EPISODE 59
Freewheeling Spirit
Have you ever hitchhiked with a sack of pigs, used cheap construction goggles as rain visors, or slept in a room where an unknown mammal with really big eyes watched you from the ceiling? With a unique mix of grit and humor, Laura Killingbeck explores how thousands of miles on a bicycle helped her rebuild a vibrant identity from the ashes of her past. In fact, Laura’s life is a tutorial in the art of the “shapeshift.” When the weight of a toxic career or a high-control community became too heavy, Laura pedaled toward freedom. From an impulsive loop of Iceland to conquering the Great Divide, Laura’s journeys prove that walking away from everything is sometimes the only way to rediscover yourself. Whether you’re looking for the courage to quit your job, no longer want to lead a fear-based life, or just need tips on out-pedaling your past, Laura’s story will inspire you to embrace the mystery of transformation. Life is much more fulfilling when you find your own path!
Episode Transcript
Laura: I eventually realized that there were just a lot of things that I needed to work through on my own and it was time to just shapeshift. Throughout my life, when I’ve needed to make a big change and figure out how to do that change, I’ve gone on a bike ride.
Gabriel: You just heard Laura Killingbeck, revealing that whenever the weight of daily life became too heavy for her, her go-to solution was to load up her bicycle and ride. It first happened when she got fed up with the toxic environment she faced working as a nightclub dancer during college. She booked a cheap flight to Iceland on a whim and cycled around the island’s perimeter on an old commuting bike she barely knew how to maintain. After living for 13 years in off-the-grid, experimental communities in Costa Rica and Massachusetts, Laura set off from San Francisco, cycling across the American Southwest and the length of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route from Antelope Wells, New Mexico to Calgary, Canada. Along the way, Laura reinvented herself by writing stories about her adventures. There are, however, some constants among the multiple transformations in Laura’s life: Her unquenchable thirst for adventure, her love of public libraries, and her freewheeling spirit.
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 bicycle touring enthusiasts. Welcome to another episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. I learned about today’s guest, Laura Killingbeck, through listener Annalisa van den Bergh. Some of you might recall that Annalisa was Eric Douds’ touring partner in the episode “Touring with Type 1: A Journey of 10,000 Miles.” Last year, Annalisa organized the “Cycling with” Virtual Summit, and she introduced Laura with these words: “Laura’s journeys have taken her tens of thousands of miles via cycling, hiking, hitchhiking, and sailing. She has spent more than a thousand nights in her tent, and along the way she has worked as a freelance writer and visual storyteller, writing for publications such as Bicycling magazine, Adventure Cyclist, and Bikepacking.com.” Well, that’s a very compelling introduction. So, Laura Killingbeck, thank you so much for being a guest on the Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
Laura: Thank you so much for having me.
Gabriel: My podcast is called The Accidental Bicycle Tourist because it usually highlights people who stumbled into bike travel. Was there an accidental aspect to how you began using bicycles for travel?
Laura: What a good question. I… pretty much everything has been accidental.
Gabriel: Yeah!
Laura: Yeah. So it all started back in college. I was studying philosophy and sociology at the University of Rhode Island. And I also was working weekends at a nightclub to raise some extra cash, and it was a really fascinating job. There were aspects of it that I really liked, but there were also aspects of it that were not so healthy, I think. It was not the healthiest environment, especially, I think I was, at the end I was like 22 years old. I was trying to figure out myself and my identity, and it was kind of in this dark and murky world of dancing at these nightclubs. And so one day I came back from work. It was really late, and I kind of had this dark feeling where I just felt like my whole soul had been kind of crushed into this smaller and smaller space. At that time in my life, I didn’t really know how to articulate that. I didn’t know what to do. And so I went back to my apartment and I had a laptop, and I started kind of playing this fantasy game where I was like, I’m going to look at flights around the world and imagine what it’s like to fly away. And so it was just a game. It was just, you know, looking at the flights. And then I actually found a cheap flight to Iceland, and then I just bought it. And so the flight was leaving for the following weekend, and it was going to come back a month later. So I was going to have a month in Iceland. I knew nothing about Iceland.
Gabriel: But what about your job?
Laura: So, yeah, I had to quit that.
Gabriel: Ok.
Laura: Yeah, I had to quit that. So that was good. That was kind of a way out. And I was done with my classes at university. I had just finished classes. So everything was kind of like primed and ready for me to go, even though I would never have known that at the time until I bought the ticket. So then I was like, OK, what am I doing in Iceland? So I looked at a map and I saw that there was this road that went all the way around Iceland. Maybe I could just bike around this road. I happened to have this old touring bike. I hadn’t really used it for anything except commuting. So I’d commute, like, a few miles. Or I think at that time I’d gone like 20 miles down a bike path at one point. I was like, I’m just going to, you know, bike around Iceland. Over the next week, a friend actually helped me learn how to change a flat tire and pack up this bicycle into a box. Flew to Iceland and ended up in Keflavík in the wee hours of the morning – because it was a very cheap flight – I got dropped off there at like two in the morning, built the bike in the airport and then just biked out of the airport into Iceland. And that was the start of a month long journey.
Gabriel: So what time of year did you go? Because this is very important in Iceland.
Laura: Thank goodness it was summer.
Gabriel: OK, so it was high summer. So you at least had long days and somewhat warmer temperatures.
Laura: Yeah, it was beautiful weather.
Gabriel: OK, and what year was it?
Laura: I think it was around smartphones. So I just had a paper map. I had a guidebook, paper guidebook. I had the bicycle and I had all my camping gear. So by then I had quite a lot of experience camping. So that part of it was pretty easy, relatively. And at that time it was before Iceland was so much of a tourist destination. So that one road that went around the island was in most places, not very well trafficked, so it was actually a great ride.
Gabriel: Yeah, so I did my ride in Iceland. I did it in 2006, so it would have been fun if we’d been there the same year.
Laura: Wow.
Gabriel: We were off by one year. I also asked about the time of year because I did it a little early.
Laura: Oh no.
Gabriel: So yeah, there was definitely some weather.
Laura: What kind of weather did you get and when did you go? I’m so curious now because Iceland, I mean, the wind is what’s so crazy about Iceland.
Gabriel: Oh, everything. It was something like, towards the end of May and the start of June. This is early. The wind, I’ve never experienced anything like that. The only thing that comes close is Patagonia. Patagonia is super windy. I went with a friend. My friend and I were blown clear across the Ring Road.
Laura: I believe it.
