Yesterday’s panacea took a toll on my body today, weakening my legs and filling me with drowsiness. There’s something alarmingly lethargic about bicycling through a desert, especially into a headwind in this time of year. The ambient temperature isn’t too hot and the wind chill is just barely 10 degrees lower, blowing at cuddly blanket temperatures.

This blanketing warmth blowing all over your body is terrifyingly soothing– so much so that I was fighting the urge to doze off and daydream even while pedaling. This problem was worse today, and I suspect that the vomiting and lack of food from yesterday is the cause. A random encounter with friendly Lutherans who offered me cold water and macaroni salad improved my spirits though.

With less than a week left, I have begun to answer a question that has followed me since Day 1: why am I doing this? Even before leaving, this question would routinely come up in conversation. The easy answer: I’ve always wanted to go on a crazy road trip and can’t afford a car. A more hokey answer: I just graduated from college and wanted to have some alone time to think about what to do with myself.

In reality, the reasons are infinite and its never hard to explain myself. Believe it or not, I don’t see how bicycle touring is that different from my dorky game-centric other hobbies. After all, the grandiose athletic feat of bicycling across the country demands a lot of the same stuff that any Bethesda role-playing game would. It’s a long, slow hike through the great outdoors that requires some extreme patience and technical know-how. You need to persistently focus on a single goal for weeks at a time, and constantly micro-manage a seemingly never-ending inventory of doodads, all of which degrade with use and affect the overall performance of your body.

Honestly, I’m a glutton for a good adventure story and gaming is a medium that is chock full of them. It’s time I had one of my own.

It’s time to whisper “lydighet” and unlock something locked.

What inspired me to bicycle coast-to-coast? The post-apocalyptic American desert in Fallout. The kitschy and corrupt not-California of San Andreas. A certain moment with a certain song in Red Dead Redemption. Growing up to watch one of the world’s newest storytelling mediums constantly improve, mature and grow despite controversies and stereotyping is, in a word, inspiring.