Author: charlie

Hi. I am Charlie, I am from Madison Wisconsin and I am cycling around the world. I do this slowly. I don't believe in speed. I believe in ecological technology. Cars and airplanes just don't do it for me. I don't know how long my tour will take me, but long enough :)

Latest Distractions

Well it has been a long time since I crashed my bike in Egypt.

I was pretty messed up after that, physically of course, but also spiritually. It was a hard hit, having to come home, and the recovery of my injury was (and still is) complicated and long.

I apologize to anyone who may have expected me to write. In that group I include myself; recovering from a leg injury certainly sounds like a good opportunity to sit and write, but I never wrote a book about my three years bike touring.

Yet.

Instead, Lily came to live in Wisconsin. In August 2011 we had a lovely ceremony of commitment called New Equator.

New Equator invitation

Our special day (s)

Instead of wedding gifts, we asked our guests to provide us with money towards a sailboat. They did, and May 2012 we moved to Los Angeles, California to live aboard her.

S/V Portal

We got a kitten!

Pixel

And we are now five days from our departure – sailing South to Mexico, then across the Pacific Ocean to French Polynesia, and from there island-hopping all the way to Australia. Perhaps I’ll go around the world the other direction this time.

Lily, Pixel & I

My old touring bike is still in Mostafa’s apartment in Alexandria. I hope to retrieve it one day and to continue where I left off, but for now, life got in the way of the world bike tour.

This is not goodbye, just a last chance to do something I’ve been meaning to do: reach out to you, here.

Thank you.

Love and Joy!

Charles Brigham

Going Home

This is an email I sent out on November 14, 2010. I apologize for not updating this website sooner – it’s been pretty rough these last months.

[singlepic id=2601 w=450 float=center]

I have some news… can’t say it’s bad news, really, but it doesn’t feel quite like good news either. Let’s call it “conflicted.”

I am going home to Madison, Wisconsin.

 

(more…)

The Blood Makers

It was finally quiet. No nurses, no traffic noise from outside, no distractions.

Loneliness was there, a misty specter that filled the room and seemed to push away the medicated haze. It was terrifyingly obvious how self-sufficient I had to be. Aloneness quivered with crisis, discordant. Tears weren’t far away.
I turned my head on the hospital pillow, blearily. Self-pity curled down the corners of my mouth. My eyes throbbed. I directed my gaze upwards to the IV bag slowly dripping saline fluids into my veins. The blood hadn’t come yet; this was just to fill my vascular system with something, anything, to keep my blood pressure up. The doctors couldn’t get their hands on what I needed, and though my friends and contacts were out there, searching for my blood, right now it was up to me and me alone.
Taking a few deep breaths, I prepared the image I would begin my self-guided meditation with: the stark white of my bones before a black field. The disembodied trio of my hip bone, other hip bone, and sternum – the blood-making bones in ultra-real purity.
I closed my eyes…. (more…)

Being an Inpatient in Egypt

The technical terms that were used were “comminuted sub-trochanteric femur fracture,” meaning that the thigh bone had shattered into a bunch of different pieces just below the ball joint of the hip. It wasn’t your average geriatric fracture, where the ball of the femur snaps off from osteoporosis. This was the thickest part of the femur, crushed into several disorganized pieces. I had really fallen hard.

(more…)

Aftermath

[singlepic id=2593 w=450 float=center]

 

I lay on the hard stone, breathless. My mind was shocked with the worst pain I’ve ever felt. For the first moments, all I could do was grimace in agony, unable to even see for the blinding white pain.

(more…)

Libya: they call me Rahalla

[singlepic id=2511 w=450 float=center]
They say it’s the ghibli, the southern wind from the Sahara, that brings the dust down to the populated areas of Libya. Wherever it comes from, it’s everywhere here – ramula. Sand, stretching as far as I can see, on either side of the lonely strip of road, with dry grey bushes and maybe a bit of the sea to be glimpsed at times to the left. It’s encroaching on all the towns and villages; between, behind, and all around every sun-baked, run-down building, and covering what used to be gravel streets. Trucks are equipped with extra-rugged tires, just so they can pull off the road or stop for gas. And this wind brings the fine dusty sand straight in my face as I painstakingly pedal across the country. (more…)

The Bike Effect: Tunisia

Downtown Tunis, Tunisia.

A little cafe on Avenue Habib Bourguiba. The waiter offers me a “personal discount” on my coffee because of something I’ve come to describe as “the bike effect”: my rig looks bad ass resting next to my table, and here the travel-worn, custom-grub adventure bike is out-of-place enough to mark me as an adventurer, a traveler, not just another tourist who comes on the ferry from France for an afternoon-in-the-medina to say “I visited Tunisia!” It’s not just literally that a bike is “open to the world” – it opens the very soul of the rider, and affects the first impressions of others in a mysterious but undeniable way.

(more…)