Gabriel: So one moment we’re biking with you know, fully-laden touring bikes, and a gust came up and before we knew it, we were biking on the wrong side of the road.
Laura: Yeah.
Gabriel: It just pushed us across the entire Ring Road. And luckily, as you said, there’s not much traffic, especially not 20 years ago. It was just a gust. If it kept blowing, it would have blown us clear into the whatever landscape there was. And when you had the wind against you, you could hardly do anything. And when you had the wind in your favor, you felt like you were on a motorcycle.
Laura: I remember getting pushed uphill without pedaling.
Gabriel: Oh, yeah, totally. If you get the wind at you’re back, it’s great. I often, it felt like the wind was not at our back, but that’s a different story.
Laura: Yeah.
Gabriel: In Iceland, the airport, as you said, is in Keflavík. And that’s a ways away from the capital, Reykjavík, and it’s this lava field. I can only imagine how it was for you. I’d already done some tours by then. And so here you are, a brand new touring cyclist with this bike. And you land in this – what was probably a completely foreign landscape to you – this lava field.
Laura: Yeah, it was wild. I think one of the advantages was I had absolutely no idea what I was doing or what to expect. I just rolled with it. You know, it’s like, okay, you have gale-force winds. This is just what it means to be a bike tourist. I was just like, all right, this is how it is. Iceland, I think what I remember is just being so magical was the landscapes and that almost 24-hour sunlight. It was easy to lose track of time and just keep biking into that golden light, the ocean on one side, glaciers on the other. I think because I hadn’t spent very much time doing the research, it was really sort of unfolding as this magical thing that I really actually didn’t know what was coming around the bend.
Gabriel: Is there one specific adventure that you had on Iceland?
Laura: That’s a great question. I ended up having quite a lot of problems as well, because I didn’t know anything about the bike or how to adjust the bike. And I was kind of scared of the bike itself and the mechanics because it was kind of out there. And so I ended up having kind of a lot of struggles with like my body positioning on the bike and the saddle and all of that stuff. So over time, I ended up kind of having to go slower and slower because I had so much knee pain and all of these different things that I just didn’t know enough to adjust. There was one time, I think I had gone maybe two thirds or so around that Ring Road. And I just gave up. There was a road sign and I just lashed my bike to this road sign and left it there. And there was a dirt road that I saw on my map that’s going into the interior of Iceland. And I was like, I’m just going to take my camping gear in my panniers, sling it over my shoulders. I’m going to walk down this road until maybe somebody finds me and picks me up and takes me to the interior of Iceland. And I’m just going to leave the bike there if it’s there when I get back, great. If not, maybe that’s okay too.
Gabriel: I’m sorry, Laura, but I think that was a little unfair to your bicycle.
Laura: I know.
Gabriel: Here was a bike that you had bought. You only demanded a few miles a day from it. It had a simple life. You said you were scared of your bike. Your bike was scared of you. The bike’s like, what are you doing to me?
Laura: You’re right. I didn’t take good care of it.
Gabriel: So what happened though? You went into the interior, which is even crazier, even more rugged than the Ring.
Laura: I know that now. Yes. So I just started walking down this dirt road into interior Iceland. And luckily, these lovely people in a jeep, it was a jeep road. And so there were some tourists going down there. They picked me up and they drove me way out there and then just dropped me off. And so then I was way out in interior of Iceland. I had a couple of days worth of food and it’s a very stark landscape. There was a little hut out there that I was staying in. I remember reading in my guidebook, it was the area where they used to send prisoners because it was just this remote… I hope that’s true. I’m thinking from memory.
Gabriel: It sounds reasonable.
Laura: Yeah, but it was just this epic landscape, just windswept, a lot of dark earth, big rocks, glacial lakes, snowy. So I was just out there until someone else was driving by and decided to give me a ride back. And when I got back to the road a couple of days later, my bike was still there. And by that time, I was like, OK, I’m ready for this again. And I kept riding.
Gabriel: You just needed a break. The way you just did that, it leaves me to believe that if we back up before your bike touring days, you had some outdoor experience, because somebody who was not experienced, their initial reaction would not be, oh, this is difficult. Let me go into the even more remote inland of Iceland. They would say, let me get a bus and let me go to Reykjavík. So, can you just briefly tell about your background and your experiences in nature prior to that?
Laura: Sure. I grew up in suburban Rhode Island in the US, and both of my parents were naturalists. So we went camping and hiking a lot when my brother and I were kids. I had just developed a love of nature from a very young age. When I was 18, just after I graduated from high school, I took a year off. And I ended up spending a year hitchhiking around the US and across Mexico on almost no money. I think I had like a dollar a day budget. So I was just kind of camping out and seeing the world from a different perspective. And that gave me the skill set to camp out in nature for sure and also have a lot of confidence in just survival skills in general. It kind of showed me that if I have a problem, I have to solve it in some way. And if I don’t know how to solve it, then there might be some unique solutions that are a little creative. So in the case of like getting tired of biking, it was like, well, maybe I don’t have to bike every day. Maybe I can do something else.
Gabriel: I love that.
Laura: But I definitely did have the confidence with camping that it felt very comfortable for me.
Gabriel: Yeah. You’d need to have confidence to take that decision. And did you start hitchhiking from your home in Rhode Island and just went across the US?
Laura: Yeah. So I actually started by taking a Greyhound bus to Arizona and I worked for five weeks on a trail crew in the mountains as a volunteer building trails. And then after that crew was over, I just walked out down the mountain and walked to the edge of town, which was Tucson, and just started hitchhiking.
Gabriel: Oh, OK.
Laura: I would also like to add like in terms of walking alone into interior Iceland, it wasn’t a great idea. It worked out fine for me and I feel very lucky about that. But, you know, those were kind of the early days of travel, where I was making choices and seeing what happened. That was a choice I made.
Gabriel: Yeah. But as we’ve just found out, I think you made it with some basis already. All right. So you returned from Iceland. You were on that flight back that you had booked. And then suddenly, I guess you finished your studies, you finished that job. You could do anything at that point. Did you come back with clarity or with more questions?
