#flight phobia sucks ass

[kdxart]

Tomorrow I'm taking my first flight without family and I'm a huge mix of terrified and excited. Terrified cause I have a huge phobia of flying (Xanax ftw) but also excited cause if I can handle this then it means I'm ready for flight travel on my own which opens up b travel possibilities for me.

[popmybrains]

Panophobia - Richie Tozier x Reader - Part One

Next

"Panophobia or the fear of everything phobia might sound bizarre, but it does exist in the list of non-specific phobias. It is known by other names like Omniphobia or Pantophobia. Panto stands for 'all or everything' in the Greek language." 

A/N: Panophobia is a fanfiction series I wrote for my archive of our own, but will now also be posted here on my tumblr. I also have to write in short amounts because I have carpal tunnel it and it limits my time allowed to write.

Warnings: Trigger Scene, Swearing, Richie’s humor. 

Summary: Meet (Y/N) Kaspbrak's one of the biggest wussys of all time. It sucks when you’re scared of everything and anything. But the time comes when your father is fed up with your hiding and pushes you outside, leaving you to fend for yourself alone. But it only gets worse when Henry Bowers catches sight of a young small girl he's never seen before. So what happens when you run into Eddie, alongside three other boys you've never meet before? You join in on their summer adventures of trying to kill a demon clown who's terrorizing the town of Derry of course. Man panophobia sucks ass. 

Part One

The last bell of the day rang, signaling the end of school and the start of summer, three boys busted through their class door, walking down the crowded hallway as other students started pouring in, seeming to already have a conversation when the fourth boy ran up behind them, taking his place beside of the shortest in the group and the one who seemed to be the leader of the group, as they walked passed another group of boys who just seemingly glared at everyone who walked passed, especially the four boys, when the one with thick rimmed glasses turned to the other three.

"Do you think they'll sign my year book? ’Dear Richie, sorry for taking a hot steaming dump in your backpack last month. Have a good summer'." He chuckled looking at the others boys who seemingly rolled their eyes at him.

"Hey guys, you want to stop buy my house after school? Bill got a new croquet set we can use it there." Said the boy with curly hair wearing a kippah, pointing to the boy next to him, as they all turned down the flight of stairs the entrance of the building coming into view as they walked out the school towards the trash cans that were in the front near the rode.

"Sorry Stan, I can't make it I promised told my mom I'd go see my cousin after school today, her parents are getting tired of her being locked inside the house and not making any friends." The shortest one side, whereas Richie took it upon himself to make a comment about this "unknown cousin" of Eddie's.

"You know you keep mentioning this cousin of yours Eddie Spaghetti, yet we never get to meet her, does she tickle your pickle?" Richie laughed as they made their way to the trash cans to empty their schools bags, the shortest one now known as Eddie stopped what he was doing to turn and look at Richie as the other two boys Stanley and Bill emptied their bags. Bill turning to look at Eddie with his now empty backpack. “H-h-he has a p-p-point. W-why can’t we meet -h-h-her?” He asked. 

"Are you fucking stupid? (Y/N) would have a fucking aneurysm if brought three boys over, especially three new boys. I might as well be signing her death certificate." Eddie screeched at Richie as Stan just emptied his bag muttering something along the lines of how that was the best feeling ever. It wasn't until Bill turned to Eddie curious about Eddie's cousin.

"Www-what does ss-sshe look like?" He stuttered out, looking at Eddie curious to hear his response and explain his cousin to himself and the other two boys beside them as he placed his now empty bag back onto his shoulders. With a heavy sigh of defeat Eddie placed his now also empty bag on his shoulders as he turned to walk away with the three boys behind him catching up. "Well she has (H/L) which is a shade of (H/C). And I'm not that much taller than her she comes up to me about here." He said motioning to the hand that was now at his shoulder. "It also doesn't help that she's fucking terrified of everything that walks and breaths. She had to scream and beg for my uncle to homeschool her when they moved to Derry about a couple months ago." He mumbled as the three finally caught up.

"Why is she so fucking scared of everything." Richie lifted his hand to push up his glasses as the boys went to the bike racks and grabbed their bikes. “My mom said it’s called panophobia, which means the fear of everything or some shit like that.” Eddie mentioned waving his hand as he put his bike lock in his bag. "Why not let her met us and let her base her own opinion first before doing it for her." The thoughtful Stan mentioned as Eddie had a look of doubt in his eyes, Richie new just a little more pushing and he would break and take them all to this cousin of his. "Yeah come on Eddie Spaghetti, take us to this mystical cousin of yours named (Y/N)."

