As soon as I heard that Harbor View Hotel, the place where I’d be staying in Martha’s Vineyard, made bicycles available to its guests, I started to research cycling routes, which seemed a most pleasant way to explore the island.

I read about Edgartown’s many paved bike paths. I imagined myself pedaling to check out the town of Oak Bluff, or heading out for an afternoon on Katama Beach.

The only problem: I really didn’t know how to ride a bike.

Yep. There I was, in my early thirties, and while I had just bought a bike of my own and was making slow, oh so slow,  progress, the fact of the matter was that as my trip to the Vineyard drew near, I could not reliably start, stop, steer, or go more than a few yards at a time without planting my feet firmly on the ground. Certainly I would not be up for narrow, rural roads, no matter how charming, nor would I have had the slightest notion of how to heed advice to “ride defensively’.

But you never know, I reasoned, and so I used my upcoming trip as motivation to practice all the more.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has used travel as an inspiration to learn a new physical skill, although I’d hazard the guess that it’s more common to use travel as a way to learn new activity. Sometimes this is just plain logistics: you need a mountain, an ocean, a cave for your intended new sport and you don’t happen to live anywhere near the desired geographical feature.

And sometimes it’s just one of those traveling things: you’re already immersed in new surroundings, and open to the new, you spot a flyer for a beginner’s class, the what-the-hell instinct kicks in and before you know it, you’re standing on the edge of a boat about to jump in to the water with a scuba tank on your back for the very first time.

Reduced inhibitions when traveling – a circumstance that does not absolutely require alcohol.

The downside of using travel as either an inspiration or an opportunity to learn a new physical skill is one that plagues adults trying to learn a new skill anywhere: impatience.

For various reasons, both physical and psychological, it takes adults longer to pick up a new skill, but our minds are still calibrated to how quickly we were able to learn as agile children. I discuss this in my recently released Like Riding a Bike: On Learning as an Adult, which recounts my own (rather rocky) path to two-wheeled triumph, and the psychology that affect all adults learning something new. The key to outwitting impatience lies in calibrating your expectations correctly: to realistically  assess what you might be able to learn in whatever time you’ve got on your vacation –  and whatever happens, not to beat yourself up if you don’t even make it to there.

Or, if you’re using travel as an inspiration to learn a new activity, whether it’s to sign up for a marathon or just to pedal yourself towards a New England clam roll, to allow yourself more than enough time to learn what you need to know before departure.

This, I did not do. On my last biking practice session at home before I left for Martha’s Vineyard, I regretfully realized that it would not be wise for me to borrow one of the Harbor View’s bikes. (Know your limits: also good advice regarding alcohol.) The closest I came to cycling was snapping this picture:

The photo was something of a promise to myself –  of how much more I’d be able to do on a future visit to Martha’s Vineyard.

_{Photos by Alison Stein Wellner. Learn more about Like Riding a Bike: On Learning as an Adult.}

On a recent visit to California’s Central Coast, I went in search of  Harmony.

But driving north from Cambria on SH1, I blinked and nearly missed it.  Luckily, I caught a glimpse of the sign through the rear view mirror, executed a quick U-turn, and got back on track to finding one of California’s smallest towns. Although, with a population of 18, it wasn’t so much a small town as much as an almost ‘ghost town.’

Of course, it wasn’t always that way. Once, the main coastal highway ran through the middle of the town and it’s milk, butter, and cheese, processed at the Harmony Creamery, were bought by the likes of William Randolph Hearst and his movie star guests on their way to Hearst Ranch.

But the Creamery closed decades ago and all that’s left is the bare bones of a town that once housed a school house, general store, stables, blacksmith, feed store, and post office, and a few more residents.

These days there are more visitors than residents.

They come to take photos and

visit the glassworks and pottery shop

sample the wines at Harmony Cellars

Some even come to get married at the tiny wedding chapel.

And when they get here, they find that everything is in perfect harmony.

Silence, music, borders, tales of the land and people: each of those has a part in the landscape of the North American west. Those are touchstones of the songs. Gretchen Peters has chosen for her album One To The Heart, One To The Head.

North Platte, a piano based instrumental by Barry Walsh that evokes that landscape, and the quiet changes of the western lands, begins things. Mary McCaslin’s song Prairie in the Sky follows, with lyrics that create impressions and invite imagination, rather than set out direct images. Billy 4 finds Tom Russell joining Peters for Billy 4, a rattling story of the western outlaw Billy the Kid written by Bob Dylan.

