was later in the year than I was used to finishing the trips. I think it was mid-September or something, which was gorgeous because there was foliage in New England, but it also meant that people were finishing their Appalachian Trail trips. So I climbed Mount Katahdin. And when I’m traveling I tend to, like, start out an hour before light and be the first one on the mountain – especially these crowded mountains. So I was the first one on top of Mount Katahdin that morning, which was a really nice reflection time. But within 20 minutes, that next hour of hanging out on the summit, I watched ten people finish the Appalachian Trail. They hug the sign at the top, they stand on top of this little summit sign, they ball their eyes out they hug each other, and I just sat off to the side watching this and, like, relating to it, because I just finished crossing the country, but also my journey wasn’t ending. I hiked down with a couple of Appalachian Trail people and we just all got to reflect on what these journeys mean in our lives. And the next morning I packed up and those people were packing up and, like, getting rides back to airports and stuff, but I went to, I think it is called the Appalachian Trail Diner, and had breakfast with some more folks, and it ended up being the perfect transition out of a shared trip and into a solo trip.
Gabriel: I don’t know if you’d planned it that way, but it ended up taking on more of a significance than you maybe thought at first, when you saw these other people also being emotional because they finished something big.
Eric: Yeah, that trip was interesting because the real goal was to just live outside for a year, and so I knew I was planning to bicycle around the US. As I headed down the east coast of the US, I was trying to figure out how to kind of close out this trip, like, where do I stop riding? Do I just go around the world? Well, I finally figured out, like, wow I don’t have to end in Seattle. Like, the road doesn’t end there. I could just keep going north and that’s when I figured that I would extend the trip to Alaska, which was really funny because I’m still heading south on the East Coast and people are like, “Where are you headed?” I said, “Alaska,” and they’re like, “Why are you going south?”
Gabriel: Yeah, you don’t believe in taking the shortest way. This episode’s going to be called, “Take the Long Way Home.”
Eric: Good, good. Yeah. But I ended up telling people I’m going to Florida because if I told them Alaska, it was so confusing while heading south.
Gabriel: Exactly.
Eric: It was an interesting time. October has foliage in the Northeast, and then it’s November, December, January, and it ends up being this kind of bleak time and nobody is out bicycling. I was just this random guy going down roads and people were like, “What are you doing?” The coldest night I ever had bicycling was in Georgia, and I think it got down to 15 degrees Fahrenheit-ish, a little bit below zero Celsius. I wore everything to bed in the sleeping bag and everything froze. People were like, “You’re gonna die,” but it was fine. It works out. I hit Florida, and Florida is a big state. If people aren’t aware, it covers a lot of latitudes. And so southern Florida is warm almost all year. Daytona Beach was just a couple days in a hotel to kind of mentally transition to heading west and reconsider like, okay, that commitment: “Am I going to go to Alaska? Okay.” So I head west and I get to Ocala National Forest and these – I’ll use the word – these hippies were like twirling outside of a van while I was getting water at a gas station. Now like, “Oh, are gonna come live with us in the forest?” And I was like, “I don’t have any plans,” and they’re like, “Well we’re camped out here. Come, come stay with us.” So I had never heard of the Rainbow People, but they had a camp there, so I stayed with the Rainbow People for a couple days in the middle of Florida. And for people who aren’t aware, the Rainbow People are this, like, loosely affiliated group of people who just live in the national forests, some for like a week at a time, and some like their entire lives. And so it’s kind of this parallel society that half uses money, half uses barter, and super interesting to meet those folks.
Gabriel: And that’s still going on today?
Eric: I believe so. I have heard of it over the years and read about it every once in a while and haven’t seen any sign that they don’t exist. I think they’re always going to exist.
Gabriel: Interesting. I had not heard of the Rainbow People.
Eric: It was interesting to turn west, because now when I said, “I’m going to Alaska,” people were like, “Oh, you really are.” I crossed the South, which I had done in the summertime before, but it was very different to go in the winter time it’s just a different feeling. I got chased by two Rottweilers at one point, around Florida or Georgia or something. And I remember these dogs. There was nobody around, and these dogs just appeared on the road one morning. I realized they were hunting me. They were using this pack behavior where they split up, they’re trotting on either side of me. One would dart at my front wheel and then back off and the other would watch to see what I was doing, and I just did steady speed and didn’t try to race them or anything, just stay calm. And then the other would run at my front wheel and the other would watch and they traded off for about a mile. That’s one of the scarier encounters. So I went across southern states: Alabama, then Mississippi.
