I thought a lot about what I wanted to write about today.  Honestly today started out tough.  I didn't sleep well last night, woke up a bit nauseous.  We had to get up super early (about 5:15) because we had 100 miles in front of us, and it looked like it might be bad.  I am struggling against heat exhaustion and sun exposure; Utah hasn't been kind to me, and I have a second degree sunburn on my lower lip which sounds hilarious but actually totally isn't.  Anyway, as I ill-temperedly drudged on through the morning, I was reminded of re-learning an essential truth about life that my Dad has tried to teach me before.  "We all come into this world alone and we leave it alone," he says.  There is something inside me that wants to fight that truth.  I've spent a lot of time in my life trying to join groups; getting married, going to college, grad school, yoga training, Mazamas - I always want to belong to something bigger, to the romantic notion of becoming part of something bigger.  But the truth is that, at the end of the day, this journey that I'm on is my own journey and nobody else's.  Nobody can really do this for me, or truly understand completely what I'm going through.  Now, some of you in the audience will immediately begin to boo and hiss.  And certainly my goal is not to in any way de-legitimize your experiences.  If you've felt intimacy on that level, then that's awesome.  But for me, the truth is that eventually I realize that other people have to live their own lives and I have to live mine.  For example, almost everyone on this trip loves coffee.  I've tried to drink it, but to me it tastes like a horse's patootie.  That's a simple and silly example, but there are many more.  I dislike the rain a lot more than most people.  On the other hand, I'm much more excited about cycling.  Of course everyone on this trip likes cycling to a greater or lesser degree, but I really love cycling; my love of cycling specifically is what's gotten me through some tougher moments.  I've had some hilarious conversations - and over heard others - where one person talks about how that day was their "favorite day so far", only to have the other person shake their head and say it was their least favorite.  The point is, we are each on our own journey.  Even though it's a team effort, we all face our own demons and our own angels.  Certainly we can help each other, but at the end of the day I don't really know what it's like to be Damien or Kip or Jeff, and they don't know what it's like to be me, and that's OK - that *has* to be OK, because it's the only truth we have.