The League

Alright, sports fans and cycling enthusiasts, guess where I’m not? That’s right! Israel! I’m still in Cyprus. This is a magical place in its own right, and by no means a poor choice for spending the remainder of one’s days in this mad world. I’ll do what I can to tell you what’s been going on here on this Island when I get a chance, but I’m behind on writing. I’ll say that things have been nothing less than incredible here.

The technodemons are still hard at work trying to thwart me at every turn. A few days ago, in Girne, they messed with me so hard there was an earthquake. That will be a heck of a story if I get a chance to tell you about it. Elsewhere in the news, my Aliyah advisor at Nephesh B’Nephesh told me in an e-mail that the family emergency that had taken him away from work has now resulted in his permanently leaving his position.

I don’t want to seem self-absorbed. I really liked that guy, and really do hope that what’s been going on with him turns out okay. On my end, however, it’s like the forces of darkness have taken out of the fight one of the few people who were tracking my situation with some interest, and who were developing the familiarity with my case that would be required to give me sound advice and make things happen.

Remember, I’d also grown close to my case manager at the Jewish Agency, Deborah, only to find out that she is gone, never to return. Another member of the Jerusalem team that had some idea what was up with me, Andre, is nowhere to be found at this point either. A couple of calls to the Jewish Agency lately have landed me in contact with a girl named Lauren. I got an e-mail from a Jewish Agency employee named Elisheva as well.

I have no idea if any of these people have the first idea who I am or what is going on with my case. The only thing I know is that I call them, they tell me that they have sent in update requests to the Israeli Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of the Interior has not responded with anything at all. I was told that Aliyah packets to Israel normally take a couple of months to process. Converts to Judaism can take three, however, I suppose because validity of sincerity of religious conversion is an issue. My Aliyah packet has been at the Ministry of the Interior for over four months now, and nobody is saying anything. I talked with the Rabbi who converted me, Rabbi Marc Rubenstein, and he told me that he is not popular in Israel, and that the Israelis can delay things.

Overall, I’m reminded of a significant event from a few years back in which a Hollywood director made some superhero movies that portrayed Superman in a messianic context, and the Hollywood establishment turned against the director and several members of the cast. They succumbed to personal weaknesses and failings, fighting, all the rest, as if the universe itself were conspiring to prevent a story that compared superheroes to the prophets of old from gaining the recognition that it deserved. In my own case, everything about this trip has been nothing short of an afternoon walk through the sunlit glades of paradise itself, but everything pertaining to my efforts to enter Israel has manifested itself as a blossom of the fire of hell into the very fabric of my being.

I’m going to set these current concerns aside for the moment, though, and talk about what happened on the bike trip after Paris. The main events of this post are supposed to center around Switzerland, but I want to start this one with my last few days riding in France. Remember, I had just parted ways with Daniele Savarini after a crazy experience on the streets of Paris near the Gare du Norte and St. Christopher’s Hostel there that I don’t know what to make of. Lucid dream? Visionary experience? I have no idea. I only know the night blew me away, and it affected the remainder of my time in the country.

The last post being about France, I already put up some pics and videos of the remainder of the trip through that country, but there was a thing or two that I left out. Namely that between the town of Taintrux where I spent a Sabbath to get out of the rain, and Colmar, a famous Alsatian tourist town just north of Switzerland, there is a well-known cycling climb called the Col du Bonhomme. There were a lot of cyclists going through that region to ride that famous road.

For my part, the climb was quite a bit for me with the heavy pack I was wearing and my general approach to training for riding long distances on flats. I’ve never been much of a climber. As I was sweating and grunting my brains out trying to climb this road I caught sight of a chick heading up the hill at a monstrous pace and decided to motivate myself by chasing a girl up a mountainside. It’s easy to do.

Toward the top of the hill I caught up with her while she was taking a rest break, and I would learn later, waiting for her boyfriend. Oops. I rode with the two of them a little further, still not getting any pictures of her, though I was able to shoot a quick shot of her boyfriend as he struggled, like me, to climb with the same fervor as the lady up front.

