I try not to be a person who takes blessings for granted as though, in some way, I deserve them, but I know that I do. I know without a doubt that who I am in character and what I have accomplished with my life is a result of those who taught me and raised me and because of many people who impacted our culture so that I can live the way I do. My parents were obviously the most influential in my life; my siblings also shaped my life in various ways. Many pastors, youth leaders, teachers, and friends spoke into my life in multiple ways. I take all those people for granted; I simply don’t take the time to think, remember, and say thank you.

And then there were all the church fathers who preached, taught, and protected the purity of the gospel, many being martyred because they stood firm. There were the founders of our country, the many soldiers who fought and died in wars so that I could live in freedom.

The command to be thankful is given in the Bible many times. We obviously need to thank God all the time and also those who have given, served, and sacrificed for us. Saying thank you and being grateful is a key way for our character to grow and become like Jesus. It is also a powerful glue in relationships. Nothing much will destroy relationships as much as taking people for granted and not appreciating them and their contribution to our lives.

In my praying today, I made a special point of thanking God for those people He sovereignly used in my life. I also asked that He would work in my heart and make me more and more a grateful person in character.

I have devised a new bicycle riding plan to replace the previous one. On the route that I planned that Cliff and Kathy are still on, we would arrive at our son Seth and his family’s place in Twin Falls, Idaho, on June 18th, and then we had two weeks more bicycling until we got home. I will leave on Monday, June 3rd, and go the opposite direction as originally planned. I will meet Cliff and Kathy at Seth’s place on June 18th and then ride home with them. I am planning a different route there than the one we will return on for variety. From Monday, June 3rd, to the end of June 18th, there are 16 days, 13 riding days, and three rest days. I will have two days, precisely 70 miles each, and the rest will be 60 or less. I am confident that I can do this after a week at home resting, though I will ride ten to 20 miles every day before I leave. I have gone through all my stuff and reduced my weight on the bike to 55 lbs. I will ride nine days less than the original 44 days planned, and instead of 2,500 miles, I will ride 1,900. I feel good about this new goal and look forward to accomplishing it. The primary loss for me will not be bicycling in Utah, which was the trip’s primary goal: to see all the beautiful rock formations in Utah. I will schedule a driving trip with Patty, some of our kids, and grandkids to some of the National Parks in Utah to make up for missing them. Also, I will be riding by myself as I go to Seth’s place, but I was always way behind Cliff and Kathy anyway so it won’t be much different than usual. I will be close enough to home or Seth’s place so that if I get in trouble, one or the other won’t have more than five hours of driving time to pick me up.

A good thing about coming home for a week is that our family from Hawaii is here, and I would have missed seeing them. Now, I plan on taking one of my grandsons fishing two times.

Psalms 37:24 When he falls, he will not be hurled headlong,
Because the Lord is the One who holds his hand.

I called Patty this morning and asked her to come pick me up from the KOA campground in Klamath Falls that we were in, and I bailed on the rest of the bicycle trip. Cliff and Kathy took off this morning without me. I overdid it yesterday, and I could hardly walk this morning. I am in the pickup now, just about home as Patty drives, and I feel great remorse for quitting. I hate quitting, and I hate losing, and I did both.

So, one of my life guidelines is that if you fail at accomplishing a big goal that you really want to do, make adjustments and go at it again. I have been thinking about what those might be, and have written a few that I believe will help the next trip be successful.

1. Always take a support vehicle so I don’t have to carry 70 lbs of gear on the bicycle. I know that the extreme weariness that I felt at the end of most days was because of the extra weight. With 70 lbs being the absolute maximum, there are a lot of items that make camping more enjoyable that get left behind. Also, this year, the possibility of health issues requiring a trip to the hospital was demonstrated. In previous years, bicycle breakdowns needed a vehicle to quickly get to a bicycle shop. I knew all that, but I thought it would be an extra challenge and cheaper to do it unsupported. Oh well, live and learn.

2. Keep the longest day’s riding to a maximum of 60 miles or 3,000 feet of total climbing. I do have to make some adjustments for my aging body.

3. Also, considering my age, I will schedule a rest day every three days for the first twelve days of the trip and every five days after that. Another benefit of a support vehicle is that any day I need extra rest, I can throw my bike on the rig and ride.

