Day 839
Carla
When you ride around the world you leave friends and family behind. It could be very lonely and yet it isn’t. About a year ago I started a WhatsApp for riders Tom and I met along the way. It now has over 200 members. Most I will never meet, but each one will have met someone, who met someone, and so on. We support each other, from the obvious route and travel advice to just being someone who understands. People sometimes take out their frustrations on the group, they can because we get it, we’ve all been there. Some though just inspire, and Carla was one of those.
We all met Carla in Canada, we were riding along by a lake and there she was cycling up to us. We chatted and realised we all had plans to cycle around the world and at this point were heading to Ushuaia, over a year’s cycling away. Over the next couple of weeks we rode together. Not every day but when it suited us all. That’s how it works. Carla had endless patience as Tom filmed her and I riding over the bridges on the old railway line around Myra Canyon. We went back and forth quite a few times until Tom was happy, and take it from me crossing those bridges takes some nerve. Carla had bucket loads of that.
On an evening we chatted about our lives, it turned out both Carla and Tom were from Northampton and were both 52 at the time, but as far as they could tell had never met before. Carla and Tom definitely felt a bond. She had an incredible sense of spirituality and inner-calm that was a massive inspiration to him.
When we parted, us heading north up into Canada and Carla back into the USA, we made plans to hopefully meet up again. Over the next few months I stalked Carla on Strava, and on her advice we rode one of the highlights of our trip so far, to Durango, Mexico. Many others followed Carla’s route, inspired by her sheer joy in what she experienced.
At times she was tantalisingly close, just a few weeks riding ahead of us, but we never quite caught her. Then the tone of her messages changed a bit. She was finding it tough on her own, had a few accidents, some of the joy went out of her trip.
We then made a plan, she would wait for us to catch up, extending a visit to London to see her son Sean, so we could meet up in Medellin at the beginning of May with the plan to ride to Ushuaia through South America together.
Unfortunately it wasn’t to be. Carla started to feel unwell, she found out she had a rare, one-in-a-million cancer. She was one-in-a-million but this was not a way she wanted to express that. And yet, as the cancer, or ‘Winston’ as she named it, progressed, she accepted it with positivity. If this was her time, well she had lived life to the full and had no regrets. Her sense of inner calm, her joy at life remained strong. She also talked of her belief that she might yet overcome Winston and return to her trip. Tom and I spent quite a bit of time with her back in the UK, we did theatre trips, behaved like children at a family park and ate an awful lot of cakes. Tom created a series of ‘Carla’s Hearts’ as part of the work he was doing decorating and gardening, with the aim of helping send her positive energy and healing, and these gave all of us a sense of love and joy.
Sadly Carla died a few days ago. We’ll never catch her up on the road, nor will all those other riders she inspired, but her spirit will ride with us forever.
Thank you and bless you Carla.