"P-please." Bill finished looked at the Eddie who grunted and started walking away from them. "Fine come on then, but you have to listen to exactly what I say or she will be scared of you." He huffed as the boys started following him.

(Y/N) let out a squeal as her father started pushing her to the door. “You can’t keep hiding away from the outside in your room any long!” His voice boomed as he opened the front door and shoved you outside. “When you asked to be home schooled I accepted on the condition you finally make some damn friends. And you haven’t had a single one beside your own cousin. (Y/N), Eddie will be over soon until then I want you to stay outside!” He screamed as he slammed the door in her face.

Letting out a silent wail she turned around and sat on the steps of her porch, huddled next to the railing while she hugged herself, mentally deciding that here was where she would wait for Eddie.

It was until about 10 minutes later (Y/N) had noticed a car, slowly driving up and near her house. She watched as a blonde wearing a mullet lifted himself up from the hole in the car hood and shouted in her direction. “Hey babe, why not come in for a ride with us?” He chuckled as his friends starting wolf whistling from the car, one of them beeping the horn. Cheering him on as he climbed out and (Y/N) got up while she had the chance, quickly speeding away. Where to she didn’t know but away from blonde boy behind her who was now speeding to catch up with her. (Y/N) probably only made it about half down the street before she felt someone grab her wrist and jolt her back.

“Hey come on back babe what’s the rush?” He whispered in your ear as he slammed your back into his chest, as he brought both of her wrists into one of his hands, letting his free own drift down her chest and to the hem of her shorts slowly slipping in. (Y/N) started screaming hoping to get anyone’s attention but she watched as a car drove by slowly, as the occupants just stared out at her and the boy at her back as you struggled.

(Y/N) screamed, praying Eddie would magically come biking his way down your street. In (Y/N)’s trashing, she managed to turn her head just right and bit down into his arm that was in front of her, slowly slipping down into her shorts . With a shriek, he dropped her screaming curse word after curse word. (Y/N) managed to pull herself up and run away down the street like she were part of an Olympian track team, turning a corner and quickly jumping through back yards, making it a few streets over.

(Y/N) didn’t look where she was going until she turned a corner and slammed into a chest, stumbling back she fell once again, landing on her ass. Crawling backwards horrified she stared at a group of three boys holding their bikes. Squeaking she crawled back still on her hands and ass she heard a fourth boy from behind the group.

“(Y/N) Kaspbrak! What are you doing out here.”

[fates-theysband]

fun facts about my deltarune s/i (cut for length):

in castle town they and their siblings live in a house shaped like the dice tower you build when you're waiting for your turn in combat

in the card kingdom they're technically the guard captain but they're conveniently on their lunch break when the lightners escape from the dungeon ("i can't seize them, your majesty, i'm off the clock and still have five minutes before my lunch ends and you bet i'm taking every fucking second of it. no i'm not going to stop helping them, there wasn't a non-compete clause in the contract and you have no authority over what i do during time i'm not paid for. anyway kids the exit's to the north. if you see rk tell him that if i'm late for work again because he locked down the front gate to build one of his piss easy puzzles i'll kick his ass")

while they're pretty lazy about obeying the king's orders even when they are on the clock (if the lightners ever did fight them in a pacifist run they wouldn't even assume their full dragon form), they're your worst nightmare if you threaten their friends (or, god forbid, their siblings)

i realized while i was writing about how they act on the job that what i've essentially written is a storyshift (sadly abandoned undertale au i liked a lot back in the day, may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest) sans-as-undyne swap. royal guard captain who could not give less of a SHIT about their job but loves their friends and family and will hurt anyone who threatens them. i'm not changing this because the storyshift author never got to the point of a sans-as-undyne swap so the concept is mine now.

they have a strong dislike bordering on phobia of microwaves (based on the phenomenon of microwaving dice to balance them or, for more superstitious players, to punish them for rolling poorly one too many times--btw do not do that, microwaving anything that's not food, a container that food is in, or something with express manufacturer instructions saying it's okay to microwave usually results in fire or toxic fumes happening)

they kind of envy rouxls because yeah it sucks to be the part of the set that's tossed aside or put back in the box and never used, but for someone who is always essential, who manages everything within their purview, and who is expected to always provide good outcomes even though it's impossible that they'll always succeed (and it's not unheard of to be publicly shamed for failing), being useless to begin with would be a dream

