When I was in high school - my Dad took me to a bike shop in Jackson, Michigan, called 'On Two Wheels'. For a birthday/ Christmas gift he bought me a Trek 800 XC mountain bike... if I remember right, we couldn't tell my Mom exactly how much the bike was, he went a bit over budget... but that was our secret.

A year after I graduated high school - I rode that same bicycle across the country with my best friend, Tim, over 4,000-some miles, it took us 55 days to reach the Golden Gate bridge. It was the most euphoric moment of my life.

I didn't know it at the time but that bike would take on the entire meaning and experience of that trip... it symbolized the easy times, the hard times - the times I just laughed and laughed in the middle of an empty road stretching through a never-ending wheat field in North Dakota... or when I broke down physically and mentally all at once on my fourth day in the desert, crying, wondering if I would ever see anything but dead grass and heat waves again... a desert that I wouldn't wish any one to drive through, let alone ride a bike.

Four years later I would ride that same bike, along with my brother, Nick and my girlfriend of three years, Amanda, along the Pacific coast - preparing for a coast-to-coast bike trip that would become a documentary film.

And the bike took on even more meaning.


And then, a half-a-year later, today, I would walk downstairs to find that the lock, used to secure my bike behind our parking spot, had been cut with bolt cutters - and my bike missing.

Which, for the lack of a better word: sucks.