Season's Greetings!

My goodness; have I really been home a year already? Travel is wonderful… so is being back home. Its great to spend time with old friends, sleep in the same bed every night, change the temperature by simply adjusting the thermostat, and get ice from my freezer any time I want it. I appreciate local restaurants more now because I can read the menu, don't have to calculate exchange rates, and the bathrooms are relatively clean.

Those that read my Odyssey 2000 (O2K) trip newsletters know that the adventure was a definite mixture of good and bad times. In the end, I pedaled almost 10,000 miles, visited 44 countries on 6 continents, saw incredible places, and met wonderful people.

The Good Stuff: Wow! Where do I begin? I feel like I got to see and do more than one in a billion people ever get the chance to. I feel incredibly blessed. Special memories include seeing a Stealth Jet fly overhead during the Rose Parade, the Panama Canal (a place I'd read about in kindergarten!), the beautiful Patagonia region in Argentina, flying on a 747 owned and piloted by an Arab prince, going on safari in South Africa, being attacked by a lion in Swaziland (OK, he was only a cub), walking around the Acropolis in Greece (just imagine who else stood on those grounds!), turning 40 while biking the Amalfi coast in Italy, the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, the Colosseum in Rome, the overly decorative Gaudi designs in Barcelona, the "rock" of Gibraltar, Times Square in New York City, standing next to the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo in Paris, the Palace at Versailles, a car bombing in Belfast, Loch Ness in Scotland (sorry, no monster pictures), the magnificent fjords and glaciers in Norway, reminders of WW-II in Germany, the simple beauty of the Czech Republic, the pristine Jungfrau (the highest peak in Europe), the yodel choir and alpenhorn players in Switzerland, the Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, finding a 3" spider in my luggage in Australia, snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef, shopping in Hong Kong, visiting shrines and eating Sushi in Japan, rice fields and karst rock formations in China, just being in Hanoi and HCMC-Saigon, exchange rates of 14,000:1 in Vietnam, my mystery hives outbreak and drag queens in Thailand, Malaysian women in traditional Muslim dress laughing out load at me riding by in lycra, and just being blonde when no one is!

The Bad Stuff: Besides being wholly unprofessional and just plain rude, the O2K trip organizers also failed to deliver much of what we paid for. To top it all off, they claimed to have run out of money and demanded we pay another $3000 or go home early. Not surprisingly, most of us chose the second option and I came home just after Thanksgiving last year. Since then, approximately 40 riders have filed a joint lawsuit against TK&A. It’s a long, slow process but we feel very encouraged by what we've accomplished so far.

I finished reorganizing my web page at www.HarpoVal.com and have been working hard at posting my O2K photos there. I'm currently adding pictures from March 2000 so I'm only 20 months behind now! If you want to receive post-O2K news, read my old newsletters, or be notified when I publish new photos, just subscribe to my O2K Newsletter from my web page.

In April I started a new job at Express Scripts, a pharmaceutical benefits management company. I'm an Information Systems Engineer, which is just a fancy way of saying "Sr. Nerd". They're located in Bloomington, which is only ten minutes from my house, and I'm loving that! I like the challenge of working again but am especially enjoying getting paychecks now after 16 months without any income!

In past years, I've usually done a weeklong summer bike trip. Somehow I just couldn't get too excited about more time sleeping in a tent and riding in the rain, so this year I decided to take several long weekend trips instead. In February, I went on the TCBC Mississippi Headwaters Hostel Winter Trip to ski in Itasca State Park. In June, I rode the Tour of Lakes up near Mom's cabin, the Tour of the Mississippi River Valley (TOMRV) in Iowa, and the TCBC Summer Velo Trempealeau ride in Whitehall, WI. The 4th of July was the annual TCBC Watermelon Ride. I again raced in the Chequamegon Fat Tire Festival near Cable, WI in September. October included the TCBC 21st Annual Halloween Ride. This year I cycled just over 1000 official TCBC club miles and maybe another 1000 non-club miles. It was far less than my O2K totals, but plenty by normal (if bikers are considered normal!) standards.

Before I left for O2K, my mom moved into my home and took care of everything. What a blessing that was! She stayed on after I returned home and I've certainly appreciated her home cooking and help with cleaning and laundry. Sometimes it's good to be a kid again! She's retiring next month and will first head north to her lake home northeast of Brainerd. Her plan is to buy a motor home and travel… where do you think I learned it, huh?

I guess that just about sums up my last two years. I hope you all have an enjoyable holiday season and an exciting New Year!

Valerie