Gabriel: Let’s expand a little bit: you said that there might have been some social issues in these states and unfortunately this has been reported by other guests who’ve traveled in… in these states.
Eric: The South, I don’t quite know how to describe it beyond concrete experiences. You know, I’m gonna use a racial slur in a moment, because that was the reality. I was in Mississippi. I would camp alone in the woods a lot because I felt very safe there. You know, I didn’t have a fire, I’d just cook on a camp stove and I was very invisible. But I stayed at a campground one night in Mississippi and most of us know that as bicycle travelers, you end up at people’s campfires. So we’re at this campfire late into the night and people are telling their stories about where they’ve come from and how they got there. And these people, they’ve been nice all night, very welcoming, sharing food, and warm. It was my turn and then they learned that I had left a teaching job in New York City to live on a bike. And I remember this guy said, “Yeah, if I taught a bunch of (N-words) and wetbacks I’d go live on a bike too.” And it just floored me. And I had never heard the word “wetback” before. if anybody has not heard it, it’s a slur for people who have crossed the Rio Grande to get into the US. And I felt terrible for a few days because I did not confront these people. I had no idea how to confront that at a campfire in remote Mississippi. And so, yeah, I just stayed quiet and let other people talk and went back to my tent and stayed awake for a long time. You know, as we know right now, the US has issues with race all over the country. The history of that is so different in the South that it comes up in different ways.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Eric: And I live in North Carolina right now. I’m dealing with some of this as a resident for the first time, and it’s it’s interesting and I’m kind of glad I had the background of having traveled through this area on a bike for a framework for thinking about living here. Anybody who doesn’t fit that mold ends up as a target at some point.
Gabriel: And what part of North Carolina are you living in now?
Eric: So, I’m in a town called Brevard, which is a small town south of Asheville, western North Carolina, and it’s in the southern Appalachians, so we’re about 2,000 feet elevation.
Gabriel: Ok, and Asheville is also close to the endpoint of the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Eric: Yeah.
Gabriel: Why would there be this backlash against bicyclists? Just because they don’t fit the mold, or something? They’re not, you know, driving a pickup truck? Do you have any insights on that?
Eric: Ok, where I am right now is one of the mountain biking meccas of the world. There’s a bit of contention and some of it comes from how long people have to wait behind bicyclists at points. But outside of bicycling-focused areas, you know, some of the Southern roads are some of the worst I’ve ever ridden. I came up with this description of… in Louisiana, I saw like negative shoulders. Like the road was so poor that you had to be in the lane most of the time because you’d see bits of a white line on the side of the road. You’re kind of in the way. You kind of had to get out of people’s way, and so that there is an interaction. it’s much less of just being able to just drive right by.
Gabriel: I see. Alan Gilbert also was one of the people who mentioned Alabama. He said there, the rumble strips…
Eric: Yes.
Gabriel: Also prevented you from being on the shoulder, so you had to get on the road and some drivers didn’t appreciate that that was the only option, and they thought, “Why are you on the road?” This would also be the case with the negative shoulder. You kind of have to be on the road.
Eric: Yes, yes.
Gabriel: I think that maybe that is one set of things, is that drivers are like, “Why are you on the road?” And maybe they don’t realize that the bicyclist has no other option.
Eric: This part of the country has a long history of violence. Slavery was perpetrated by violence. I think that lingers in some ways, lingers is part of the culture in a way that there’s different the way violence plays out and impacts culture in other parts of the country in the world. Lots of people in the US want to pretend that that is just the past but it lingers. It lingers.
Gabriel: Okay, so somehow you got through Louisiana.
Eric: Yeah. I hit New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I stayed in this like super dive motel. So then I hit Texas and Texas was wide open. Eastern Texas is actually a bunch of rolling hills, but then you hit a point in West Texas where it’s just those western plains again. I did a 36-hour ride once. I rode all through the day and then it was a full moon night on these like just long, endless straight roads and I was like, “There’s no reason to stop riding.” Nobody is out here, the moon is full, and I decided to just ride straight through the night, and all those animals we see as roadkill as bicyclists, I saw them all alive. I saw armadillos crossing the road, owls swooping down, and flying at me, rodents crossing the road. It was a totally different experience. Yeah, then I was hitting New Mexico. Arizona was nice. I started hitting snowstorms in Arizona. I was riding one day and listening to the forecast in the diner and they started talking about snow, and I was like, “What?” And we got six inches of snow the next day.