4. I will work much harder to get in shape for the next trip than this year.

I am sorry for all those looking forward to the bicycle stories for the next 40 days in my blog. I was looking forward to writing them. I will try to come up with something that teaches and entertains in my blogs despite the chicken lifestyle for the next 40 days. Maybe I can ride my bike to Talbot and back a few times and write about that!

Today, we rode 99.68 miles, according to my bicycle odometer. I am rounding it off to 100 miles. I am as close to death as I have ever felt. It was a long, hard day, for sure. We are camping at a KOA campground in Klamath Falls. The showers were excellent; I stood in mine for at least 30 minutes, letting the hot water massage me.

Cliff and I walked a couple of blocks to a Sports Bar to watch the NBA playoff game between Dallas and Minnesota. It was super noisy, and we left at halftime; Dallas was getting smeared. I will be in my nice sleeping bag by 8:00 pm There is something about a warm, down sleeping bag that is very appealing.

We will sleep in tomorrow until 7:00 am and get left about 8:00 am. We only ride 53 miles tomorrow with no significant hills. Hallelujah!

Well, the schedule was to be in Klamath Falls tonight after a 97-mile ride, but we were all so tired last night, and this house we are in is so comfortable that we decided to take a “rest day” today and stay right here for another day. I am writing this blog after sleeping ten hours and getting out of bed an hour ago at 8:00 am. I usually schedule a rest day every Sunday, but I phoned the camping spots and rearranged our schedule, so here I sit, enjoying my rest day very much. Yesterday was a killer day, and I am still very tired and exhausted. I think I will schedule a rest day on Thursdays and Sundays for future trips, at least for the first couple of weeks of the trip, until I get in shape. My first bicycle trip to Fairbanks, Alaska, was in 2013. I was 64 years old, and it was so much easier. I should get all caught up on my Bible reading and Bible memory today.

Last night, as we were watching the Dallas Mavericks and the Minnesota Timberwolves play basketball, both teams striving to win so that they could go to the NBA national championships; if they win the best of seven series they are in, I thought of 1 Corinthians 9:24-25, “Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win.” The desire to win, succeed, accomplish, conquer, and overcome a significant challenge is how God made us. We can grow that part of our motivation, and we can also shrink it. As I think about this year’s bicycle trip and what motivates me, I think it is primarily the challenge. There is something very rewarding in attempting to do something challenging and accomplishing it.

That is the cool thing about goals: you can write them while you are sitting in a comfortable chair in a warm room, with a cup of coffee, but all the while you are writing them, you are counting the cost and mentally evaluating whether you can actually do it, or if you want to pay that kind of price.

Someone asked me why I was doing this bicycle trip, and I responded that it is impossible for me to win an NBA championship, even if I wrote a goal to do it, but I think I can still do this bicycle thing for a couple more years. Everyone needs a crazy mountain to climb. My good friend Lloyd is ten years older than I am, and he is still skydiving, now how crazy is that?!

Today was a very, very hard day. We climbed almost all day riding Highway 58 to Willamette Pass. I rode three to four miles an hour nearly all day grinding up the hills. Then, when we got to the pass, it was 32 degrees and snowing, and the wind was blowing hard. I probably have been colder at some point in my life, but I can’t remember when. We entered a little grocery store attached to a gas station when we reached Crescent. They were kind enough to bring out some chairs, and we drank big cups of coffee and hot chocolate, sat, and warmed up. We still had 18 miles to go until our campsite sight, and the weather report was 18 degrees tonight. None of us were excited about sleeping in a tent at that temperature. Donna Cuputo wrote on my yesterday’s blog that we were welcome to stay in the cabin they owned near Crescent. I called, and they said sure. It was just two miles from where we were sitting, so here I sit in a comfortable house, writing this blog and watching the NBA finals on TV. So what started as a terrible day has ended nicely. The only problem is that we will have to pedal 97 miles tomorrow, but the weather is supposed to be warm, and the road is relatively flat, so there is no big deal about the extra miles after a day like today.

I am having to exert extra discipline to get my Bible reading, prayer, and scripture memory done each evening. I am so tired that I fall asleep while doing it. I think in a couple more days, I will get in shape.

Today, we rode 51 miles from Marcola to Oakridge. It was mostly uphill, but only a short stretch was really steep. We were on Highway 58 for a good part of the day, and there was a lot of truck traffic, so we were careful to stay on the side of the road as we peddled, though there were times when there was only an inch of shoulder.

