The Beyond The Bike Full Interview
Robinson: Ed, you started our conversation by quoting Mark Twain. What does that quote mean to you, especially when you think about travel today?
Ditto: Mark Twain said that, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” When he said travel, if you think about it, he meant seeing the world from paddlewheel steamers and stagecoaches and steam trains, you know? Not from doing eighty on the interstate. So, yeah, slow travel, that is what he was doing.
Robinson: When did slow travel become a part of your life?
Ditto: I got hooked on slow travel when I was a kid. My dad took my brothers and me camping and backpacking and my family went on long car trips and stuff like that. And it took. I was fortunate enough to be able to escape corporate America in my mid-thirties, and I am fifty-five now and slow travel has been a way of life.
Robinson: You have described yourself as a travelling storyteller. What does that mean?
Ditto: I have been bike touring for almost twenty years, and I think it fills a social need that people are hard-wired for, and that is the travelling storyteller. Back in the day, when the old man in the robe with a long grey beard and the funny hat showed up in the village, and at night the villagers gathered around, and he told them news from other places and stories about the gods, and maybe sang a song they had not heard, and they gave him hospitality, a dry place to sleep, food, and so on. And after a day or two he left, and maybe next year he came around again. It was good for everybody.
Robinson: How do you feel that kind of storytelling has changed in modern life?
Ditto: So now it is kinda sad that the stories travel and the people sit still. Like you put your best story in a bottle and throw it into Instagram and hope people find it, but usually they do not. But when you are the bottle and you are out there floating around, it gets a lot easier for people to find you, and for you to find them.