Laura: Oh, wow. I think some of both. That time was really refreshing in a lot of ways. And I think just spending time in nature in general, camping out and moving your body does free a lot of things inside of you inevitably. Yeah. I think it was clarifying and also I still hadn’t really figured out my life. The day after I got back from that trip, my roommate and I were actually driving cross-country. So I got back and then just got immediately in the car and we started driving cross-country. And we moved together to San Francisco and started a new chapter. I ended up going back to dancing. It’s such an easy job to pick up. Yeah, it’s a fascinating world. It was just, I mean, there were so many things about it that were interesting in like, in terms of human nature, and seeing people in these different kind of parts of their lives in this sort of murky environment. There was definitely a fascination, but again, it wasn’t the healthiest thing. And so eventually that kind of reality, again, got to me. It kind of started breaking up something inside of me. Once again, didn’t quite know what to do. I’d moved to San Francisco in the late summer, fall. And then by that next summer, I was kind of done with San Francisco and ended up getting rid of all of my stuff and booking a one-way flight to Alaska with the same bicycle.
Gabriel: Hey.
Laura: Yes. All problems solved by bike. Booked that one-way flight to Alaska. And this time I was like, you know what? I’m just going to bike south until I figure it out. And I’m not going to go back to dancing again. I’m going to find a different option, find a different route.
Gabriel: Did you work out all of the issues with your fit so that you could pedal in a pain-free way? Because, you know, some things are down to the frame size not being right. And then it’s a real problem. Other things you can adjust and it’s okay. But hopefully you were able to make adjustments and be much more comfortable. It’s much more fun when you’re comfortable riding.
Laura: Yeah, I know that now. I improved some things, I think, but it still was fundamentally painful.
Gabriel: Argh.
Laura: Yeah, it’s OK. It’s OK. You know, I still enjoyed the journey, but it would take me a long time before I really realized that bike fit was that important. Because again, like I was just out there on my own. I wasn’t surrounded by bike people. And so in my head, I was like, oh, this is just the way it is. This is just how it’s supposed to be. I solved the knee problem, but there were other issues that I ended up having to figure out.
Gabriel: I suppose that on this trip, you encountered lots of different types of people and were probably taken care of by a bunch of people along the way. Because this was now, I guess you said a year later, this was 2008?
Laura: Yeah, I believe so.
Gabriel: So I think it was still probably not that common to see a solo female traveler on these roads in Alaska and then British Columbia and then the Pacific Northwest. What are some of your memories of people that you met on your way south?
Laura: Yeah, so people were amazing on that trip. I really didn’t have any bad experiences. There was a time at a grocery store, I think up in the Yukon, where I was picking up some food and a woman came up to me and she’s like, “What are you doing? Where are you going? You have to come home with us.” She and her husband took me home with them for dinner and gave me a place to stay and took me out on their boat. Beautiful things like that that I never would have imagined or expected started to happen. There was another woman who saw me riding down in British Columbia and she pulled the U-turn in her pickup truck and was like, “Come home, come to my house.” Again, she and her family hosted me and it was just really special moments with people. I was really alone for a lot of that ride. I was on my own. I was just camping out wherever I landed in the forest. I didn’t know that it was a bike route. I guess it’s kind of like a general bike route along that coast or maybe there is now. At least when I crossed the border back into the US, I started to see more cyclists. All of a sudden, crossing the border, there were all these people on bikes and kind of noticed it and I was like, wow, this is interesting. Then there was one day, I think Washington or Oregon, I had just slept in this ditch on the side of the road, woke up at like 10 in the morning when it got warm and threw my bike onto the road to get out there. I almost ran into this guy named Hugo, who was this New Zealander who was biking south. We ended up becoming friends and he was like, “Oh yeah, this is a bike route,” and he showed me this book which was like this whole bike route that the Adventure Cycling Association had mapped.
Gabriel: Right, then the Pacific Coast.
Laura: Yeah, and so then it was like, oh, okay.
Gabriel: Oh, it’s official!
Laura: Yeah, and there were campsites mapped out and I just had like a paper road map. I didn’t know any of those things and so we started biking together and then we eventually ran into this woman named Jen. Jen Hopkins was her name, at the time, and she had just finished racing the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route. She had raced that route and then come over to the Pacific Coast as kind of like a joyride and I remember meeting her and just she was this like very small person with this radiant smile. I just remember listening to her stories and thinking, wow, there’s this whole world happening where this person is racing these routes and, you know, it just kind of unlocked sort of this spirit of adventure and joyfulness in the process that really ended up changing my life a lot. So the start of that route from Alaska back down to San Francisco was very solitary and then by the end I had more of a crew of people, really interesting folks who ended up shaping my life in a lot of ways.
Gabriel: Did you keep riding with Hugo for a while and with Jen for a while as well?
Laura: Yeah, we rode off and on I think for a couple weeks down the coast and then almost to the way to San Francisco we parted ways. We were just going in different directions.
Gabriel: And did you ever see them again?
Laura: No, I stayed in touch with Hugo for a while and then I meant to stay in touch with Jen but, you know, unfortunately didn’t and a number of years later I wanted to look her up and I found out a few years after that ride, she passed from cancer. It was very jarring. She was, you know, the healthiest person you ever meet.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Laura: And she had kind of just stuck with me in my mind for a long time because I think she just radiated so much joy about cycling and being alive and so yeah, it was a big moment to realize that she had passed.
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s a shame, really unexpected.
Laura: Yeah.
Gabriel: Yeah, it looks like she had a big influence on your life despite only having spent a short time together.
Laura: A very short time. I think that was kind of what she did for a lot of people.
Gabriel: Wow. Okay, and then you got to San Francisco back where you had been before and what was next?
Laura: Yeah, so along that route I stopped in libraries and applied for jobs.
Gabriel: You mean you stopped at libraries and you went online and applied for jobs?
Laura: Yeah.
Gabriel: Okay, you applied for jobs anywhere?
Laura: I think I applied for a job on a sailboat and then I applied for a job on a chainsaw crew and a forestry crew in Colorado, and so I got that.
Gabriel: Nice.
Laura: Taking a bus with my bike to Colorado to Durango and I worked for a season on this forestry crew. It was amazing and a lot of fun. And then when I was there I ended up meeting a guy named Scott. At that time I was interested in traveling more. I was kind of always wanting to be on the road a little bit and I had hatched this idea that I was going to hitchhike down to South America. I met this guy Scott at a party and was basically like, “Hey, I’m Laura, do you want to hitchhike to South America with me?” That was my pick-up line.
Gabriel: That’s how you started the conversation with Scott?
Laura: Yes, that was it.
Gabriel: Wow. I guess he said yes.
Laura: He did and that’s what’s even more interesting. He said yes. You know, like why? He said yes and so then yeah, we just left.
Gabriel: You must have radiated something at that point. This is not very usual.
Laura: It is not, no.
Gabriel: Oh wow.
