Tag: sailing

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

On to Northern Ireland: Dublin to Belfast

I heard they were building a motorway through an important historical site, the Hill of Tara, the seat of the ancient Irish Kings, just northwest of Dublin. I also heard there was a group of protesters camped up there doing an ongoing solidarity vigil and keeping a sacred fire going. I thought, “Now that sounds like my kind of place,” (more…)

The TransAtlantic Greenway: Two Months without my Bike

It was your average Caribbean afternoon: bikini heat and rustling palm tree shade, crystal azure water lapping at white sand beaches, and the waves glistening and winking gaily in the sun, carried from ocean horizons as far as the eye could see.
We were leaving the island, setting sail for Europe. (more…)

Life aboard an Asteroid: the heavenly body at sea

The boat’s name is Asteroid. She’s a 68-foot Van Dam cruising ketch, custom built in Holland in 1986. She’s strong, safe, and easy to operate. She’s a million-dollar luxury motor-sailer, registered in the Caiman Islands, giving her a real off-shore-account black market feeling, though I’m pretty sure everything is legit. (more…)

Populatechnolog and Decree

It was the Wright brothers, those enterprising Ohio bike dudes of history, that discovered a way to keep airplanes in flight. They believed that flight technology would make wars of attrition obsolete – a noble scientific aim. But the inventor of dynamite, the inventor of the machine gun; they too believed the same thing of their own never-before-seen technological accomplishments. High hopes for the cutting-edge geniuses of our progress-hungry society.
Of course the airplane only changed the face of war – to something more expensive, more demanding of resources – it did not reduce the casualties of war. Technology, by its very nature, is complicated, and (more…)