Twenty Miles per Cookie: 9000 Miles of Kid-Powered Adventures

by Nancy Sathre-Vogel

  Hanging out waiting for rain to stop.

  Relaxing in the San Juan Islands.

  Taking a nap while waiting for a ferry.

  The enormous triple bike was dwarfed by gigantic redwood trees.

  Hands-on learning at Fort Ross

  Exploring Alcatraz prison

  Exploring the Oregon coast

  A foggy day along the coast

  The boys loved playing on the beach. Every chance they had they headed down!

  There was so much to do along the coast we could never get bored.

  Playing ball in a campground. The boys had more energy than they knew what to do with.

  We all enjoyed the peace and solitude of camping in the wild.

  Red Rock just outside Las Vegas. It was an abrupt transition from remote countryside to massive city.

  We had never seen Joshua trees before – lovely!

  Playing King of the Rock

  Flat tires were never fun, but on the side of the interstate, they were even less fun.

  We love Zion National Park

  Massive sandstorm moving in. Ten minutes later we were barreling down the road at thirty miles per hour with an incredible tailwind.

  The Grand Canyon! It was beautiful, but so very cold.

  Camping out at Joshua Tree National Park – very chilly night.

  Into saguaro country!

  We never tired of seeing Joshua trees

  We got a special tour of the paleo lab at Anza Borrego State Park.

  A date farmer invited us to his farm.

  San Diego – the water was finally warm enough to enjoy!

  We enjoyed all the sights at Disneyland.

  A whole crew offered to help rebuild the bikes to get them ready for Mexico.

  Davy

  Daryl

  Cycling Baja

  Boojum trees were huge!

  That's a long way to the tip of Baja!

  Wonderland – this part of Baja was magical with many types of cactus.

  Relaxing in a hostel. In the towns, we stayed in hostels but camped between them.

  Baja was lovely, but all those cactus thorns were torture on our tires.

  There was a wide variety of fruits and vegetables in the stalls.

  Playing chess

  John

  Heading back out to the road after camping in the desert.

  Davy was fascinated by these pelicans. He watched them for hours!

  Look Ma! A sunflower sea star!

  Every time we stopped the boys started playing soccer or some other game with local kids.

  Checking in to a hotel. Our bikes came in with us.

  Taking Grandma out for a ride. We rented a single bike for Davy for the day so all five of us could enjoy a day cycling around Mazatlan.

  Feeding the birds. They were huge but the boys had a blast giving them little fish.

  We stayed at a little farm one night. The family raises cows and makes cheese from the milk. We got to help milk the cows in the morning before we left.

  Sugar cane. Davy loved it, but Daryl thought it tasted nasty.

  Taking a break in a small local restaurant in Mexico.

  Enjoying Copper Canyon. we were fascinated by it all - the colors, the deep canyon, the colorful local people...

  Tarahumara indians who live in Copper Canyon

  We were lucky enough to stumble upon a rodeo. It was more of a comedy show than the rodeos we're used to, but we enjoyed it a lot.

  Daryl at the rodeo

  Cycling Mexico

  Our little rolling wagon train. Everything we needed we carried on our bikes.

  Our friend, Harry. We met him in the Grand Canyon, then again at Carlsbad Caverns.

  Davy was very proud of his fish!

  Camping on the Appalachian Trail

  Amish country

  Horse carriages were more my speed.

  The boys had a lot of fun exploring old bridges.

  American History Days

  Newfound friends

  Covered bridges – a bit of Pennsylvanian history

  Taking a break

  Learning US history up close and personal at Gettysburg

  Kids will be kids! Enjoying New York City

  Cycling out of New York City was crazy!

  Visiting the Statue of Liberty

  Dangling Lightbulbs

  “How is it, Nancy,” John asked quietly as he glanced at my knee with a worried look. “How bad is it?”

  I sat on the couch in our condo in Mazatlan with my leg elevated. The slightest movement caused searing pain to shoot through my knee and tears streamed down my face. The mental anguish was far worse than the physical pain.

  John’s mother, Anne, gently prodded my knee. Her many years of nursing experience provided no clues. My knee was a mystery. There was no obvious reason for the pain.

  Anne had flown to Mazatlan for a week, and all five of us were enjoying our week in the lap of luxury. My mother had arranged for a condo on the beach for us, and we were relaxing in the luxurious accommodations. By day we hung out at the pool, went coconut bowling, played tennis, or took cooking lessons. By evening we sat around chatting or playing cards. It had been a wonderful time that we had all looked forward to for a long time.