So the guy she was dating was named Sie, an African athlete and clone of a young and virile Peter Mensah who ran in several challenging foot races, and I suppose was getting into bikes because his girlfriend was all about them. The pair gave me a bunch of cool information about rides in the area, and we all followed each other on the Strava app. After leaving them, I sent a few messages here and there about what I was doing after parting ways with them and tagged them in this or that post. Since I didn’t live there, and I didn’t know when I would return, I assumed I would just clue them in to what I was doing as I continued my journey for a while, and would have expected my contact with them to die down as we went our separate ways, but all of the sudden the chick just blocked me on Strava.

There could be a few reasons for this. Yes, perhaps her boyfriend Sie didn’t like her talking to some other guy on Strava or something. Also, I think a few of my posts mentioned Shabbat and this or that reference to Judaism, and it could be that she is an antisemite. I’d noticed that Israel and Jews have not been popular as I travelled through Europe, I assume because of the twelve-day war and all of the bombardment of Palestinians before and after that war.

Or, it could be that she is a misandrist. I don’t really recall complaining about any matter of gender issues at that time, as I have done what I can to put all of my pains relating to that whole issue behind me, but you never know, maybe she looked at something on my blog or on Strava from way back that convinced her that I wasn’t feminist enough to talk to or something.

However, I suspect there could be a more subtle reason she did this, perhaps one that she is herself not aware of. That is, I have been cataloguing unusual coincidences and bizarre occurrences that I have observed on the trip, trying to relate phenomena that I have observed through the lense of Kabbalah and of Carl Jung’s Analytic Psychology. These phenomena lead to notions that the universe is designed by God in such a way that the law of probability is quite often violated to the effect that our lives contain messages from God that we can read from the events around us. One of the patterns that Jung and his predecessors took note of was the phenomenon of sequences. That is, how a person can live forty years on this earth and not know what argyle socks are, for example, and then upon finding out what they are, he encounters argyle socks everywhere he looks from thenceforth.

I’ve written in a previous post that I’d experienced a string of significant Carolines and Julias in my life that at one point dovetailed with a pattern of seeing young Asians and blondes everywhere to the effect that I was finally running into pairs of Asians and blondes named Caroline and Julia. Now, you’ll remember that after the psychedelic night on the streets of Paris I met a couple back at the hostel, the girl of the pair giving me a little bird with “good luck” written on it that reminded me of a Liam Neeson movie that I hold close to my heart (Taken). The girl from Paris said her name was Louise. Well, this chick who I was struggling to climb with on the Col du Bonhomme, Sie’s girlfriend, called herself LouLou, a nickname based on her name: Louise.

I had just parted ways with Daniele and was riding by myself again, hungry again for companionship, and I run into this cycling chick whose name was the same as the girl who had given me the good luck bird. When she blocked me, with no explanation, of course, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that I was being robbed of the opportunity to prove to my readers that it looked to me like I was running into a “chain of Louises,” so to speak. Since she blocked me, I can only show you her publicly available profile on Strava. And since she blocked me, I guess I don’t have to worry about asking her if I can put her profile here.

If someone blocks me, I can’t ask them if they mind getting doxxed. So above is her profile. It was real. I really ran into these two Louises a few days apart. Yes, Louise is a common name in France, so it’s not like I am proving a grand mystery of the universe or anything. And for the record, after this little pattern, and frustration that came with it, things did not continue. I did not run into another Louise for the rest of the trip. But overall, I felt like some kind of force was frustrating me. It’s as if the forces of evil were trying to prevent me from showing you that I ran into two Louises in a row, so they just motivated her to block me for one reason or another.

If she hasn’t blocked you, you can find her on Strava and ask her why she blocked me. From my end, I just felt like the demon Screwtape put out the missive to his infernal agents the world over: “The guy is trying to show God’s hand in the coincidences that turn up in his life – make sure that second Louise blocks him, and make sure he doesn’t run into any more Louises on the trip.”

And so there I was, heading through Alsace toward Switzerland by myself, mentally unstable and yearning for companionship. I spent a lot of time in my head on those rides. A central point of thought that was going through my head was that God seems to want us to talk to him with passion. Looking back, I think I was trying to come to terms with how angry I could be with my creator for letting me get into that jacked up situation in Paris.

