Hi folks –

I’m heading out on another bike tour. This time to Scotland!

For this trip, I started a new project that’s been in the back of my mind since my last tour, along with a new website! Below is the first post of the Fork Files (@forkfiles). I hope you join me for the ride. It’s always such a pleasure hearing from everyone.

Cheers,

Danielle

Fork Files:

The rain was a familiar sound.

A pittering giving way to a full drumroll of droplets unleashed on the fly of my tent. For the previous two weeks, I experienced the crescendo night after night.

However, during this October thunderstorm the droplets we’re different — metallic and rhythmic — from the shelter of a double-wide trailer. After spending many nights in the rain on the coast of Oregon, my riding partner, Jackson, and I found ourselves, two thousand miles and two months into our trip in the kitchen of a giving stranger.

In the living room, we found eleven other cyclists all enjoying a break from the weather, sharing drinks and food — a meal cobbled together from the bottom of dirty panniers and wet stuff sacks. We ate stale corn chips, apple pie, burgers. We discussed the fastest ways to pack a tent, we shared what we’d seen in the North and those headed that direction shared stories of the south west coast.

Hiding from the rain underground.

The gear room at our biker gathering, only some of our bikes pictured here.

Some were traveling for a week, others two years; we were from Maine, Belgium, Los Angeles, Spain. Conversation subsided to sleep as we cuddled into our sleeping bags like we did every night, but this time we weren’t two bikers in the middle of the woods. We were packed like sardines on the living room floor, surrounded by so many different origins, different experiences, different worldviews, different languages — our commonality: food. Our mode: bicycles.

Except for the occasional Facebook or blog post I’d never see most of these people again once I left the California coast. Yet as the raindrops resonated through the roof, I fell asleep next to strangers as we shared an intimate reprise, moment of comfort, of home.

I’d been here before — sharing meals in strangers’ kitchens, I mean.

Along our cycling trip we were taken in for meals with the most storied people, we sipped the strong fermented hard cider, we helped assemble irrigation heads before building a fire for dinner, we cooked curry for a biplane pilot, ate plums from a host’s tree, drank the raw milk of the cow who kept watch while we camped at night. In these experiences I found the community I left at home, in Maine — the cast iron care, the kale from the backyard, the laughter and indeterminacy of making sustenance out of mix-matched ingredients.

You bet it is!

The adventurer likes to think of herself as an island, a warrior against the road. A machine moving through space and time to accomplish a goal: of self-sufficiency, of the body’s power to overcome, to travel through and over obstacles both physical and mental.

In this mindset, I too easily forget the gravity of sitting at a table and sharing in food — in the intimate and personal lives of others. An unintended benefit of my first bike tour was being able to cook and share food with so many strangers. The experience reminded me over and over again how important communion — community are to a satisfying human-existence. Yet how does a solo-adventurer reckon those two realities? If the adventure is about the individual, our stories often reflect that focus. How do I reach the solitude, clarity, and freedom of solo travel but also share with others? Share in a way that is both meaningful to me as a visitor in another’s space and to those I interact with? From this idea my proposed trip was born.

The dinner table — whether it be a picnic table, a rock, or a barstool — is the common place we all share. Sharing food can be a gesture of equality. Furthermore, telling stories allows us to connect and empathize with others who we believe to be different. My trip is intended to meld the slow pace and individualism of cycling with the communion and commonality we all share in food, through storytelling.

Follow the rest of my journey at www.forkfiles.org and on Instagram @forkfiles. Thanks always for your support!