There’s a certain simplicity in cycle touring, a simplicity founded in routine. To get from A to B, perhaps via C, D, and E, one follows a pattern: arise, prepare for the day, ride, settle down at the end of the day. Repeat day after day after day after day until one finally arrives at B.

Simple routine. Profound meaning.

Meaning is construed by each of us according to our experiences, hopes, expectations. Different people attribute to the same act different meanings. Sometimes those meanings are similar, at other times they are quite different. But the meanings are never identical just as no two people are identical.

So cycle touring means different things to different people. It may mean escape (from other routines, from relationships, from the confines of urban life), adventure, self exploration and discovery, or simply the pleasure of being outside riding a bicycle, possibly in a new location or culture. It may be, at the one instant, all of these or none of them. Such is the vagary of meaning.

My reflection on cycle touring and its meaning is as a result of preparing a talk on my tour down the Rhine River, from Andermatt to Amsterdam. My mood is pensive, my reflections informed by a longing for escape to another fulfilling tour and the timelessness of retirement. Three episodes of mountain biking a week do not fill the gaps in my life, though they represent a routine. Checking email several times a day is not so much a routine as an expression of hope for interest, adventure, excitement, shortcomings in my life. Three meals a day become a bore, especially their preparation.

So my thoughts turn to a mobile life complemented by musings on the viability of living in a small space. With many fewer possessions. Too many of those I now have bind me to the past, both its highs and lows. Knowing this I remain unable—or is it unwilling?—to reduce the stockpile of things attesting to past life.

Cycle touring requires small spaces—panniers, bar bags, back packs—and few possessions. There is no room in these small spaces for past life, other than those recorded in digital images and words. Space is required for those objects that maintain the routine of the tour: clothes, food, reading material (digital?), bicycle spares, digital devices and their accessories. Perhaps camping equipment, if essential to the tour.

Instead of ruminating on life’s past successes and failures, the touring cyclist ponders the next few kilometres or village, wondering what they will offer, how one will be affected by them. When thoughts do turn to the past those thoughts are of the life of the routine: past campsites, people met upon the trail, vistas, even mechanical matters. Experiences.

Experiences are the cornerstone of cycle touring, the building blocks of meaning, the creator of character. What the cycle tourist lacks in space is compensated for by an abundance of experiences, not all of which are pleasant, but all of which are meaningful.

To venture into the realm of cycle touring is to embark upon a quest for meaning, a quest mediated by routine. Don Quixote on a bicycle.

Last week we spent a couple of days at the beach. Not that this was part of my recovering from surgery; we just wanted to spend time at the beach before the Summer ended. As it turned out this beach provided something of a—dare I call it?—spiritual experience. But I might also call it an existential one.

Our first walk along the seashore took us over a rocky headland. When viewed in a certain way, in a certain light, this seascape became an alien landscape. Alien mountain ranges, canyons, plains, indeterminate heights, depths and distances. A landscape forged by erosion; a monochrome landscape. Was this the primordial Earth? Was this a planet out beyond the galaxy?

What was my role in this landscape? A (quantum) viewer giving life to the landscape? An integral part, each of us fulfilling a symbiotic relationship with the other? A maker of transient footprints, granted a snapped vision of the longevity of the non-organic and a fleeting glimpse of my irrelevance to its continuity?

Next morning we walked along the beach—away from the headland—empty of human life. We were in our own worlds, Margaret and I. She looked for pretty coloured shells and other organic detritus cast out of the everlasting waters. I listened to the crashing of the waves tens of metres out beyond the waves attempting to wet my feet. And I watched the light from the early morning sun as it played across the water, the waves and the beach.

Suddenly, I was transported to that alien planet I had discovered the previous day. But this time I imagined myself to be the alien, visiting this wondrous scene for the first time, feeling its beauty, its agelessness and its emptiness. These thoughts I wanted to share with Margaret but to speak—to utter sound—seemed sacrilegious. (It took some time for me to find an appropriate word for the experience.) For our beach had become a temple, a nursery of new life, a place of restfulness in a universe of harsh creation. An accident upon which I was happily meandering.

No image could capture that feeling; no words what I felt. Like the waves, my thoughts and feelings rose, peaked and collapsed, suffusing through my being. Awe, reverence, wonder. Then it was all gone. Words reappeared; the moment passed. Yet the beach—side lit by the rising sun—remained, unchanged and unaffected by my fleeting moments of wonder and magic.

People eventually returned to the beach, each to participate in their own way in the co-mingling of organic and inorganic.

We here in Australia tend to huddle in settlements constructed on or around beaches. For us they are resources to use and abuse as we choose. They give us pleasure, social opportunities, moments of reflection, relaxation, an opportunity to indulge our primal hunter instinct or to make money. Too often we take these wonders for granted; they become a simple backdrop against which we consume our lives and resources. On them we mark out a private place, claiming temporary ownership. Then the waves return and obliterate our intrusion onto the timelessness and alienness of beaches.

I do wonder who is the alien in this landscape.