Laura: But yeah, so we both finished up our crews. He was on a trail crew. I was on the saw crew and then… Again, we really didn’t know each other because we were on separate crews.
Gabriel: Right. It doesn’t seem like you knew each other at all.
Laura: Not at all. Yeah, but luckily Scott was a great guy. Yeah, we took a bus across the Mexican border and started hitchhiking from there. We had this plan that we were only going to speak Spanish to each other so we could learn Spanish. So not only did we not know each other, but we were speaking only in broken Spanish for the first time.
Gabriel: Wait, wait. So neither of you really were fluent in Spanish?
Laura: No.
Gabriel: So you just sat there and you’re like, “Buenos días.” “Buenos días.”
Laura: Yeah.
Gabriel: And that’s…
Laura: So, I did know conversational Spanish, because I had hitchhiked across Mexico previously. On that trip, I had actually met this Mexican shoeshiner named Valente and we traveled a lot together and so we helped each other out with language. So I had conversational Spanish, but Scott didn’t. So it was mostly, it was awkward, but in a great way. And yeah, we just hitched around Mexico. And again, people were just extremely lovely. I look back on that and think about how young we were and inexperienced in so many ways and people took the time to pick us up and carry us to safety across that entire country over and over and over again. It really is such a striking thing and a humbling thing that that happened. So yeah, we spent about a year, I think, hitching and we stopped at various places. So we stopped in Guatemala for language lessons.
Gabriel: Oh God, thank you.
Laura: Yeah, I know, right?
Gabriel: Scott’s like, “Finally.”
Laura: I know.
Gabriel: All this time you guys have been picked up by people and they’re talking and you’re talking and he’s just sitting there.
Laura: Yeah.
Gabriel: I find hitchhiking is amazing because you meet people from really all walks of life. Just the fact that you said you traveled with a shoeshiner is already an introduction to that. You probably met, I don’t know, a farmer, a professional truck driver, an accountant. There’s so many different things you encounter hitchhiking.
Laura: Yeah, it was very, very special. Families would pick us up, all kinds of different folks, folks on their way to work. People would be like, “Yeah, get in the back of the pickup truck,” and the truck would be full of pigs or wood. I remember one memorable ride where it was just a sack of pigs and our job was to keep the pigs in the bag.
Gabriel: A sack of pigs.
Laura: Yeah.
Gabriel: Don’t let the pigs out.
Laura: Yeah. We eventually made it down to Costa Rica. When we were there, we did an internship in natural building and sustainable design at an organic farm and education center in this little town out in the jungle. And that ended up starting a new chapter for us. We had planned to keep hitchhiking down to Argentina, but when we came to this place, we realized that we really wanted to spend more time in one spot and do some more learning and working with our hands. And so we ended up coming back to that place the following year. The owners offered us a position as co-directors of the education center, which is kind of wild in hindsight. We just kind of rolled in there hitchhiking and got offered this role as co-directors and ended up taking it.
Gabriel: Wild for most people, but no wilder than any of the things you’ve said so far.
Laura: Okay, fair.
Gabriel: I’m getting the sense that this is standard for you. Of course, you’d be co-directors.
Laura: Yeah. And we like to work hard. Scott had a degree in economics and he was just coming from this background of a business background in a lot of ways. Really smart person. We both like to work really hard. We both like to learn. And so we ended up for the next nine years working as co-directors of this organization and developing an apprenticeship program in homesteading and sustainability skills. We learned a lot of skills in tropical, organic farming, as well as food processing, live culture fermentation, food preservation, natural building. And then we collectively put this together into classes for people who would come and live with us and work with us for at first three months and then six months and then eventually a year at a time.
Gabriel: And I guess by then sounds like you and Scott were actually in a relationship at this point. I mean, if you were there for nine years.
Laura: Yeah, we were. We’re sharing a tent and hitchhiking and developing these programs. A lot of the work that we did was really program development and making it financially sustainable. During that time, I would also leave. And so it was nine years, but I also would leave on other journeys and go back to the US. There was another farm that I went to in Massachusetts every year. I also went on backpacking trips and more biking trips. Scott and I and our friend Simon biked across Costa Rica in a big loop, collecting plant genetic material for the farm. So we spent a number of months just on the bikes, visiting different organic farms across the country and learning from people and collecting seeds and cuttings to bring back to the education center. I also went to Colombia and Ecuador and biked around there. It was nine years, but there was also kind of interspersed with bike trips. The education center is worth saying was also an experimental community. So we were a group of people living together and basically sharing everything. It was a campus that the owners had built – the two co-founders who were Americans – had built out in this very remote jungle. The buildings were all very eclectic, made out of earth and bamboo and all these different natural building techniques, and they were all open-air. And so we shared one communal kitchen. We all ate all our meals together. We shared everything to do with the business and creating the business and how it functioned. Scott and I lived in this one-room open-air bamboo cabin on the edge of the forest. It was really deep in the forest. I mean, we were really out there and there was a lot of wildlife. The animals would kind of just flow through the house. They would just kind of move through, you know, snakes. There was a boa constrictor that would come every year to shed in the closet. By closet, I mean a single piece of bamboo that we hung clothes on.
Gabriel: It sounds pretty intense.
Laura: It was very intense, especially the army ants. You know, like everything would just move through these houses. I don’t know what it was. There was this creature, this mammal with really big eyes that would sometimes come in at night and be on the ceiling and I’d just wake up and look at it and then it would leave. You know, very intense communal living, like sharing everything with this group of people, but also deeply connected with the outside, the outdoors and the indoors merged. None of us had phones. We didn’t have WiFi. So for a very long period of time, it was a very rustic living situation that was very immediate.
Gabriel: How were you able to promote the education programs that you were running if you didn’t have some kind of WiFi link or, you know, make bookings? It just seems kind of essential.
Laura: There was a one-room library in town that had intermittent internet and the founder did all of the bookings on a laptop.
Gabriel: Okay. There’s the library again. Very important.
Laura: I love libraries. I do. They’re great.
Gabriel: Yeah. I have to ask one question. I want to talk a little bit about your ride in South America, but I feel like I’ve developed a bit of a bond with your bicycle, this touring bicycle. It went to Iceland. It went Alaska-to-San Francisco. What happened after that?
Laura: The bicycle is still with me, actually, to this day.
Gabriel: Really?
Laura: Yeah, at my parents’ house in Rhode Island.
Gabriel: I’m glad to hear the bike is still around.
Laura: Yeah. But I did end up getting another bicycle in Costa Rica that I ended up riding around.
Gabriel: So you did Costa Rica one time and then Colombia and Ecuador was another?