Gabriel: Well, wait a minute, because Arizona, that’s the state where I actually went to middle school and high school. I…
Eric: Oh!
Gabriel: Yeah. Flagstaff, Arizona, where you would expect to find snow. I went to college at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and it doesn’t snow in Tucson. So, how were you crossing Arizona?
Eric: I went through a town called Show Low. I was along the Mogollon Rim, if that’s how you say it.
Gabriel: Mogollon, yeah, Mogollon Rim. Flagstaff is on the rim, and so that’s an altitude of 7,000 feet, so it definitely snows. Okay, so you went through northern Arizona.
Eric: I remember getting snowed on one night and I had a walrus tent. It was gray and red and I went to sleep in this pasture. You know, there’s cattle guards all over the West. And so I crossed the cattle guard, set up a tent in this little area behind a hill. Snowed. The next morning, I’m slowly packing up my tent, shaking off snow and there’s cattle all around me. I didn’t grow up with cattle, so I don’t know if these animals are going to hurt me, but I remember turning around to pick up a bag, to pack it, and each time I’d turn around, the cows would be closer. But I’d never see them moving. And I got to shake at my tent fly. I was like, ah, I don’t know if I should shake a red fly, a red tent fly, in front of a bunch of… I didn’t know if they were steers or bulls or what. so I just like quietly folded things up, quietly walked my bike out, but it’s actually relevant to the conversation about going to Alaska because the biggest question was, how am I going to deal with bears? So my plan was to go to Seattle, cross into Canada, and then go up the Cassiar Highway. You were talking about the longest road home, my goal at this point – this is before the internet, before Google Maps – I would always buy a state map. Whenever I got close to a state, I’d know where I was going to cross into a state and I’d pick a point on the other side of the state that I wanted to get to, and then just find the smallest roads that would get me there. Yeah, I’m grateful to have done these trips before the internet, because I really appreciate not knowing what the land was going to look like before I bicycled into it. So, I didn’t want to take the Alaska Highway, There’s another parallel highway that’s more remote and it’s called the Cassiar Highway.
Gabriel: The Stewart-Cassiar (spelled C-A-S-S-I-A-R) Highway is the northwesternmost highway in the Canadian province of British Columbia, traversing some of the province’s most isolated mountain wildernesses. Cassiar itself is now a ghost town, formerly housing the workers of the Cassiar Asbestos Mine, which closed down in 1992. Although mostly gravel when Eric rode it in the late 1990s, the Stewart-Cassiar Highway is now fully paved.
Eric: So my plan was to go into Canada, head north, pick up the Cassiar Highway, and then pick up the Alaska Highway when it was the only option. So I knew I’d be in remote places, I knew there’d be bears. Everybody I said the word “Alaska” to, they’d be like, “What about bears?” So, around Arizona, I started practicing bear safety. So I started learning to hang my food in Arizona. I’ve committed to hanging my food every night and basically living as if there are bears around me from that point forward. And for anybody who hasn’t done it, it’s a lot harder to hang food consistently and well than people realize. A lot of branches are not easy to throw something across, not easy to pull a rope across, and so I had many failed food-hanging nights.
Gabriel: That’s impressive, that you thought that far in advance.
Eric: Yeah. Into California, and I went up 395, which kind of goes through the Sierras, and that was surprising because I was getting into springtime but all those mountain areas just hold on to to winter for a long time, so it’s kind of like I went into spring in the Southwest and as I headed north in California it was like going back into winter. But it was a pretty profound experience to get back to the Seattle area, because I went around the Olympic Peninsula, which was just gorgeous, my first experience of a, you know, Outer Coast rainforest. I went up to Whidbey Island and I reached the point where Sara and I had started the trip. And that like closing up the loop around the us was a pretty profound feeling.
Gabriel: I bet.
Eric: And then being back on familiar roads, but also with this, like, trip to Alaska still coming up. And it’s like, what a life, right? Live for a year, do 10,000 miles, and then still have like 3,000 miles to go.