  All was going well until that moment when my knee went out. I was walking to the bedroom when I suddenly felt intense pain in my left knee. I froze, hugged the wall for support, and called out for John. He helped me hop to the couch where I sat, crying, trying to figure out what was happening.

  The next week was a blur – a blur of painful steps, crutches, and doctor’s visits. Eventually I managed to find a knee specialist who informed me I had calcification under my knee cap, which caused the kneecap to have trouble tracking. My kneecap had wandered off to the side, causing the pain.

  “Don’t worry,” the doctor told me. “It’ll get better. The kneecap is back in alignment now, so just give it time for the inflammation to go down. You might need to have surgery to scrape those bumps off at some point.”

  What a drag. Under this smile is a lot of frustration.

  We hung out in Mazatlan an extra week, waiting… hoping… We had no idea what my knee would do. Would it heal to the point where I could ride? Would it continue to cause problems and we’d have to abort the trip? Should we abort now and not cause further damage? Day after day, our discussions centered around my knee as we tried to figure out what we should do. We were tired of hanging out and wanted to move on. And yet the consequences of a poor decision were severe.

  In the end, we decided to move on. We waited until my knee was more or less stable and I could walk with a barely detectible limp. We vowed to ride very short distances the first week, at least, to see how my knee held up. The last thing we wanted to do was push it too soon and have it go out again.

  Nearly three weeks after arriving in Mazatlan on the ferry from Baja, we were ready to attempt riding again. Our bodies had gotten soft from so long off the saddle, and we longed for the challenge of a good long ride. As much as we wanted to push on, we vowed to keep the mileage low, but we ended up even lower than expected.

  Twenty miles out of Mazatlan we stopped for water in a tiny town called Quelite. As we hung around on the street corner filling our water bottles an old beat-up white pickup pulled up behind us and a voice boomed, “I heard you need help!”

  We turned around to find an old American man with a red bandana around his neck and a backwards cap upon his head sitting in the driver’s seat. “I was told an American family with two kids was down here and they need help. You need help? No? Okay. Well then, I think you should stay with me for the night.” And thus was our introduction to Joseph.

  The boys learned about mining gold from our new friend Joseph.

  Once at the ranch Joseph jumped out of his pickup and unlocked the door to a house. “You can stay here tonight – it was being built for another American miner, but he died. The house isn’t finished, but it’ll be good for yo
u.”

  And indeed it was. We wandered around exploring the six empty unfinished rooms. A thick layer of dust covered every surface. Water was from the hose outside, and there was a lone light bulb dangling from the ceiling of one room.

  “Never mind those bugs up there,” Joseph instructed as he pointed to a huge hive swarming with some type of small black bees directly above our heads. “They won’t bother you if you don’t bother them. If enough of them sting you though, they are poisonous and will kill you. During the night they are inactive, so don’t worry about them tonight, just don’t disturb them tomorrow.”

  We all looked at each other and made a pact not to disturb the hive.

  “There are cots in this room,” Joseph continued. “You need to use them – there are lots of scorpions and other bad insects around here. The state of Sinaloa has all kinds of nasties that you don’t want to meet. If you sleep on the floor they’ll crawl into your sleeping bags with you.”

  John and I began to have second thoughts about traveling through mainland Mexico. Should we really be dragging two little boys around an area with deadly bees and scorpions and whatnot? Maybe we should load the bikes on a bus and make a beeline for the USA, where everything was more familiar? But in the end, we didn’t. If Mexican kids lived with those insects their whole lives, surely our boys would be fine for a few weeks.

  We tried sleeping on the old dusty cots, but the burlap was so weathered and disintegrated, it ripped when we sat on them. Luckily we had our tent which we set up inside the old gold miner’s house to protect us from the myriad of nighttime prowlers, and fell asleep wondering what our next day would be like.

  * * *

  Dear Grandma,

  We finally left Mazatlan. Mommy says her knee is OK, so we are hoping we will be able to continue on. When we were riding an old gold miner named Joseph came and asked if we needed some help. He offered to let us stay in an abandoned house. In the abandoned house there were a lot of fold-out beds, a couch, and a lot of empty rooms. He showed us his gold-mining tools and machinery. He even showed us the mine! He grinds up the rock, then gets the gold out of it. The gold is found in some black sand that he gets out of the ore. It is neat. I can’t wait until tomorrow.

  Love, Davy

  * * *

  In my many years of traveling I’ve found adventure is, many times, only one step away from disaster. It springs from the unknown – from having no idea how we will meet our basic needs. It is stressful, but the kind of stress I can look back upon and say, “What an unexpected turn of events!” It’s those days that make the most memorable experiences, and are, therefore, the most rewarding days of a journey. After it is all said and done, those are the days we look back upon and tell stories about – the days when we wonder where we will find food or water or a safe place to sleep. And Mexico provided quite a few of those days.