Just thinking things and doing things does constitute a form of prayer to God, but of course he likes it when we bow our heads and actually talk to him verbally. This gives the powers above a clearer picture of our actual desires, since we are often very conflicted and do and say things that run in direct contradiction to those things that we actually claim our desires to be. But beyond this, when we go to God screaming, crying, kicking in fits of passion, the angels watching us have yet an even clearer picture of who we really are and what we want. For my part, I’d wound up in the strange situation that it seemed to me that my prayers to God had a greater chance of being answered if I bellowed them at him in rage.

A long time ago I actually wrote a poem, God only Listens to Me when I am Mad at Him. On this trip, on this particular leg of the journey through France, my complaint to God was that he must be more than just an emotional response. Sorcerers and witches the world over would tell me, “Jonathan…there is no God…these things that happen, the universe’s connection to your identity, they are just a result of your passions.” If you read about the Law of Attraction described in the book “The Secret” and its sequels, you’ll find the doctrine that the universe simply reacts to your passions. “If you scream something loud enough, it will happen…”

I wanted to disprove that. I want to show that I am actually interacting with an intelligent, living God, in a relationship, and that if my concerns are heard when I whine, it’s because a husband is more likely to listen to his wife when she is screaming at the top of her lungs and throwing kitchen knives at him than he otherwise would if she were just politely asking him to take out the trash.

Now the Torah describes the relationship between God and humanity in terms of the relationship between a husband and his wife. However, I did not want to be a bitchy wife. After all, I am a knight of the holy army of angels and tzadiqim and saints. Knights render proper salute to their commanders and offer proper customs and courtesies befitting of soldiers speaking to their commanders, lords, and kings. I shouldn’t have to scream and cry to have my prayers answered, much less throw my bike off the nearest cliff in rage because some ridiculous calamity was befalling me.

With all that going on in my head, and in that lake of solitude that I had ridden my trusty road bike into, I turned my attention to a friend of mine in the USA. One of the oldest friends I had. My ex-wife’s first husband, Rodney Schulz.

Yep. I married my buddy’s wife. Long story. The three of us met when he and I were junior soldiers (privates) in the US Army in Germany. After that first tour of mine, I got out of the Army in Europe and studied Jewish Studies and Classical Semitic Philology at the Hochschule fur Judische Studien in Heidelberg, a kind of daughter university to the University of Heidelberg. Rodney stayed in the Army and took his wife and daughter Veronica to Ft. Carson Colorado. I did my best to keep in touch with the two of them, though I would find that Rodney was never around, and I would talk to his wife to learn that they were having grotesque marital problems.

At one point, he took off to another state, which he would tell me later was his attempt to set up his family in civilian life after he got out of the Army. He was never around, though, and I would talk to his wife, and she told me that he had abandoned her. My chivalrous urges took over, and I was set on rescuing his wife and his super cute three-year-old daughter from the abandonment that had been portrayed to me by her.

Ultimately, I supported her divorcing him through an abandonment clause that existed in Colorado family law, and then I married her. Months later Rodney got back in touch hoping to rebuild his family only to find that the ship had sailed in a very concrete way. He hated me for years after that because I stole his wife, according to his side of the story. However, I eventually supported him in establishing a relationship with my stepdaughter, his daughter, and then when I ultimately went through my own divorce to his previous wife, the two of us would become friends.

We would often call each other up when we were looking for spiritual advice. A profound irony in all this is that while they were having atrocious marital strife, and I was apparently stealing a married woman from her husband, the three of us were supposedly committed Christians. Rodney had made a commitment back in the 90s to be a Christian pastor, but life hit him hard, and he finished his service in the Army to work for a while as a water deliveryman and then finally to take up a career as an electrician in order to support his new family that he had built with a new wife who he would describe to me for years after as being pretty much exactly the same type of woman that his first wife (or I should say “our wife”) was.

I listened to the guy gripe about all of his family problems for years on end, up until the point at which I told him that I really didn’t want to hear anything more about his family issues because I couldn’t talk to his wife or his kids, and I could only hear his rants that he would proffer from his truck while driving out to this or that site to do some kind of electrical work.

What I did do, however, was try to motivate him in any way I could to pursue what he told me was a kind of divine calling from God to become a Christian pastor. When I called him up on those days riding through eastern France, that’s what we talked about. I’ll leave the whole description of our interaction on that note, though, without any great theme or message, as this whole drama would turn into a significant part of my journey later on when riding through Italy.

