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The Lost Journey
The part of travel that we don’t experience so much anymore
Last month my parents came to visit me, staying in an AirBnB in Annapolis, close to the beaches so that their new dog could swim in the Atlantic Ocean. Baltimore is only about 20 miles from Annapolis: a car ride would have taken less than an hour, they could have picked me up, no sweat.
Out of a desire to hold up my supposed low-carbon values, I told them that I would bike and meet them there. From a purely emissions-based point of view, this probably doesn’t make any sense: the fossil fuels involved in the production of the calories I needed to burn to transport myself were probably much more than the extra gallons of gas it would have taken to modify their route to pick me up in Baltimore. (Actually this probably isn’t true: a gallon of gas is 31,000 calories. There’s about a 10:1 fossil fuel calories:food calories ratio in modern agriculture. I burned probably around 800–900 calories biking 20 miles. This puts me at 8000–9000 calories, which is still more efficient than a gallon of gasoline). However, from a deontological perspective, if I want bike travel to be a thing, I have to walk my talk.
The ride was pleasant enough, given the hot and humid Maryland summer, due to most of it being on the bike-only Baltimore-Annapolis trail. There were some tricky sections when I was actually in Annapolis…
