Day 43: Patapsco Valley State Park, MD

Day 43, not Day 42: I seem to have skipped a day somewhere in the past week, as Saturdays should always be evenly divisible by seven (since we started this year's travels on a Sunday).  I'll need to go back and fix that...

We put on our Good Samaritan caps on Sunday.  I was stopped near Turf Valley Resort in Maryland, waiting for Alea to catch up with the van, when Robert Montgomery rode up.  We had met Robert very briefly a few days ago, and had invited him to stop at the van if he ever saw us on the road.

He related how the roads had gotten very rough and his bike and gear had gotten very shaken up on the swift descents.  Since he was stopped, he decided it was a good idea to see that he hadn't lost anything, and it turned out that his tent was AWOL!

Since Alea was coming down the route he had taken, I called her to see if she had seen it.  She had.  It was sitting in the middle of the road, so she had stopped and moved it to the side of the road, so that nobody would run it over.  So I doubled back and picked it up for him.

"Man, what would have this been like if I had not discovered this for another 40 miles?"

Robert said that if he hadn't seen the van he likely would have kept cycling for hours before discovering that the tent was missing.  So needless to say, he was feeling very lucky and grateful.  We told him that we would soon be at French Creek State Park for several days and offered to let him camp on our site, so we should see him again some time later this week.

We drove over 100 miles out of our way to visit with Alan Stillman (who lives in Alexandria, VA) and his labradoodle, Gaia.  We had originally planned on seeing them on Friday as we worked our way northward, which got pushed to Saturday and then finally Sunday.  Since we have firm plans at French Creek State Park in Pennsylvania for Wednesday, that meant we had to keep moving north and then drive back to Virginia in order to find a meeting time that worked with everyone's schedule.

I first saw Alan somewhere in either Denmark or Sweden (probably the latter), and then ran into him about two weeks later at the hostel in Bad Zwishenahn, Germany on 8 Sep 1986.  We rode together for two days, before my penchant for getting lost on Holland's cycle paths became a bit too unnerving to him.  He was one of the few cyclists that I traveled with while in Europe, though there were a few others.  He may have been the only American cyclist that I had traveled with during those six months.

Alan's story back then was that he had at one time weighed 335 pounds, but bought a stationary exercise bike made by Lifecycle.  He shed about half that weight and eventually got interested in bicycle touring.  His ambition when I met him was to cycle around the world, though his travels ended early, after cycling throughout eastern and western Europe and across the northern tier of Africa and throughout the Middle East.

He found communicating in non-Romance languages a challenge, so while in Hungary he first started drawing pictures of stuff in order to find the things that he needed for his day-to-day survival.  That concept evolved throughout his travels, so he added it to a long list of possible business ideas that he was maintaining during his adventures.

Alan shares his archive of Kwikpoints with Alea, explaining how the concept progressed over time.

Despite a great product idea (a foldable picture translation dictionary, which he patented as Kwikpoint), it was difficult to find a viable business model.  His big break came during the various Mid-East wars, when he put together some specialized translation tools for the U.S. Armed Forces.  That led to a special purpose Kwikpoint to help troops and sympathetic locals to detect improvised explosive devices (IEDs).  That kept literally hundreds of bombs from killing or maiming our troops or innocent bystanders.  A lot of folks that made it home from Iraq and Afghanistan owe a huge debt to Alan.

A special Kwikpoint just for the 7th Cavalry!

He didn't stop there.  He also worked with the World Health Organization to develop a series of graphic illustrations for correctly providing a sputum sample to test for tuberculosis.  Prior to that, most samples were taken incorrectly and were mostly saliva, which was of no use in making a diagnosis and thus tuberculosis remained rampant.  So thousands of people in developing countries owe their health and well being to Alan's ingenuity, which allowed them to cure a highly treatable disease.

After the tour of his Kwikpoint collection, we walked down to Old Town Alexandria, out to the Torpedo Factory (now an art collective) and along the waterfront, swapping stories between stops on Alan's city highlights tour.  After dinner it was time for some quality time on the freeway, arriving home just before darkness set in, but with little time to get set up for the coming day...