So I’ll return a bit to riding a bike through Europe. During this time I was seeing swans everywhere.

Frankly, I had been seeing swans all over the place pretty much everywhere there was water all throughout my travels through Europe. I think my most spectacular swan scene was something I saw in Belgium, but I didn’t put it in my post about that country because I was too busy being driven insane by Israeli bureaucracy and trying to get my Aliyah packet together.

Above are some swans from Bruges, my first foray into the adventures of Alice in Wonderland.

Continental Europe really is covered in swans. I kid you not. Perhaps the most spectacular swan scene I got to see was also in Belgium, where there was this forested kind of park that had a pathway cut into the middle of a lake not entirely unlike the parted Red Sea of Exodus fame. The road went downward at one point to leave a lake on either side, and swans would come up to mess around with tourists who were walking between the sides of the lake.

Always eager to extract meaning from my encounters, I took this as a message from on high that I was somehow being made from an ugly duckling into a swan on this trip, and all of these encounters with swans were intended to give me a good look at my new brethren.

All of this, though, with Sie and LouLou, and with Rodney, and with all the swans of the world flocking around me, is really only a kind of a preamble to the story of this post, which is really supposed to start in Switzerland. So. Oops. Yeah. This post is going to be a long one. Sorry. I’ll try to wrap up with France.

The last place I would visit in France was Colmar.

The town was a magnificent blend of German Fach Werk architecture and French cobblestones, canals, and spectacular greenery, but I only stayed there one night because I was anxious to get to Switzerland. There were tourists everywhere, anyway. I can’t really hate on tourists since I am one, but the place was really overcrowded with them. So on to Switzerland I went.

Things got interesting when I hit Basel.

The city itself was gorgeous, no doubt, but all of the solitary overthinking I had been doing about how to talk to God, and all of the internet conversations I was getting into with my old Army buddy, had been driving me nuts. I really was longing for a riding partner like Daniele. It seemed like social interaction, with real actual flesh and blood people, anchored me to reality, to adulthood, and to sanity. After the night in Paris, I definitely needed that. And that’s what I got.

First, I ran into a Turkish guy named Omer at the hostel. He was a dentist coming to Switzerland looking for a career in Europe. I don’t have any pictures of him here, but he also comes into my story later. He was really fascinated by my bike and wanted to keep in touch. This was a kind of unusual thing for me, as I am not accustomed to random people coming up to me and flattering me and wanting to connect, exchange social media, etc. The most interesting thing about this guy, though, is that I would bump into him later in Turkish Cyprus working at an Israeli dental clinic. Now most people, I think, after running into this guy in Basel and then again later in Cyprus, might be tempted to think there was a connection. Perhaps he was spying for someone. Spying on me. I am, after all, a retired Army Intelligence officer.

However, I am also a Jungian Kabbalist, and I study coincidences and patterns of life that come up without having any actual connections. On this blog I have run into scores of absolute violations of the law of probability. The little series of Louises was just one. Meeting a retired Green Beret on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic who knew my uncle Skip in Vietnam was another. I could go on and on and on. So, could it really be that “just by chance” I run into this Turkish dentist in Basel, in Switzerland, who would wind up working in Cyprus, where I am now, for a bunch of Israelis? Could that just be a coincidence? Since so many weird coincidences have happened to me, I suppose I’ve lost a bit of my ability to put two and two together to find out when I am being spied on, scammed, etc.

The next thing to come upon me in Basel was that, just as I had been yearning for some companionship to keep me grounded, a new riding buddy turned up. Paul Donbi.

That’s his ride. Canyon with two panier bags. He actually lived in Colmar, where I had just come from. He had ridden down to Basel the day prior from Colmar, just as I had. I didn’t see him on the road, but it turns out we had ridden more or less the same route. And further, he was doing a ride through Switzerland to Como, which is a town in Italy on the border of Switzerland that is right next to Mendrisio where Daniele was going, and where I was also going to meet up with him!

So, after riding through Europe in 2022 without being able to find a single riding buddy on all 2,700 miles of that trip, God had just given me my second riding buddy, just as I had been desperate for some companionship to keep me sane after getting my brain blown out of my head in Paris. I was definitely not in the same world that I was in on the first bike trip and was desperate not to get sucked down Alice’s rabbit hole into John Lennon’s magical mystery tour of a land with tangerine trees and marmalade skies, and a girl with kaleidoscope eyes, all my myself with no friend to slap me back to sanity when required.