Things take a more reflective turn with Ian Tyson’s atmospheric take on landscape and the feelings of love’s changes in Blue Mountains of Mexico, and Russell’s mystic western border journey, Guadalupe. Townes van Zandt western classic Snowing on Raton vividly pairs emotion and landscape, as well.

On her own or singing with Russell, Peters offers a thoughtful musical intelligence and a graceful soprano that strike straight to the heart of these varied and well chosen songs. Not that Peters couldn’t have written an album of western songs herself: Bryan Adams, Bonnie Raitt, Etta James, Shania Twain, Martina McBride, Patty Loveless, and George Strait have all been drawn to record songs Peters has written. Her friend Russell, also a fine songwriter whose work draws on the ideas and landscapes of west Texas, encouraged her to think about the west again. “I figured she should hearken up to her roots and turn to western themes,” he writes in the notes for the album.

Though she has been based in Nashville for some time, Peters spent seventeen years in Colorado. ”As Tom and I were sifting through the songs for this record, she writes, “I began to realize the extent to which growing up in the west shaped me, musically and otherwise. There is nothing so starkly beautiful and lonely as a prairie sunrise, or a mountain pass covered with new fallen snow, or the sound of chinook winds howling.”

Stories in the fourteen cuts range from Sweet and Shiny Eyes, which you very well may have heard and sung along with if you’ve ever been in a western bar after midnight, to If I Had a Gun, a dark tale from which the title emerges. What may be the centerpiece of this intricate collection of music and ideas is a song called Wolves. It is written by Montana native Stephanie Davis, and is filled with the grace, loneliness, and change of the contemporary American west, aspects which Peters well serves and illuminates in her take on it.

One To The Heart, One To The Head is not a western travel guide (although in some ways it could be) but it is a fine companion for traveling in, remembering, and dreaming of the American west.

Nothing really surprises me anymore in Bangkok, at least in the sense that I know the city well enough to predict, or least anticipate, its day-to-day quirks, its endearing moments of absurdity, its profound ability to somehow always outdo itself in ways large and small.

A rail-thin runner, all bushy mustache and sinewy muscle, doing laps at Lumpini Park while dragging a tire from a rope tied around his waist. Streams of motorbikers eluding traffic jams by taking a shortcut on the pedestrian sidewalk as if yellow dotted driving lanes were painted down the middle. Girls working at product stands in grocery stores and shopping malls chattering into a microphone endlessly, breathlessly, like one of those talking dolls with a pullstring in their back, often speaking to an audience of none. Food vendors like armies of ants: underneath highway overpasses, outside restaurant and convenience stores, in front of five-star hotels. Everywhere.

These things don’t surprise me, which isn’t to say they’ve faded into a droll background of daily life or lost their hypnotic power of seduction; if anything, the allure has been magnified. With each passing day, the rhythm of this place, its character, its specific drumbeat of humanity becomes more and more a part of my life’s fabric, and less of a foreign entity to be photographed and catalogued and separated. That jarring newness of surprise I felt during my earliest associations with the city has simply matured into something else entirely. What was exotic is now everyday; what was once-in-a-lifetime is now Saturday morning.

This is not a bad thing.

My adventure in Bangkok is seen from a different, more informed perspective than it was 5 years or 5 weeks ago, but with no less sense of wonder. Still, as with anywhere we love and return to, while an appreciation for the places and its people can deepen, and a more nuanced appreciation can take root, the intoxication of that first experience, that first fateful introduction that grabbed you and wormed its way inside you, can never fully be recreated. Oh, you can remember it, write about it, talk about it, but when you return… you’re returning, not discovering. That’s okay, that’s just life, equal parts mirthful and melancholic.

One man’s return can be another’s discovery, of course. My fiance and I spent the past week walking her brother/my friend through our version of Bangkok’s Greatest Hits. It was his first time in Bangkok–first time in Asia, actually–and not knowing what to expect, he left yesterday with exceeded expectations.

Boat rides down Khlong Saen Saeb, cooking class with the legendary May Kaidee, drinking and dancing during a particularly wild night at Tawandang German Brewery, climbing to the top of Wat Arun, sipping cocktails on the outdoor deck at Centara Grand’s rooftop Red Sky Bar, gorging at favorite restaurants like Jae On, Din Tai Fung, Yaki-Ten, screaming “knee! knee!” during the fourth round of the main event at Lumpinee Stadium‘s muy thai boxing night.

We showed him a good time, and it was fun going from one favorite haunt to another, and sharing those sides of the city we love most. On a deeper level, though, it was personally gratifying to moonlight through the newness of his first Bangkok encounters, and in a way to be reminded what it was like to be surprised on levels I once was too.

_{Tawandang German Brewery photo © Brian Spencer}