Laura: Yes.
Gabriel: I’m curious to hear a little bit more about where you went in Columbia and Ecuador.
Laura: Sure. So this was pretty early on. I think it was the year after Scott and I had first gone to Costa Rica and we ended up actually breaking up at one point. And so my breakup plan was to just move to Colombia. So I flew to Bogotá and he went back to the U.S. and I was kind of trying to make a life in Colombia. About a month after I moved there, Scott found out he had cancer.
Gabriel: No way. Oh no.
Laura: Yeah, it’s just a devastating thing for people. So I ended up flying back to be with him while he had surgery and he ended up pulling through and being fine. But that brought the relationship back together. I flew back to Bogotá and at that time I really wanted to spend more time in Colombia. So I was trying to get my visa extended, but I wasn’t able to do it at the time. You had a limit of six months in the country per year. And I had heard rumors that if you just crossed the border to Venezuela, you could get it renewed there at the border. So I was like, okay, well, I need to get this visa renewed. Scott wasn’t with me yet. He was still back in the States. I was like, right, well, maybe I can just bike to Venezuela and renew this visa. At that time, I had a friend who sold me a used bike for 50 bucks. I had some camping gear. I was like, well, maybe I should bike with someone to Venezuela. And so I put this flyer out. It was a post on couchsurfing.com asking if anyone wanted to bike with me to Venezuela. And if they did, then they should meet me at this rock concert in town at like a certain day and a certain time. I showed up at this concert just like by myself. And this French man named Mathias wearing these flowing beautiful colored pants just walks right up to me. And he’s like, “I want to bike with you.” So we went to this concert together and we chit-chatted and he was this French mathematician, amazing person. And I was like, “Well, have you ever been on a bike trip before?” And he said, “No.” And I said, “Well, do you have a bike?” And he said, “No.”
Gabriel: Do you know how to bicycle?
Laura: I know. And so we ended up getting him a really cheap bike, loading him up, and we just left together on this trip. And we biked from Bogotá out over the mountains and ended up all the way at the border in Venezuela. At that point, we realized I actually couldn’t get my visa extended. So then I went back to Bogotá.
Gabriel: Oh.
Laura: Yeah, couldn’t get the visa extended. That’s okay. And then at that point, Scott came and met me and the two of us biked down across Southern Colombia to Quito in Ecuador. So it was a really roundabout trip again, but had a great time biking with Mathias. And then a great time biking with Scott as he was coming off of his surgery and recovering from cancer.
Gabriel: This was a low-budget setup that you had for this trip, it sounds like, starting with the $50 bike.
Laura: Yeah, extremely low budget. I went to a flea market and got like bags at the flea market. One of the bags was just a child’s rolling backpack. And I hooked it up to the bike with bungee cords. I really wanted to be low budget. I was trying to live in this country. I didn’t know what I was going to do for work. So yeah, everything we did was very, very rustic.
Gabriel: What are some examples?
Laura: It was very rainy. And so we found these cheap construction goggles. And so we used those as kind of like rain visors. And then we had, you know, just bags to cover our gear, bags to cover our feet, cheap ponchos. We spent very little money on that trip, especially on the gear, which is, you know, something I think that’s worth noting for people who want to do a ride and are kind of confused by the amount of gear it seems like you have to purchase or the type. You can get away with a lot of things with household items for sure. Biking across Colombia and then into Ecuador, we were sometimes staying at these little, you know, five or $10 hostels and then sometimes camping out. And people were very generous allowing us to sometimes camp on their land when we asked permission. And there was one time we asked to camp kind of in this forested area in Ecuador. And the guy was like, “Oh, you know, just come home with us.” So we went back to his house and he lived with his parents, I believe. And it was in a part of Ecuador that was very traditional. So they were wearing these little hats and they had these long dresses and clothes on. And we went into their little house and it was basically almost nothing in this guy’s room except for this one big Jackie Chan poster. And it was just amazing. They were the sweetest family. And I remember they cooked us this delightful soup from things from their garden. Because so many people were so nice to us, Scott and I had started buying little potted plants and carrying them with us in our water bottle holders. And then giving them away as like a thank-you gift. And so I remember we had this little aloe plant that we were able to give them. But really the kindness of strangers is just such an extraordinary thing. And it’s continuously humbling. I’ll always remember that family. And I remember them asking where we had come from. And we said the United States. And then they were like, is that closer or farther than Bogotá? Because they had been in this one small town for so long, I believe. The whole concept of distance was different. The whole concept of culture was different. It really was so striking that they would even invite us into their home, you know, like how extraordinary.
Gabriel: Yeah, it reminds me exactly in that same part of the world in the episode “Odisea Panamericana” with Swiss traveler Martina Gees, she stopped telling people where she came from and where she was going because they had no concept of it. So if they asked where you’re coming from, she would just mention a town that was a little ways back. And where are you going? She would just mention a town that was a bit ahead.
Laura: Yeah.
Gabriel: And then people could relate to it like, oh, okay, that’s a good trip. Yeah. In fact, she was traveling the entire Americas, but there was just no concept of it in that setting. Yeah, she was also just showered with kindness from strangers on her ride. How have these highly specific, spontaneous encounters with strangers shaped your world view?
Laura: Such a great question. And I think the answer to that is continuously also changing. It is kind of a miracle that people are so kind to one another in so many different areas of the world across culture. It’s interesting being in the United States right now because there’s so much conflict, there’s so much social conflict, and a lot of division amongst people. One of the things that strikes me about travel and the kindness of strangers when traveling is that people are still very different. They hold different values and different belief systems, but they still extend often hospitality and friendship. And I think that that is a really big lesson. Especially as a solo female traveler, I have to practice a lot of discernment about who I’m with, who I’m trusting, what people want from me. Both of those realities can exist at once, having to practice that amount of discernment and having to take a lot of measures to protect myself, which I do, and also understanding that the world is a fundamentally beautiful place where most people are very kind.
Gabriel: Well, yeah, and we’ll touch on that a little bit later. At this point in your story, you got back together with Scott. Is that where we’re at?