Gabriel: Yeah, yeah.
Eric: Super funny story. So I crossed into Canada, near a town called Abbotsford, and you go up to a town called Hope, and that’s where Rambo was filmed. Some of these places just still look wild and kind of out there. I think it was my first night in Canada. I wasn’t out of the developed area very far, and I was camped on this little hillside. I hung my food I wasn’t very satisfied. It wasn’t super high, the branches were kind of droopy. The next morning, I came back to where I had hung my food. And it wasn’t unusual at that point for my food to be a little lower when I went back to it, because my knots weren’t perfect or whatever. And my food was higher. And it was significantly higher, and I was like, “What?” Gravity only works one way. I was like, did a bear like try to get it and it just, like, snagged higher? And I started untying it, and it was a different knot. And so, somebody had walked through the forest that night, saw that my stuff wasn’t tied up well, retied it with a better knot, and I ended up using that knot for the rest of the trip.
Gabriel: That’s funny. Somebody was like, “Amateur!”
Eric: Yeah, so whoever you are, I appreciate that. Anyway, I got to this town, where if you keep heading north, you’ll hit the Alaska Highway, and if you turn left, you’ll head out towards Prince Rupert. Oooh. Am I gonna actually do this Cassiar Highway, which is mostly gravel and where I knew I would see bears? Or do I go, like, the well-traveled path to Alaska? That was the main choice. And so I turned left and it was, you know, a couple hundred miles of just rolling farmland, just gorgeous, getting more and more remote the further I rode. And then I got to a place called Kitwanga, and that was the turn right, north to the Cassiar Highway, and it was into the Yukon and then Alaska. That was a really interesting choice, because I could have just gone straight a little longer, and there’s a ferry terminal for the Alaska-BC ferry system, and so I could have just decided to end my trip in British Columbia, I could have gotten on a ferry and, like, gone up to Alaska that way, and kind of created this hybrid trip. And I remember standing there, just kind of taking a few minutes and saying like, “Do I really want to go, like, test myself and live with bears?” And I was like, “Okay, this is what I’ve been working towards for a year.” And so I headed north, and that first night, I saw bears. And I had always wondered, “Okay, if I see a grizzly, am I going to know it?” And I had learned, you look at the shape of the ears and the hump on the neck, and you can’t rely on color because there are light- colored black bears and dark brown bears. And I saw this bear once, and I was like, “Oop!” You know it when you see it. So, I saw bears almost every day for the next week. That Cassiar Highway was remote. I think it still is significantly more remote than the Alaska Highway, but back then it was a lot of just gravel and not many travelers and about as remote as you could get.
Gabriel: You didn’t have any scary encounters? You just saw them and they kind of went on their way, or?
Eric: Yeah, I did not have any issues. I never got hurt. It was the focus of that time. I remember, people coming the other way would stop and slow down and roll their windows down and they’d say, “There’s a bear up ahead. You should watch out.” And so at one point, I got to this hill and I could see the bear about a quarter mile, half mile ahead. I think there’s a might have been a bear and a cub. And, you know, they’ve learned to hang out and just kind of harass drivers for handouts. Most of them, I just come across them and have to deal with it. But this one, I could see him sitting in the middle of the road. I wasn’t sure whether to go towards it. I waited like 10 or 15 minutes, flagged down the next RV that approached, and they pulled up next to me and rolled their window down, like an inch or two. And, you know this… that whole, like, fear of bicyclists. Like, what am I gonna do to you? And like, “What… what do you need?” I was like, “Well, there is a bear up there.” And like, “Ok, thanks.” and it’s like, I’m not warning you. I’m like, “I was gonna ask you for a ride past the bear.” But they just took off. And I was like, okay. You know? This is my life, this is what I have wanted, and so I just started singing and talking loudly to the bear, and they got off the road. I passed there and never saw them again. and…
Gabriel: So your singing is that bad.
Eric: Haha! You know, I want to clarify, for anybody who is going to encounter bears and hasn’t heard this, it’s about speaking loudly and asserting that you are not afraid. It’s not about yelling and being angry. I’ve had people think that It’s about being aggressive and showing them dominance. It’s just showing a lack of fear. If you go too far and are loud and aggressive-sounding, that can come across as challenging and cause issues.