Paul and I headed out of Basel and rode through Switzerland toward Italy.

The countryside was absolutely spectacular.

It seemed to me that as I was able to anchor myself with other people, relax, and enjoy myself, a world of supernal beauty sprung up all around me like sunflowers blanketing a spring meadow. Now we didn’t see any sunflowers, and it wasn’t spring, but you get my point. Daniele had complained that the weather in the German part of Switzerland was usually pretty terrible this time of year, and we did see some clouds and a few sprinkles, but overall, the country was nothing short of splendorous.

At one point, deep in the woods, we found a crew setting up for a rave party. This reminded me of the old raves back in the 90s that were hidden in out of the way places such as remote farms. Back when I was a soldier in Germany in the 90s, I dated a French girl I met in Lyons when I was taking a vacation road trip to Barcelona. She was a materials engineer who lived in a little town called Cluse just outside of Geneva but was visiting her family in Lyons when I met her on my road trip.

I really should have married her. Cecille Deviller. We had perhaps the best relationship I have ever had with a girlfriend, but I screwed it up because I got cold feet and broke things off thinking they were moving too fast. Since I knew her before social media was a thing, I haven’t been able to find her. If anyone who knows her reads this, let her know. I want to ask her to marry me.

Anyway, she used to take me to Geneva for fun and would always tell me that the Swiss were amazing musicians, known for their techno music and rave parties. You can imagine my excitement when I was riding through the countryside with Paul and saw people setting up for an old school rural rave party in the middle of the mountainous woodlands of the Swiss.

Paul and I had all sorts of fun riding our bikes through old castles and whatnot as well.

We followed his routes the whole time. He had planned out every stop of his trip to Como, and I was all too happy to follow along, as he was going exactly to where I was heading, and it was nice to have everything planned out and simple for me. I grabbed a shot of us as we thought we were saying goodbye and parting ways in Lucerne.

The city itself was nothing short of amazing.

The next morning I awoke to head down to Fluelen by a ferry that I was taking through Lake Lucerne, and who did I bump into on the boat? Paul! I wasn’t quite sure in my heart of hearts if Paul would have rather continued on his own, but fate sealed the question of whether we would be continuing together. Just as I put my bike in the storage zone on the boat, I turned around, and there was Paul. He had just by chance gotten on the same boat at the same time to go to the same place. We took the ferry down to the southern tip of Lake Lucerne to continue on together. I didn’t get any shots of Paul here, as I got a seat up at the top of the ferry to have a comfy place to sit down, while Paul took the economy option and stood with his bike down below.

Of course, the swans were intent on making their presence known.

Finally, we hit Fluelen, but Bailey up top didn’t even notice and just stayed on the boat talking to some Swiss couples on the lounge deck. Paul got off when he should have, didn’t see me, and, I don’t know, maybe thought I ditched him or drowned in some kind of man-overboard adventure or something, and went on his way.

I ended up getting off at the next stop as the boat started to make its return trip to Lucerne and made my way from there.

Riding into the Swiss Alps reminded me of following Gore Creek through the Colorado Rockies from Vale into Denver.

The bicycle climbing through the Alps was absolutely the most treacherous I’ve ever undertaken.

The climbs on the way into Gotthard pass were like trying to ride a bicycle up a twenty-story fire escape at places.

Finally, I reached a town at the top of the mountains called Hospental, which is the entrance point to a treacherous stretch of the Alps that hosted one of many famous passes down to Italy.

Guess who I ran into at Hospental? Who was staying at the same hostel as I was? Just by chance, of course, Paul! I’m not kidding. So, more riding through the mountains together.

I do admit that Hospental is a small place. I was following the routes that Paul gave me to follow. When you take this path through this part of Switzerland, you’re going to be canalized into a very select, small number of mountain passes that you will be able to go through. So my running into Paul here wasn’t exactly a violation of the Law of Probability like I maintain tends to happen to me as I catalog this Jungian, Kabbalistic attempt to verify synchronicity and the teleological argument for the existence of God that I have been doing on this trip. Nevertheless, between losing and finding each other on the way to Lucerne, after Lucerne, with the boat, and now here, we see a pattern of an unusual degree of congruity between my journey and Paul’s.