Laura: Yeah, so Scott and I were together for the better part of 10 years, from the time we met in Colorado hitchhiking and then working for about nine years in Costa Rica. That was our 10-year span. The place in Costa Rica where we were co-directors was incredible in a lot of ways. It was brilliant and attracted a lot of extraordinary, smart people who worked really, really hard. And we really believed in this idea of kind of recreating the concept of society itself, ending climate change, and looking at this idea of can you share everything? Can you share your resources and finances and create meaningful work and grow your own food and build your own houses? In a lot of ways, it was very successful. In other ways, it wasn’t. I think internally, one of the founders ended up, how do I say this? When I now look back at this group, as beautiful as it was, it was also what I call a high-control group. It was a group that had an extraordinary amount of economic, emotional, social, philosophical control over its constituents in ways that were fundamentally unhealthy. There were a lot of deceptive practices. There was a lot going on in the founders’ relationships with women that were not what we had thought they were. It just wasn’t the family environment that we thought it was. It was kind of this place that was built on this like amazing idealism and trust. It was so sparkly and it was so beautiful on the outside, but internally, people’s relationships just did not meet those same qualities. At the end, we realized that this founder who had promised this kind of collective that we were all sharing this business, we were all going to get a portion of the business as a work trade. We’re going to get the house, all of these things as this work trade. He actually wasn’t going to share those things as he had promised. All of these people had put in all of this work for all of these years based on these work trade agreements that he was just not going to follow through with. I ended up kind of slowly coming into this understanding that something was wrong, deeply wrong, and slowly coming into this understanding that it was a high-control group practicing really classic types of coercive control. I left one day. I packed a suitcases with some old clothes and dishes and I just walked away. I had tried very hard for years preceding that moment to get us back on track and solve these problems and try to figure it out as a group, but there are times when you can’t solve those problems, when someone is a certain way and they’re just going to be that way and you can’t fix that. I ended up walking away from everything: From my business, my home, my community, my relationship.
Gabriel: Wow.
Laura: So it was a big life change.
Gabriel: Yeah, that is comprehensive. And you went back to the United States?
Laura: I actually didn’t know where to go, so I stayed with a friend for a couple weeks in Costa Rica and then I ended up kind of randomly finding an artist residency up the road in Costa Rica in this tiny town called Concepción. I applied for this residency and I got it and I ended up living on this mountaintop in Concepción, Costa Rica, out in the rainforest still, and that’s when I started writing and so I actually originally started writing about this community where we had all these beliefs and these ideas and these beautiful things happening and then the slow realization that it was a high-control group and that struggle of human nature. So I spent four months on this mountain writing about what had just happened and during that time I realized I have no identity left that is my own. I had given it to this group. I didn’t have it anymore. I had lost it. I didn’t know what I wanted to do or who I was and so I had to start looking back over my life to kind of figure out in hindsight who am I. Without this place, who am I? The thing that had really stuck out at me was that I had gone on all these adventures. I had gone on these bike trips. I’d gone backpacking for weeks at a time. I finally had gotten a phone, because I hadn’t had a phone and started going online and connecting with other adventure people and then I started writing about these adventures. I ended up sort of recreating like a whole identity based on adventure versus the identity that I had had for the last nine years, which was as part of that group.
Gabriel: In a way it’s beautiful that really out of the ashes of this old life sprouted the new life directly, because you started writing about the old life and that writing became your new life. This is amazing.
Laura: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. It’s a complicated story and like I just yeah but it was an identity that it was like, what is the one thing that has just always brought me joy and always made me feel like myself? It’s these journeys. That’s what it is. That’s who I am.
Gabriel: That probably made you want to take new journeys at some point.
Laura: Yes. The first thing I had to do was recover from that experience. I had a lot of inner work to do just to figure out what are human relationships going to be like, because I had basically lived up to that point my entire adult life either on these journeys living out of my tent or in experimental communities that really didn’t touch mainstream society. The idea of then trying to forge a life on my own in the regular world was extremely terrifying and I didn’t know how to do it. I was very lucky after that writer’s retreat. I ended up going back to a farm in Massachusetts that I had spent a lot of time with previously. I ended up working there and living there. It was another community and so we all worked together and lived together once again. That provided a buffer.
Gabriel: Right
Laura: They were people I knew and trusted and so I was there for about four years and during that time the pandemic happened and I also took other journeys. I think during that time I ended up hiking the Florida Trail, which is a thousand mile trail across Florida through the swamps. I went and did a trip on Albania. And so I was starting to do more trips again but really was just taking time to figure things out and that’s when I really was writing, so I started writing more and started freelancing.
Gabriel: And publishing articles about your experience in this communal living setting, initially.
Laura: Initially that’s what I wrote about, but I quickly shifted to adventure because I needed to build a new identity and I wanted to connect with a new community. And so I started actually writing for the Adventure Cycling Association. They had a newsletter at the time so I’d write a monthly column. I hadn’t been really exposed to the bike world. I hadn’t been exposed to the industry and so the stories I was writing were unique because I wasn’t writing through the lens of, I don’t know, like the idea that you have to go fast or race or look a certain way. It was more like stories about, oh I bought a $50 bike and biked over the Andes.
Gabriel: Perfect. It’s perfect for this podcast, anyway.
Laura: Oh good. Yeah. I eventually realized that there were just a lot of things that I needed to work through on my own and it was time to just shapeshift. Throughout my life when I’ve needed to make a big change and figure out how to do that change, I’ve gone on a bike ride. I left Massachusetts, flew back to San Francisco where I had ended that previous trip and I started biking from San Francisco, and this time I was actually working and riding along the way. So I brought a bear canister with me because I knew I would be going through a lot of bear country and I used that as a little portable writing desk and I also brought a little… Yeah. It’s great. Actually it’s perfect as a desk. And I brought a portable keyboard that I would just connect to my phone and a solar panel and that was my office and so I had this mobile office that I took with me on the bike, biked south out of San Francisco down the Pacific coast and then I cut across into the desert. This was springtime and so I ended up spending a couple months out in the desert just biking around and living out in caves out there. There were these series of caves that just formed like the perfect little mini offices and so because I was working on different stories, I was writing, I took time in these caves to set myself up and write. It was also a really deep time of introspection so I was out in the desert living in these caves. It was in Anza-Borrego Park. It’s this beautiful big desert and it has this tiny little town called Borrego Springs in the middle of it.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Laura: It sounds like you’re familiar.
Gabriel: I’ve been there, yip.
Laura: So I would commute into town to the library.
Gabriel: Yes!
Laura: because I love libraries and they have a great library and I would load up on water. I had huge water jugs I could carry like four or five gallons of water at a time so I’d load up on water or food, use the internet, that kind of thing and then I’d bike back out to the caves and stay out there. So I did that for a couple months out in the desert.
Gabriel: Did you do any kind of deep meditation techniques or you just kind of led your life but just based in a cave?
