I’ve just been reading a book called Zen and Now by Mark Richardson. Those of you who have read Zen and the Art etc will know that it starts with a bike trip across the US mid west heading for San Francisco before vanishing into the philosophical aether. Zen and Now is the author - a journalist - redoing the trip some decades later and relating his experience of what he found. What he did find were a number of people mentioned in the original book who were willing to talk and a number of instances where the story had been ‘embellished’ for literary effect.

It seems that there is (or was anyway - the book was written in 2008) a Zen trail across the northern states akin to Route 66, with guide books etc available to help you track down the most obscure original trip landmarks. It is well written - as you’d expect from a journalist I suppose - and he does have the confidence to push his nose in where many of us might fear to tread; the journalist again I suppose.

With getting on for 15yrs having passed since he rode the route, his trip itself is fast becoming a route to re-ride and see if many of the characters remember him. Certainly quite a few of the places he stayed at are no longer around so anyone doing it would face the same problems he did. Re-riding a trip that in itself was a re-ride of an even older trip starts to raise some philosophical issues that it might need another trip to resolve. Quite what to call it might be the first one