  One day we had planned to make it to the next city and a hotel, but Mexico had this way of screwing up even our most well-laid plans. That particular day we had been plagued by flat tire after flat tire, and evening found us stranded on the side of the expressway with no place to sleep. Panic began to gnaw at our hearts. We were in the middle of nowhere, night was fast approaching, and we had been warned time and time again of the banditos who prowl the roads at night.

  We could see, away on the other side of the corn fields, what appeared to be a small village. We had no choice but to head there and hope for the best. We hauled our bikes off the road and through the corn field to the group of houses. Our first stop was the store.

  “We have a problem,” I explained to the store keeper. “We had hoped to make it to Culiacan today, but we had a bunch of flat tires and now it’s too late. The sun is setting quickly and it will be dark soon. We can’t ride at night. Is it possible to set up our tent someplace around here?”

  “The jefe (boss) will be here soon. You will need to talk with him,” she replied. “He is inside.”

  We waited, knowing that each passing minute was one less minute we could be using to get to another village if need be. After waiting for what seemed like hours, the jefe appeared.

  “Is it possible for us to stay here tonight?” I asked.

  “You’ll need to ask the social worker. She is inside,” came the reply.

  I was getting curious. “Inside” what? What is this place?

  A few minutes later the social worker appeared and I repeated my question. By now we had a group of thirty or forty curious onlookers surrounding us while a small group discussed our predicament.

  “They could put their tent in front of Miguel’s house.”

  “How about a room? Could we give them a room?”

  “The tent could go outside the fence.”

  Finally the social worker got out her cell phone and called the big boss to acquire permission for us to stay in the camp.

  The four of us stood around, having no idea what was going on. They mentioned “the camp.” What kind of camp was this? What was this place?

  As soon as the social worked had permission for us to stay, she turned to the others and asked, “Which room should we give them?”

  “They are so dirty. Which is the cleanest?” replied one woman.

  Aurora invited us to stay in her humble abode in a migrant worker's camp. We were humbled by the kindness of people who had so little, yet welcomed us anyway.

  “What about the office? Could we put them in the office?” suggested another.

  Finally one of the women announced that, since she had two rooms, we could stay in one. The decision had been made. We wheeled our bikes into the acampamento, past dozens of wide-eyed curious kids, dirty run-down shacks, and people scurrying around doing endless chores. We followed Aurora to her rooms, which would be our home for the night.

  The “camp” was for migrant workers from the south. They move north for several months to harvest peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, and corn, and return to their pueblos the remainder of the year. While working in the fields, they live in sheds made of corrugated tin. Doors are barely functional, light bulbs hang suspended from bare wires, and everything was filthy beyond description. Families of eight or nine crammed into one small room, and the shared bathroom facilities were barely tolerable.

  Aurora invited us in and gave us a delicious dinner and a relatively clean place to stay. Davy and Daryl immediately hit the floor with Aurora’s two children and the four of them stayed up half the night playing with a few broken toy trucks.

  As I watched my sons roll around on the floor squealing in delight while they roughhoused with Aurora’s kids, I couldn't help but think the world would be a better place if only everyone had this opportunity. For Davy and Daryl, it didn’t matter that those kids didn’t speak their language or that they lived in a dirt-floor hovel. What mattered was they were kids – and they could play together.

  To isolate us from the heavily soiled mattress on the floor of our room, we spread our tarp over the mattress and used our sleeping bags rather than the blankets, but we weren’t complaining. At least we were safe. After the lights were out and the camp was quiet, John and I lay in bed reminiscing about our previous adventures.

  “This whole thing seems like a flashback,” John told me. “Remember when we were in India? We would stop in a small village and were immediately surrounded by a sea of curious villagers? That’s how I was feeling today – it was almost like I had returned to India.”

  “It reminded me of Ethiopia,” I replied. “Remember when we were invited into tukuls of those people who were so poor? Even though they had no money at all, they gave us so much.”

  We continued talking well into the night about how it seemed like the poorest regions on earth was where generosity and the warmth of human spirit flowed most abundantly. We talked about cycling through the sprawling shantytowns of Calcutta where people lived in crowded, filthy aluminum boxes where running water was non-existent and there was hardly enough electricity to light a forty-watt bulb. We thought bac
k to the refugee camps we had visited where the inhabitants struggled to maintain basic hygiene, or places where we cringed at the thought of eating in someone’s home.