Why I'm Riding to the End of the World

To be clear: this isn't a bucket list item. I'm not having a crisis. I didn't wake up one day and decide to do something wild. I just love exploring on my bike.

17 Years of Bike Touring

My first multiday bike tour was from Austin to Big Bend in 2009 — 500 miles on a fixed gear. I was young and probably a little stupid, and it was one of the best things I'd ever done. My first trip with Sana was an overnighter from Austin to Bastrop, where we rode through a rainstorm, camped in the rain, and ate biryani out of the same ziplock bag. I've toured for a month through Tajikistan, across Colorado, through Ireland, Italy, the Cascades, the Columbia River Gorge, and every latitude in California. Last summer I rode from San Francisco to the Tijuana border wall. I regularly bike and camp around the Bay Area. A single night out is enough. I'm not training for anything. I just love it.

So when people ask why I'm doing this, part of the answer is: this is what I enjoy.

But that's not the whole answer.

Just a Human on a Bike

There's a guy named Kamran Ali (Kamran on Bike). He had a PhD and a tech job, and he quit both to ride around the world: Ushuaia to Alaska, Pakistan to South Africa, and now he's riding down the western coast of Africa. I've followed his journey for years, and what gets me isn't the distance or the difficulty — it's something he described about being on the road. Out there, he was just a traveler. His degree didn't matter. His job history didn't matter. He was just a human, moving through the world, having interactions with other humans.

I think about that a lot.

I like my life. I genuinely like my work. I'm not trying to escape anything. But there's a different mode of being that only happens when you're moving through unfamiliar places with everything you need strapped to your bike. I've felt it on every trip I've ever taken, and I long for it when I'm home. This trip is just a longer version of that feeling — six months of it, uninterrupted.

The Time is Now

I've been sketching a route from San Francisco to Ushuaia for almost nine years. I've refined it, rerouted it, abandoned it, come back to it. The timing has never been right. There's never a perfect time to drop everything and ride 14,000 miles — there's always a reason to wait one more year.

The moment that changed things happened last Christmas, in Switzerland. Sana and I were talking, the way you do when you're somewhere beautiful and far from ordinary life, and she looked at me and essentially said: do it this year. You're healthy. The work situation works. The time is now.

I didn't need her permission. But the way she said it — calm, certain, like it was the most obvious thing in the world — made it feel easy. Normal, even. She has this way of taking my biggest ideas and making them feel like reasonable decisions. It's one of my favorite things about her.

So I've decided: Cartagena, Colombia. South through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. Ending in Ushuaia in December, where Sana will hopefully meet me at the sign.

Fluent in Something

I speak pretty good Spanish. Not fluent, but good enough to get by. I've traveled in Latin America before, and something about the culture feels familiar to me in a deep way. It's family-oriented, warm, and hospitable in ways that remind me of my own background. I've had strangers in multiple countries invite me into their homes and insist I stay for days. That kind of openness is rare, and I want more of it. I think six months on the road in South America might make me truly fluent — not just in the language, but in something harder to name.

The Questions I’m Carrying

The heaviest load on this ride isn’t my equipment. I've been thinking a lot lately about how I want to spend the rest of my life. Not in a dramatic way; I'm not burned out or lost. But I'm at an age and a stage where certain questions feel more urgent than they used to.

I've never wanted children. Teaching has always been my answer to that — my way of giving something to the next generation without being a parent. I've taught at UT and Stanford. I've developed science curriculum for kids at museums and places like iFly, trying to make the world feel exciting and accessible to everyone. Across all of it, one idea remains steadfast: that education empowers people. That's not an abstract idea to me. It's a philosophy I've built something on. But lately I find myself wondering whether I want to return to it more directly. Whether the work I'm doing now is the work I want to be doing. Whether there are ways to contribute that I haven't fully explored yet.

And then there's the question of children itself, which I'm still sitting with in ways I wasn't a year ago.

I don't expect the road to answer these questions. But I've noticed that long trips have a way of clarifying things that ordinary life keeps blurry. Six months of movement, solitude, and conversation with strangers seems like a reasonable place to let some of this settle.

Privilege

This reflection is incomplete without acknowledging the tremendous privilege that enables a trip of this magnitude.

A lot of people are physically capable of riding from Cartagena to Ushuaia. Very few people can actually do it. It requires time, money, a body that cooperates, a partner who supports it, and a work situation that bends. I have all of those things, and I don't take any of them for granted. When I stand in front of that sign in December, I’ll probably have a lot of feelings, one of which will be gratitude. For Sana. For my health. For the strange series of circumstances that made this possible.

Embracing Uncertainty

I hope I’ll make it to the end of the world. But it’s okay if I don’t. There might be extended stops, water crossings, bad weather, and who knows what else. I’ll probably be tired, dirty, lost, and I might not like it. It’s all part of the journey, and I have to learn to embrace it.

Certainty is boring.