Once again a great cross country trip has come to an end. I'm grateful having had the opportunity to do this and like to thank my wife for giving me the freedom to pursue my dreams. The next time we will be traveling together again, promise. I’d also like to thank Michael, Ludwig, and Matthias for joining me for a little while and I hope you enjoyed the parts of BC and AB we traveled through together. I would have wished for better weather to show you more of the great splendor this part of the country has to offer. Perhaps a good reason to come back. And last, I like to thank Mike, Kim, Janet, Bob, Arkansas, George, Christine, Erika, Brad, and all those other people whose names I can't remember anymore, but you know who you are, which I met along the way and who shared their stories about the land and their own life with me. Without you I would only have pictures, but meeting you created stories.
I have raked up many miles, 10,490 miles per my tachometer, and have traveled from the East to the West and back. This country is huge and offers enough space for everyone here to live to his/her likings, in peace and harmony with others, enough space to be tolerant towards people with other opinions, religions, being of other race, or whatever they are. But it also showed me that there is a great part of population in this country which has been forgotten, left behind in all those advancements our society has made, socially, economically, and otherwise. Those people are in no way stupid or lazy, they just live in the wrong part of the country, deprived of opportunities, a section of the country so vital to our survival and economy, yet we look at this stretch and their people with petty.
I have in part followed the routes and steps the pioneers of this country have taken more than 200 years ago, the Santa Fe Trail, the Pony Express Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Lewis & Clark Trail with the comfort of a motorcycle. Hard to imagine what the people in that time had to endure making those travels on horseback, plan wagons, or on foot. Their tracks are full of history and stories, and I was happy to have become part of it even if it was only for a little while. The parks and the regions I visited were just breathtaking, an endless landscape in all its beauty the forces of nature can create. It is those visits which remind me, us, that we have to preserve those beautiful landscapes for our children, and their children, and the generation which follow for them to enjoy and awe at those wonders.
The wolve will continue to travel and I hope that you will join me then again.
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” - Heraclitus of Ephesus fl.c. 500 BCE, Ancient Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher
