All Packed!

It's been a busy couple days (well, weeks, months, actually), since this trip first took shape. I've done some very basic reading--history, mythology, travel & geography; watched or re-watched lots of movies; learned just enough Mandarin to embarrass myself badly; and trained in the hopes of being fit enough to deal with Sichuan hills on a bike. Writing my little speech for the forum was easy. And, following a shopping spree at the drugstore and an attempt to fit everything (except the fancy clothes, those will go on by train) into two panniers, I'm all packed. Just took my last round of books on China back to the library, picked up plane food at Trader Joe's, and gave my US-side team all their instructions. China, here we come!

A Thousand Pre-trip Details

A better title for a post, I'm sure, would be "A Thousand Terra Cotta Warriors," or "The Ten Thousand Loves of Jupiter," but no, all I've been doing all week is prep, prep, prep. It's satisfying, ticking things off lists; yet greater satisfactions await.

Examples of details: I exchanged $100 into yuan tonight--the landscapes on the money are nice, and there is Mao, on each denomination. (Do Chinese people visiting the US ever wonder who Alexander Hamilton was?) I stopped by REI for some delicious Nuun tablets (like Gatorade, in a just-add-water pill) and grabbed new biking gloves, Butt'r (don't ask) and these New Zealand-made anti-jet-lag pills I'd heard about; helped arrange some gifts for people we'll be meeting and visiting; grabbed a fascinating book about life in a town on the Yangzi, "River Town" by Peter Hessler, which had been recommended to me; all while trying to prepare three weeks of Seattle Opera social media content to be posted while I'm away!

Only one more really important task awaits, tomorrow morning, before I'm really mentally out the door and on the plane. If you've done the preparation properly, all is smooth sailing henceforth.

Ready For Adventure

"Well, I'm off again," he said! "Off around the world! Don't hold dinner for me!" I leave for China in five days, and I'm in that familiar state of pre-trip hysteria, drawing up lists of what to pack, checking off to-dos, trying to anticipate anything that could possibly happen in the next month, and forgetting all about living meanwhile.

Where I am now...

...and where I'll be very soon.

This wild China adventure began when the National Centre for the Performing Arts announced--sensibly enough, if you ask me--that their 2013 Forum would be over the Wagner Bicentennial week, May 22. The NCPA invited my boss at Seattle Opera, Speight Jenkins, to return to the Forum (which he also attended last year) to speak about Wagner; but because we have an important Wagner-related public event in Seattle that week, he asked me to go to China in his place. It wasn't hard to convince me to go. In my most ambitious moments in life so far, I had wanted to create a mighty Wagner biopic, pitched as Amadeus meets Lord of the Rings, for this bicentennial year. That project did not get beyond a screenplay and a remarkable staged reading, some years ago (details in other blogs!). So what was this fate, that was now offering me an opportunity to celebrate this bicentennial by planting the Wagner flag firmly at an important opera house where there has yet to be a production of Wagner's Ring?

I'll be in Beijing for a week, traveling with the remarkable Kelly Tweeddale, Seattle Opera's Executive Director--not just a mentor but a role model. Can I blame Kelly for how obsessive I've become about bicycling these past few years? She and another Seattle Opera colleague got in shape and biked the great STP, the Seattle-to-Portland, a few years back. I had wanted to join them, but ended up smashing a lot of bones in my hand, in my only-ever bicycling accident, in May just when the training was ramping up. So I missed that '09 STP; missed it again in '10, due to a heavy workload; and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams when I finally rode it in '11. By then I was hooked on bike touring, and went riding in southern England that summer, and in '12 to every corner of Puget Sound.

Following a lead in Lonely Planet, I am connected to a company called "Bike China," who have arranged a great trek with me along the Yangzi following my week in Beijing, from Chongqing to the Three Gorges Dam. Not sure exactly what to expect, but I've tried to get in shape and I am as ready as I'll ever be. My stay in China concludes with a few days in Shanghai as a stand-alone tourist.

More soon, perhaps even before the trip begins! I know it will be good to be on the move again. After all, the road goes ever ever on...