Yesterday I had to go to the office to use the business phone to check in to our PayPal account. When I told Erick, he jumped at the chance to ride in with me. It reminds me of when we were cruising on our boat.
There is immense freedom cruising in your own boat. You can go where you want, stay as long as you want and weather permitting, leave when you want. The only hitch is that our maximum speed is 7 knots (8 mph). This was true for most cruisers due to physics laws that my son the naval architect could better explain. So when we would get to port, given the opportunity to ride in a car, we would take it. It didn’t really matter where we were going. It would mean going fast! We could roll down the windows and watch the scenery flash by.
The first time we went to Paso Canoas, the border crossing between Costa Rica and Panama on the Pan American “highway” we met some bicyclist who had ridden all the way from Canada. “Wait,” our son said, “We could have ridden here on a bicycle? That would have been faster.”
The pace of life all across the world has slowed down. As inconvenient, and frankly frightening this time is, there are some bright spots. Old friends have time to check in with each other. Time to do some things we’ve been meaning to do. Time spent with family. And we can really appreciate things that we haven’t before, like going 60 mph on an open road.