It was an amazing place.

I was pretty happy, so even the smiley faces of the Watchmen made an appearance.

Somewhere around Hospental, I noticed that a severe problem had been developing that I had been unaware of. Earlier in the year, as I was resting in Barcelona getting ready to head back to Texas for my family reunion, I dropped my bike off for service with the Trek store in that city. When I picked up the bike to get on the ship, the store showed me that I had suffered some frame damage. I wasn’t too concerned about it at the time, as it looked like something had bumped the bike and chipped a bit of the gloss finish off. However, in Switzerland I saw that the chipped finish had expanded into a many-fingered crack in the chainstay. That is, I had a crack in my frame, and the crack was getting larger and larger.

The chainstay of a bicycle is the part of the frame that attached the rear wheel to the crank.

In other words, if the chainstay, the lower bar depicted in the picture above, were to actually snap in half, the rear wheel would completely detach from the bike. In other words, I had been riding my bicycle all through Texas, France, and Switzerland with a Sword of Damocles hanging over my head. I had a crack in my frame that had been growing larger and larger, and at any moment the bike could shatter, and if such a thing were to happen at speed, I’d wind up as road kill splattered all over the mountainsides and cobblestones of the Swiss Alps.

I’d been keeping in intermittent touch with Hawkman through my travels, and at one point I let slip that I had a pretty serious bicycle problem that could get me killed rather easily, and that I was having a dilemma finding out how to fix the problem. This kind of thing isn’t going to sit well with a guy like Hawkman. He can’t leave people hanging, and he can’t send people on a mission jacked up. The guy will drop to a knee and tie your shoe in the middle of a conversation if he thinks it’s going to keep you alive and well. As he heard me complaining, he actually volunteered to drop by a friend’s bicycle shop and see how he could get me squared away. I told him that this was going to be a tough nut to crack, though I had some options to solve the problem, but that I was going to have to continue as I was for one short little stretch before I could solve it, and to pray for me.

I’m not going to go into any further details about this exchange to keep his personal information limited. I’ll only say that the guy is a very, very, very busy guy who does all kinds of wild and crazy things that make this blog look boring. To hear him tell me he was going to go out of his way to get my bike fixed from the other side of the world, this meant a lot to me. So I’ll end this little aside by saying this guy is a very Special kind of Agent.

Now, what goes up must come down. So while the climbs were the hardest I’ve ever done, the descents were some of the most intense as well. Because of the chainstay, I had problems putting on as much speed as I had hoped to for these most historic descents that I would probably take in my life.

The Almighty would send some natural hazards that forced me to keep calm and slow at points.

Conversely, however, He sent us through these patches of cobblestones that we would encounter on these intense descents that we would run into at speed which made me feel like the forces of hell were striking my busted chainstay with a jackhammer, threatening to crack the bike in half at any time.

Finally we made it through to the bottom of the pass for some relaxation.

Ultimately, though, for our last day of riding together, we had a day similar to the ride in France with Daniele that took us through grasses and meadows. It was the ride into Bellinzona, where we would part ways, as I didn’t want to ride on the Sabbath and decided to rendezvous with Daniele and meet Paul later in Como for a goodbye hug. Paul was pretty frustrated at points, but we got to take our bikes on the dirt of Switzerland and fight our way through various closed roads and all. Paul’s gravel bike excelled here, as did the power of his youth.

Trek Bicycles really needs to see the places I took my Domane SL5 road bike with a busted chainstay.

While my rides with Paul were themselves filled with these various coincidences that should themselves make a strong case that the universe must be designed by a genius God, I did run into a fun one that Shabbat in Bellinzona. One that Hawkman might find interesting. Surfing the internet at that time, I saw from the Lady’s Instagram feed that she was at a resort in Cyprus with her family, right around the time there was a furor around her attending the Venice Film Festival, which she ultimately decided not to attend in order to avoid controversy. I referenced her Instagram story on my own Instagram feed, actually.

Then, walking around Bellinzona on Shabbat looking for a place to eat, POOF! I run into a Cypriot restaurant.

