Murrs Across America

You’re ten. The only book you want to read is gone from the familiar spot on the shelf just left of the big broken globe. Looks like Justin Graham got it first. Again.

Shoot!

So you crowd around the library table—elbowing Justin for good measure—and someone starts calling out the stats for the biggest, fastest, first, furthest, longest, and most amazing things ever. In the whole wide world.

And that very day you decide you’ll make the next biggest popsicle, or start the next largest sucker collection, or wear your socks for the most consecutive days. You begin to dream on really big scales because that big book says you can. That big book says that other people have accomplished their big dreams and that if you try really hard, even you can dream big enough to earn a Guinness World Record.

Davy and Daryl were ten. Instead of stuffing themselves with peanut butter or hoarding bubble gum, they asked their mom to write to Guinness World Records to receive guidelines for becoming the youngest people to cycle the Pan-American Trail.  Can you imagine the courage it took for Davy and Daryl to dream so big: big enough to imagine themselves pedaling bicycles from Alaska to Argentina  across 17,300 miles and fifteen countries for three years of their life? Big enough to imagine themselves earning a world record? Big enough to imagine that they could inspire all those other kids crowded around tables to go live their own dreams?

In June of 2008 Davy and Daryl, both just ten years old, received the GWR guidelines and the Vogel family left on their adventure of a lifetime from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. They followed the guidelines they received even when it was easier to do things differently.  They pedaled, worked, kept dreaming, learned, grew, persevered. They wrote and posted essays that will knock your socks off to read, they engaged and fostered and fed their dream through innumerable challenges. Finally, in March of 2011 the Vogels reached Ushuaia, Argentina—the End of the World. The boys were thirteen.

Now that they’re home, they’ve filed their final paperwork to receive their record, but they were instead issued this reply: “Unfortunately, we at Guinness World Records, have decided to rest this record, meaning we have decided to no longer recognise the category as a record, due to the fact that the record would reach an age where a person would no longer be able to break it or attempt (i.e. a two-year old attempting to do it) and as it would become limited under these terms, we choose to to no longer recognise it as a category.”

Well.

I’m writing today to ask you to support the dreams of these boys.  GWR should recognize the Vogels for accomplishing the 2008 record guidelines.

Granted, what Davy and Daryl achieved during their tremendous journey—the perspectives they’ll develop, the treasures they’ll glean from it for the rest of their lives, the countless people they have and will touch and inspire—can never be fully recognized by a certificate or record.  All our journeys supply intrinsic rewards. But read this from Davy and tell me they don’t deserve acknowledgement for seeking and achieving this lofty goal:

“Thinking that I would be in the Guinness Book of World Records helped motivate me during the very tough times of our trip. It made me go even faster the last week or so of our trip. I would probably have hitched a ride when it was very hot or we were climbing a very steep hill, but I didn’t because I wanted to break the record.”

For these boys and the rest of us who have been inspired to dream big because of a whole magical collection of accomplishments large, small, and kooky, please tweet to @GWRnews, write a blog entry, or post here asking GWR to reconsider their position and take action to recognize this tremendous achievement.

Gulp!

So.  We’ve been busy.  There’s been event planning, packing, finishing up things for work, the design and construction of an amazing treehouse , house detoxification, yard sales, training rides, news interviews, trips to Grammy and Papa’s, and gourmet cooking to do (morel season comes but once a year). Jane has been preparing her journals for the trip, and Brady has been reminding us consistently that he needs a camera to be able to “take pictures at us” on the road.

Despite the busyness, though, today seemed sort-of slow motion and fun. The kids are at Grammy’s, because, as she puts it, “we’re taking them away from her, FOREVER,” and so, Stuart and I did what any kidless parents would do that have an enormous deadline, tons of work to finish, and a truckload of planning to complete: we slept in. It was luscious. We had coffee and I read a fantastic article in Adventure Cyclist by Tim Travis, who has been touring around the world with his wife, Cindie, since 2002. Check out their amazing story here.

We spent the entire day together without children, which is to say, we ran errands.

"Ballast"

We picked up 70lbs of dog food first (ballast for our suddenly-lightweight-Burlys), then pedaled around to gather various items for the trip. Ran into Jane’s Sunday school teacher who told us of her great aunt, Zulu, who crossed America by wagon train when she was Jane’s age. Says Aunt Zulu is one of the most colorful storytellers she knows, and still recalls the time, on her epic trip, that she fell into a water trough and had to be rescued by boys. We also met an art teacher, who may periodically provide art-related bolg articles and suggestions for keeping the kids creatively entertained using found objects and scant resources. I’m excited about that.

Ended the day with a circle of fantastic women to celebrate motherhood and an upcoming birth.

Lilacs. Babies. Sleep. Light. Spring does something to the soul if we let it. And in a week we’re letting it, all right. This time next week I’ll do my first post from the road.