Laura: I’ve always wanted to be asked that. Yeah. I think it all kind of unfolded organically. I spent a lot of time in contemplation out there in the desert. It was a very stark environment and I was reflecting on a lot of things about the experiment of communal living. What went right? What went wrong? What does that mean about human nature? I think I had a lot of fear that it meant something bad about people. I had to learn some humility and come to terms with my expectations are not always the way the world appears and it doesn’t mean that the world is bad or people are bad. It just means that we are all grappling with fundamental human experiences and I think one of the fundamental experiences that we’re all grappling with is what is the difference between how I present myself to the world and who I am on a deep internal level. In that community we had this sparkly image, a beautiful image of this community that was operating this perfect way. But then internally, people’s relationships were just kind of bad. Everyone has some version of that of who is validating me as a person, who is validating us as a relationship or a society and how do you keep pulling it back to kind of that deepest place of who you are? And I think part of that includes recognizing that it is a struggle and we all have that struggle on some level, on a micro level or a macro level. I kind of sat out in the desert and sort of weighed some of those ideas and basically I just decided that I was going to stay out in the desert until I felt like I was ready to move on. Luckily, that moment coincided with summer so it was getting really hot out there.
Gabriel: That will help you move along.
Laura: Yeah, that will help the process. Yeah.
Gabriel: It can get super hot out there.
Laura: Yeah.
Gabriel: You kept bicycling?
Laura: Yeah, I commuted around the desert by bike and cave to cave into the library and then eventually I think it was May 1st or around there right when it was about to get really hot. I continued onward so I biked across the Southwest to New Mexico, to Antelope Wells, which is the southern terminus of the Great Divide, and from there ended up taking the Great Divide up to Canada.
Gabriel: Wow, this is a bit of a tribute to Jen, who was the Great Divide racer.
Laura: Yeah, and so it worked out in this perfect synchronicity where I had started the trip again in San Francisco which hadn’t been actually meant as a continuation of that ride. It just happened to be that my friend was living there, and it was only after that I realized, oh, I’m actually continuing this thing that I started, and I had actually written a story for Bicycling magazine about Jen and that had been in editorial for a while and it was that same day that I started the Great Divide that I got the word from my editor that the story was like ready to go. It was a lot of things kind of working out in a beautiful way and I spent all of the summer and into the fall riding that trail and it was such a beautiful time. I fell in love with that trail. It’s mostly gravel going over the mountains and I really felt a sense of freedom and a sense of, I think, integration that I had been missing for a long time. So it kind of ended up being the culmination of a lot of things that helped me fall in love with the world again and kind of come out the other side of a lot of things that I’d been going through.
Gabriel: It seems beautiful, but very challenging. Lots of mountains, high elevations, and the weather can be unpredictable even in the summer.
Laura: Yeah, I had pretty good weather. I was very lucky but yeah, it’s a lot of elevation, going up and over the mountains, and a lot of stark landscapes as well.
Gabriel: Were you also meeting people on the road?
Laura: So I was heading northbound. Most people do that trail southbound and within the first few weeks of starting, I actually saw the racers.
Gabriel: Oh, the Tour Divide, the race.
Laura: Exactly.
Gabriel: Oh, so you were going north and you saw them going south.
Laura: Yeah.
Gabriel: Oh, that’s cool.
Laura: I started running into all these racers and of course it was reminding me of Jen and of her journey because she did that. She did that race and it’s such a hard race. These people are not stopping. They are just racing that whole way and it’s so hard and so I ended up just cheering manically for these racers every time they passed. I just kind of lost it. I was so emotional about it and I was just like screaming for these people. I think actually Lael Wilcox, I cheered for her at one point and just lost it. And she ended up recording a show online at one point where she was like, “Yeah, there was this one place in the Tour Divide where there’s women with these fully loaded panniers just lost her shit, cheering.” I was like, that was me!
Gabriel: Hey, you got Lael Wilcox’s attention.
Laura: Yeah, she remembered.
Gabriel: Oh my gosh, memorable, memorable moment. That is hilarious. Since the old bicycle was retired, can you just briefly tell a little bit about this bicycle that you were on?
Laura: Sure, yeah. So the bike I took up the Great Divide was a Kona Sutra Unlimited and that was through Kona. So once I started riding, I started connecting with brands and for a couple years I became a Kona Bikes Ambassador, and so I got this cool bike and it worked great. Yeah, it was more rugged and more capable than most of the other bikes I had been on previously and so it was awesome.
Gabriel: And did you name your bike?
Laura: Yes, I named that bike Enigma, because when I got it, I wasn’t sure exactly where we would go. I didn’t have a specific journey in mind when I first got it, so it was kind of mysterious and I wanted to sort of follow the mystery on that bike.
Gabriel: That’s a very unique name for the bicycle Enigma.
Laura: Yeah, it’s a good one.
Gabriel: I’d like to touch a little bit on this man or bear debate very briefly. Now I’m going to give you a full confession. Sometimes I feel like it’s me that’s living in a cave, because I didn’t hear about this man or bear debate until I found out a little bit more about you.
Laura: Okay.
Gabriel: I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know who started it. All I know is that it was a big deal and you wrote an article, “A Woman Who Left Society to Live with Bears Weighs In on Man or Bear.” It was recognized as Bikepacking.com’s winner for best writing of 2024 and most widely read article of 2024. That’s an incredible achievement. So first of all, can you please explain a bit about man or bear?
Laura: Thank you. Man or bear was a TikTok debate in 2024, I believe. And so it started when someone recorded women on the street and asked them, “Would you rather be stuck in the forest with a man or a bear?” And most of the women replied a bear. And so this conversation created this big social debate across the internet and globally really, about women’s safety. It was really a question that opened a door to the reality that women often don’t feel safe around men and often have to do a lot of different things to keep ourselves safe on a daily basis. It’s something we’re always thinking about and preparing for. So this set off this social media debate and it also got a lot of backlash. There were a lot of men who saw this and became, I think, maybe scared that women didn’t like them or didn’t want to be close to them or felt afraid of them. And so there was a lot of pretty angry male backlash at the same time. So you can imagine on social media, these things escalating.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Laura: Yeah. So I ended up writing a story about it and just talking about the reality of being a solo female traveler. And I do take a lot of precautions. I do practice a lot of discernment. I do have a plan and actually a hundred plans for what to do if I am outside and feel uncomfortable or threatened around men. And it does happen sometimes. It’s unfortunate, but harassment is a real thing that can happen. And as a woman, you don’t know if that’s going to lead to something else or not. And that’s really the problem is sometimes even minor comments, actually, they need to set off a certain amount of vigilance because you need to make sure that you’re keeping yourself safe in case that harassment does lead to something else. So I wrote a story about this, kind of honing in on two truths at once. One, that this is real, that women are going through all of these things and for real reasons. And two, that at the end of the day, what we all really want is mutual safety. When women are choosing the bear in the man or bear debate, I think it’s a desire to be safe. I think the real quest in this whole conversation is creating the safety that we’re seeking and being able to say, hey, like, we don’t always feel safe around men. Let’s change that culture. Let’s create a world and draw a future towards us in which women do feel safe. And how do we go about doing that? The article I wrote did go viral. It got shared all around the world. It attracted a lot of attention from a lot of different people. I got asked to keynote all around the world and it really changed my life. One thing that changed is it’s actually led to my upcoming bike ride. The bike ride is in partnership with a credit union in Michigan. The credit union is on a mission to end gender-based violence and economic abuse. Economic abuse is a really interesting tie-in to this debate because 99% of abusive relationships actually involve some form of economic control or abuse.