Gabriel: That’s a good tip.
Eric: Yup. I would just tell them, I’m just passing through, bears. Please let me by. I am not going to bother you. And it worked. And I’d sing loudly.
Gabriel: Oh, wow.
Eric: The scariest encounter was, I was going on this really narrow section of the road. It was grassy and lightly forested, and I looked to my right and I saw this matted-down grass and I thought, “Ooh, it looks like a bear slid down there.” And I had this picture in my head of, like, a teddy bear sliding down the grass. And I was like, “Ooh, maybe it’s still around,” and I turned to my left and it was, like, eight feet away, and it was a grizzly, and it was too late to stop, because I was pretty much even with it. That road was just so overgrown in that area that I came upon it without seeing it first. And that’s the first bear that didn’t run away from me. It just kind of stood its ground, and so I just kept pedaling the same rate. I treated it like the dogs that I had run across in the South. I found that that practice of managing scary loose dogs worked on bears. So when that bear didn’t run away, I just stayed calm and did the same thing I did with the dogs. I looked back after I passed the bear. It took a step towards me and huffed and I was like, please bear, don’t bother me. And I looked back again and it just stayed where it was, and went on eating in the grass. So that was the scariest encounter. You know, I went on to live in alaska for 20 years, and so I have seen close to a hundred bears, most of them alone, most of them on foot. And I never had an issue. People do, and I’ve known friends who’ve had pretty scary encounters. I did search and rescue for 20 years, and fortunately I never had to respond to a bear mauling. I have friends who have, and so this is not a statement that all bears are manageable, but most of them are. So that encounter was scary, and then the other piece was deciding where to camp. So people would tell me that I was crazy to camp in the woods. I knew that I had been practicing bear safety basically since Arizona. No food ever touched my tent, I kept all my food in my front right pannier. That was the one that got hung up every night. I figured that I was safer in the woods, where I knew the protocols I’d been following, than maybe staying in a campground where somebody might have spelled their dinner the night before. And so I did end up hearing about people having bear encounters in campgrounds that I never had in the woods.
Gabriel: Interesting.
Eric: Ended up going to Dawson City, because, again, I just sought out these less-traveled roads. Went up north to Dawson City and did this big circle around Chicken, Alaska. So I crossed into Alaska on the Fortymile River country or something like that. Basically, one of the more remote gravel roads that you can cross into at that time. I finally did reach the Alaska Highway, this, like, big paved highway with very few people on it. It’s light all day. I’d bicycle until 11 or midnight and have the road to myself and nice smooth pavement. It was kind of funny to get to Alaska and have like 10 days left on my trip, because Alaska is a big state, but I had done like 14,000 miles at that point.
Gabriel: Wow.
Eric: Alaska itself ended up being anti-climactic. I loved it but it was a tiny piece of this trip, and so it ended up being one of those things where, like, very much makes sense as a desperation but the thing itself just served as a long journey to get there.
Gabriel: You ended up settling in Alaska. You got there and you stayed there? Or how did that work?
Eric: No, so I got to Alaska, went up to Fairbanks. I think I got my name in the paper.
Gabriel: Oh, nice.
Eric: Yeah. I spent a night or two at a hostel in Anchorage and flew back to my parents’ house in New Hampshire.
Gabriel: Okay.
Eric: Yeah. So three weeks after finishing this bike trip, I bought a motorcycle. I had been planning it for a while, and I finished this bicycling trip with, like, six motorcycle magazines in my panniers, because I’d read about them every night.
Gabriel: You’re like, “I need a motor!”
Eric: Yeah. I jumped on the motorcycle. I’d never been on one, and so I bought one and had it delivered to my parents’ house on a truck. And I just like did a three-minute ride the first day, a ten-minute ride the next day, and failed my test, motorcycle license test, the first time. And then, like, really learned how to, how to handle it. But the first time I did a mountain pass, it was like, “Oh my God! Climbing this mountain, it’s just like descending used to be.”
Gabriel: Yeah.