Last night, I went into the emergency room in Springfield. My heart rate was about 130 during the day while I was peddling hard, but after 4 hours of resting at the end of the ride, it was still up to 130 bpm. I called my doctor, and he suggested I go into the emergency. The pastor of the church we slept in last night, who is a good friend, drove me in. When I finally got in after waiting several hours, everything was Normal. They did blood work and an EKG; it was all good.

Today, my heart rate was still up to 130 bpm during the day, but it dropped to 70 after a couple of hours when we got to camp. I think every day, both the high while riding and the resting, will continue to come down as I get in shape.

The campground where we had our reservation also had cheap rooms to rent, and because it is supposed to rain hard between midnight and 3:00 am tonight, we rented a room, and all four of us are sleeping in it, poor Kathy!

Tomorrow we have a very steep climb of 5,000 feet. That should be a lot of fun!

Today we rode from Jefferson to Marcola, a small town East of Springfield. The trip was 56 miles by my GPS with one big monster hill that got me panting pretty good. We are camping in a big room inside a church in Marcola. The pastor and I are good friends. It is nice because we don’t have to set up our tents; we just throw our pads and sleeping bags on the carpeted floor. We all ate Mountain House freeze-dried dinners tonight. I had Teryoke Chicken and Rice, it was delicious. A screw fell out that was holding my rear rack in place, so the last couple of miles were very noisy as it rubbed on my back tire. I think we got it fixed. We will see if it is really fixed tomorrow. I am very tired tonight and I am hoping that ten hours of sleep tonight will fill my gas tank. I am sorry this blog is so short, but my brain isn’t working very well tonight.

Every year for the last twelve years, I have done a bicycle trip of at least 2,000 miles. The very first one was to Fairbanks, Alaska, with my brother Cliff and his wife Kathy; that was the first and probably the most memorable. We saw 92 bears on that trip, some very close. I have made three trips coast to coast across the United States, each with a different route and with different people. The longest trip so far was when four of us went to the Grand Canyon, then to Yellowstone, and then home. That 4000-mile trip was gorgeous, with the scenery of the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and all the rock formations throughout Utah.

This year’s trip will be interesting as I will use it as a test to see if I will make any more trips. My motive in all of the past trips was as therapy for my Parkinson’s disease. Well, I don’t have Parkinson’s now, so I don’t know what is going to happen to my motivation. It definitely will need to switch to some other reason for doing it. The question is if another reason, such as enjoyment, recreation, challenge, health related to aging, or emotional refueling, will be strong enough to motivate me to do something this strenuous and time-consuming.

It is an excellent time to study and write, but I can do that in my recliner and pretend I am riding my bicycle through the jungles of Africa. It is a hard challenge and positively affects my character traits, such as determination and self-control, which I definitely need to grow in. Still, I can probably get the same results going to the gym at the “Y” in Albany with my wife every morning at 5:00 am.

It is probably a good thing that we don’t have a support vehicle going with us; otherwise, I would probably be riding in it every other day because I was tired, and it was so haaaarrrrd!

Travel with me on this trip by reading my blog every day and see what happens!

“Old Saints” is the phrase I use for the couple of hundred or so people who were part of JBC thirty to fifty years ago. Many have moved away, and many have already died and gone to heaven. I have cut back a lot on what I do as a Pastor in the last couple of years, but I am committed to doing funerals and memorial services for the “Old Saints” if their family wants me to. I think only about a dozen of us are left before we have all gone to be with Jesus. Today, I will preach a sermon at Pat Smith’s Memorial service. She was the piano player in the early years of JBC, before the days of drums, sound systems, and other electronic stuff that typifies modern worship services in the church today. She was also the pioneer of women’s ministries at JBC and many other things as well. There are the old saints, and then there are the faithful foundational old saints; Pat Smith was definitely one of the latter.

Jefferson Baptist Church is a healthy, loving, unified, growing church glorifying God and accomplishing His will. The key to a healthy church is the foundation. When the foundation is strong, solid, and true, the building will usually follow that beginning. Pat Smith has gone ahead of us to heaven, but the effect of her life will be felt for many years to come.

I pray that the younger saints at JBC will continue to build on that foundation with gold, silver, and precious stones, as the apostle Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 3, and will be faithful.

God is faithful and He blesses and uses faithful people. A faithful person is one who makes commitments and keeps them, no matter what. A faithful person invests their life for others, even when it is hard. A faithful person works hard and sacrifices, and is in it for the long haul. Pat Smith was a faithful saint who is experiencing her reward for a life well lived now.