Gabriel: By economic abuse, you mean that somebody is financially dependent on somebody else and has to stay in a relationship?
Laura: Yeah, so financial abuse is really any time that anyone prevents you from using, maintaining, or gaining resources that you need to live. Could be someone actually controlling your finances, or it could be someone preventing you from working, or it could be someone doing something like taking out a line of credit in your name and then trashing the credit so you can’t get a loan. There’s all of these different elements to it, but it is fundamental to abusive relationships in general, because it traps people in the relationship and prevents them from leaving.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Laura: And so anyways, this credit union found this connection between financial abuse and abusive relationships, and so in May, I’m going to be starting an eight-week bike ride across Michigan, on this Choose the Bear Tour, and I’ll be visiting different organizations that work with women to help women recover from domestic abuse, gender-based violence, sexual assault, and I’ll be blogging about it and doing social media and uncovering these more nuanced conversations about what’s happening and why with the focus on really understanding the issues at stake and standing with survivors as well as drawing the conversation into a place where I think everyone can participate. You know, we definitely want to stand with women who are experiencing these things, and we also want to make sure that men are part of the conversation and really hone in on the reality that what we’re seeking is mutual safety. So that is the next bike tour. It all stems from that story.
Gabriel: Another incredible twist in your life. How can listeners follow along? What would be the best ways?
Laura: So there’s a website called ChooseTheBearTour.org, and that has all of the information about the ride, and then folks can also follow me on Instagram or Facebook, @laurakillingbeck, and I have a free newsletter as well on my website, which is laurakillingbeck.com.
Gabriel: Okay, so you can just click to subscribe to the newsletter.
Laura: Yeah.
Gabriel: I might do that.
Laura: Oh, thanks.
Gabriel: One thing I wanted to say about the article is, having read it very recently, the part that really struck me was, I gained an appreciation for the huge number of calculations or the very large mental load that women are dealing with in what I would just consider a random encounter. As a man, I can tell you, you already know this. There’s a lot less going on in my mind when I encounter another person in the wilderness. A man, a woman, a family. There’s a pretty high threshold level for me to start thinking, oh, this could be maybe unsafe or anything like that, but your article really made me realize how, for a lot of women, this is a much more not constant, but at least prevalent situation that you have to use all of your senses and you have to use your intuition and look at body language and tone and has the person invaded my private space? And I was really like, wow, this is a lot. And it’s something that a lot of women deal with all the time. It sounds like.
Laura: Thank you so much for saying that. I really appreciate it because it is a lot. A lot of times it’s one of the biggest parts of any journey is thinking about how to stay safe and making a plan for that safety. And it’s also the reason why a lot of women are afraid to travel and camp alone. I think that your response right there of just saying, I read this, I thought about it, I’m considering it, that’s kind of like just such a beautiful response. That’s what creates the change, is that listening and that empathy. And that’s really, I think in a lot of these conversations, all women are looking for to start with is just listening and empathy. So thank you for being an excellent model of exactly what we’re hoping for. Thank you. Yay!
Gabriel: I would even go one step further and say it is something that I would maybe have a little bit more in mind in the opposite situation. If I’m the one that’s being met by a solo female traveler, it helps to think about doing things that can help that person feel at ease.
Laura: Statistically about one in three women over her lifetime will be sexually assaulted or abused in some way. And so the numbers are very, very high, kind of extraordinarily high when you think about it.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Laura: And like you said, just thinking through all of those interactions and reflecting on them, I think can be important for anyone in any part of the conversation.
Gabriel: I want to just conclude with something you wrote on your blog, because I think it really summarizes so much of what we’ve heard. If I can quote from your blog, you wrote, “When I started this path, I expected everything from the world. Now I expect nothing. I’m just really, truly happy to be here.” How did that shift in mindset happen? And how does it change the way you ride?
Laura: Yeah, I think that starting out, especially as an 18-year-old girl, I had a lot to prove. I had a lot of ideas about what it meant to be a person in the world after years of travel and all of these experiences. The conclusion so far that I’ve come to, which is probably an ever-shifting conclusion that will change over time, is really that we’re here for this experience. We’re here for the experience of everything that it means to be human, not just the good parts, but the good, the bad, the struggle. And I think it is such a joy and a gift to be part of the human world and get to experience what it means to be alive on this planet. I think it is kind of like winning the craziest lottery ever to be alive in any capacity. You know, we’re here.
Gabriel: Statistically, it is definitely winning the lottery.
Laura: Yeah, we get to be here and we get to experience all of it. And I think that is just a joy. And I don’t know if I have anything specific to prove. You know, I think it’s just being here that’s the gift.
Gabriel: Trying to condense any guests adult life into a single podcast episode is an impossible task, but I was struck by the richness and diversity of Laura’s experiences. Laura has made many unexpected choices in her life and has already shapeshifted, as she calls it, several times. I’m happy that she has forged the career as a writer and I look forward to reading more of her stories, including her newsletter, which I signed up for. While Laura is pedaling in Michigan, I will also be going on a little bike ride of my own. In three weeks time, tune in for a fascinating conversation with Tom Bruce, another community-recoommended guest.
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: So you use the internet at the library?
Laura: Yes, I wasn’t applying for jobs as a librarian. Yes, good point.
Gabriel: No, no…
Show Notes
You can follow Laura on Instagram and subscribe to her newsletter on her website.
She will be riding the Choose the Bear Tour in Michigan between May and July 2026.