Eric: I got another teaching job in New York City. I got the same apartment from my old roommates. The person who had stayed in my place ended up being there just a year, so I kind of slid right back into that. But it was really disorienting to go from a year of living outside, especially through all the seasons. I mean, my life was dictated by the outside world for a year, and then suddenly, I’m living back in New York City and the artificial schedules and whatnot. I remember sitting down on the sidewalk at one point just, like, disoriented, and I kind of wondered if I was having some kind of breakdown. I wasn’t panicking, I was just disoriented, and part of it feels like I could have had a break there and, like, not gotten back up. But I realized after a few minutes that it was just from this sudden transition from that supernatural outdoor lifestyle back to society. That was the end of my bicycling. What I missed while bicycling was living in one place and getting to know a place well. I taught three more years in New York City and then Sara called and said she was moving to Alaska and said, “You should come.” Again, it wasn’t a relationship thing. She’s just like, “You’ve been talking about leaving New York City for a long time. You should go to Alaska too.” I’d met a couple were were crossing the country on a tandem, and they were pulling a two-wheel trailer. The woman was studying for her boards as a doctor and her husband was a middle school science teacher who coached a chess club, which was exactly what I was at that point. We bicycled together as a group for a week, and they were moving to Alaska. I called those people up, said, “Hey, thinking moving to Alaska.” They’re like, “Yes, yes. Come live with us as long as it takes to find a house.” And so I put in my notice at work and moved to Alaska and stayed there 20 years. I thought I’d live for a year in Southeast Alaska, before figuring out where I really wanted to be in Alaska, because I had this mindset that Southeast Alaska, the panhandle, isn’t real Alaska. But I got there and Sitka is a small town of about 8,000 to 10,000 people on an island that’s about a hundred miles north to south, and so our town was just this tiny little strip of land on the edge of wilderness, with bears and salmon and just wildness.
Gabriel: What a story! Have you considered writing a book about your bicycling trip?
Eric: I did. I wrote a book called The Road to Alaska. It’s on Amazon.
Gabriel: Really?
Eric: It’s self-published.
Gabriel: Wow, okay. I hadn’t heard about that. So, wait a minute. What’s the latest edition number on The Road to Alaska?
Eric: Edition one.
Gabriel: Okay, and roughly how many copies has it sold?
Eric: A hundred. So I have the distinction of one of the best- selling books on Amazon and one of the lowest-selling books on Amazon.
Gabriel: Well, I think I need to change my podcast name to The Accidental Python Programmer. I might have a bigger audience. Oh wow. Okay, I’ll have to check that out.
Eric: Yeah, I had written journals all along. So I had a long process of culling those journals and then finally turning it into a cohesive story, but I’m glad I did, because it kind of solidified all those memories. Sara told me at one point that her daughter ended up reading that book and loving it, because it’s a little slice of her mom’s life that she got a super clear window into. That experience, all that bicycling, has grounded me for the rest of my life and literally every difficult thing that has come up in my life has been easier to deal with because of all those formative experiences around facing whatever challenge came up while living on a bicycle. I ended up going to a programming conference for the first time after my father died, because my father died in 2011, and my mom asked me to go through his computer and tell her if there was anything worth keeping, anything she should know about. And I saw all these programs that he had half-written that would never see the light of day. And I realized that if I died that day, I had a bunch of work that I had only done half of. I kind of resolved to use a programming skills I had developed over the years to do something they would have some impact on other people. And so I went to PyCon for the first time, just to see what people were doing as programmers. I kind of expected to be an outsider, but the conference was half people who were way better at programming than me, looking for what to do with their skills, and half people who had skills in other disciplines, looking to apply programming to specific problems. So my specialty was teaching and I ended up realizing that most of the materials written for people to learn programming in the mid-2010s either made too many assumptions about what people already knew, basically written by programmers for the programmers, or they were written for kids, and so I decided to write a book that would assume nothing about what you already know, but also never speak down to you. And so that’s how Python Crash Course was born. And it comes back to the bicycling. I naively thought I could draft the book in the summer and then revise it during one school year and it stretched out to two and a half years. But at every point where it felt like, oh god, this project is too big, I’ll never get through it, I didn’t even think explicitly, but there was such a, like, ingrained connection to me of like, okay, there are things in life that feel bigger than we can handle, but if you can keep doing the next step, you will get there. And so this bicycling has been formative and it’s a foundation for my life.
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.
Eric: In the middle of Mardi Gras, I went to a Busta Rhymes concert.
Gabriel: Busta Rhymes? Did I hear that right?
Eric: Yeah, you did.