And while there, I was able to enjoy a Watchmen-style smiling cookie.

Call me insane if you want. To me, these patterns are too consistent, obvious, and ubiquitous to call nothing. Either the Almighty is trying to tell me something, or my brain writes the universe…but no…I’m not going to buy the “you’re just stringing details together making something out of nothing” argument for a second.

Bellinzona was a good way to spend a weekend, at any rate.

There was a festival for the weekend that I got to enjoy.

Then, without Paul by my side, I rode down to the town of Lugano to rendezvous with Daniele to follow him home at the end of his two-year world tour.

Yes, I was by myself, but I was excited to see Daniele, and I knew I’d be seeing Paul again, so I was rather energized. Luckily things were still pretty much downhill, so I would be able to put on some speed getting to Lugano to link up with Daniele.

Then when I got to Lugano, I took some time to bask in the beauty of Lake Lugano and wait for Daniele to show up.

I don’t know how to take the rest of the ride, though. I am on a grand voyage to Israel to find a new home. I have lost my daughter in the process. To this day I cry at least twice a week about not being able to talk to her or hear her voice. I discovered how distant I had been to much of my extended family. I’m on my way to Israel, and I don’t know how things are going to go. I don’t think I’ve ever been more alone in the world. How important Paul and Daniele were to me should convey this to you. Well, when I went to the square where Daniele told me to go to wait for him, I found dozens of people there on bikes.

I wondered if they were waiting for Daniele, as he had told me some family members would be meeting him there to head to Mendrisio with him. It turns out, that’s exactly who they were, and the man himself showed up to meet his family.

He was wearing the same ripped shirt he had been wearing for the last 25,000 miles. They’d organized an epic family ride to escort him back home.

There were no shortages of beautiful views.

At the midpoint everyone piled into a grotto cafe that the family had rented out for the homecoming party.

Daniele gave a speech. I didn’t understand a word.

I got to see all the countries he had ridden through.

They made like they were going to give him a haircut. Ignorant of Italian, I made no pretense of understanding what they were trying to convey with everything.

Finally the party drew to an end, and a smaller group rode with Daniele straight to his house. I wanted to be in the group and followed along as far as I could, almost to his neighborhood.

Finally, though, it was my time to make a right turn when Daniele was going to make a left to go to his place. That’s where I saw the guy for the last time. I made that fistpump goodbye that we promised each other we would do.

Daniele had made it home, but I still had a little further to go. I was sad, but my heart still bore a little lightness that I was on my way to go see Paul. I rode by myself from Switzerland to Italy.

Como was a gorgeous city. I may put some more pictures and videos of it in my next post, but since this is the most picture and video heavy post I think I have yet written, I’ll just reference the hostel here.

I’ll say I did indeed find Paul. I got no pictures of the guy on that last day, though. He had spent the weekend going out for fun with some people his age, and I found him the next day sitting next to the most beautiful Chinese girl on the planet. She was so strikingly beautiful that when I saw Paul, I couldn’t think straight. I seriously lost my ability to communicate rationally due to the presence of that incredible Asian angel.

So, I awkwardly told him that I’d had a good time, I’d keep in touch, the standard American thing, and we parted ways. I have no pictures or videos of that goodbye. It was, though, equally powerful for me. I’d said goodbye to both Paul and Daniele on the same day. My heart was broken. Daniele had gone home. Paul was on his way back home. I was still heading to Israel. My mood reflected in the Strava post I made about my ride to Como in Italy.

I don’t know what to say about the experience of riding with these two. Constantly running into Paul as our various circumstances took us apart and put us together again reminded me of my relationship with the Apostle Paul, whose thinking I haven’t been able to avoid after converting to Judaism. That’s why I made the picture of Paul making the champion sign under the Gotthard Pass sign the image for this post. A guy with the name of an apostle there looking like a giant human cross underneath a sign that basically says “God…hard” pretty much sums up a lot for me. And for a guy who has lost pretty much everything and left behind what little hasn’t been taken away from him, parting with these friends was a hard, hard thing to do. But I’d committed to this journey to Israel to begin a new life. I’ve nearly died for it, as many previous posts have displayed. So the end of Switzerland was the end of my riding with friends.

Things took on a very different character in Italy. But that’s another story.