[rabidwrestlingfan]

Phobias

101. “Don’t be an asshole. Asshole.” Sometimes dating Trent Seven really sucked. Tabbitha always realised it when she was in situations like this. “Tabby, you’re overreacting!” The man exclaimed with a laugh. She rolled her eyes, continuing to walk away. Soon enough his arms came around her waist and pulled her back. “You can’t blame me for an airplane crash being on the news. It was a hell of a lot smaller than the one we’re going to be on. I’m sorry I made an inadvertent joke about your fear of flights. I didn’t mean it.” The smile could be heard in his voice. “Don’t be an asshole. Asshole.” She muttered before pulling away from him to sit in one of the multiple chairs. He sighed before sitting down next to her. “I really did mean the apology, love.” He told her before kissing her temple. Tabbitha didn’t know exactly where her fear of planes stemmed from. She wasn’t a really anxious person in general. Something about planes just scared her. The first flight she had been on was to Los Angeles from Vegas when she was six, and she freaked out the whole hour it took. Her parents had figured it was something she’d get over as she grew up. Yet here she was at age thirty as scared as ever. She found it overly ridiculous. As not only a wrestler, but an American living England, flights were fairly regular in her life. It made no sense that she felt such dread about being on aircrafts. Suddenly she was being pulled into her fiancé’s larger frame. “Hey… no need to start shaking, love. Just breathe. We all have little phobias. It’s going to be just fine. After takeoff you’re gonna put your headphones on and be out like a light. I’ll be right beside you. Everything is alright.” Trent assured her quietly. When had she started shaking? She could feel the other people staring at them. Tabbitha shifted against him, pressing her face into his neck. “This is fucking ridiculous. I’m a bad ass.” She groaned in frustration. She hated feeling so embarrassed about herself. “Superman’s weakness is a rock. Every bad ass has a weakness. I know guys as big as houses afraid of spiders. What’s ridiculous is that they haven’t invented a teleportation machine so that a gorgeous woman like you doesn’t have to worry about this.” He whispered into her ear. She couldn’t help but laugh. Thank God for giving her Trent Seven. Almost ten hours later she was being woken up. “We’re about to land, love.” An accented voice whispered into her ear. When she finally looked over at her fiance she couldn’t help but smile. He looked so happy. “Told you everything was going to be alright!” He exclaimed. “Yeah. You were right.” She finally agreed, kissing his cheek. “I love you, Mr. Seven.” He chuckled before kissing her temple. “I love you too, Mrs. Seven. No matter how many flying induced anxiety episodes you have.” She sat up in her seat and tried to fix her hair. “You’re still an asshole.” Tabbitha finally told him before the flight attendant starting giving the descent announcement. “Yet you still agreed to spend your life with me.”

[cocuzzo]

My father was born to be a rock star, but instead of picking up a guitar, he climbed onto a bicycle. “He’s the kind of cyclist you hate,” my mom tells people, laughing. At 64 years old, Dad still commutes to work through the city on a brakeless fixed-gear, weaving through traffic, flipping people off, and occasionally spitting on the windshields of anyone unlucky enough to cut him off. His riding style has deep roots; over the years, he’s been hit 19 times. That’s no exaggeration: Fourteen of the crashes were with cars, three were with trucks, and two were city buses. After one of these accidents, my mother called me into his hospital room. “You have to talk to him,” she said to me behind the curtain. “He can’t go on like this.”

Sitting on the end of his hospital bed, I made my case. I told him that he had a responsibility to our family to not end up a vegetable, or worse, a ghost bike on the corner of some cold city street. He heard me out and nodded, but I knew nothing was really going to change. Dad depends on the bike for his sanity. His commuting is less about getting to work than it is about the adrenaline rush of running with the bulls. He doesn’t drink, smoke, or eat meat; the high of the ride is what my father lives for. “I live in the big ring,” he likes to say. Taking that away from him, or ratcheting his riding down by even a pedal stroke, would only make him—and everyone around him—absolutely miserable.

Unfortunately, Dad’s riding philosophy didn’t always carry over into his parenting style. He did everything in his power to keep us safe, which sometimes meant showing up to extract me if I was out past curfew. Our family did things his way, with very few objections. If we got lost driving, the car would turn into a ticking time bomb. Throw in a little traffic, and Dad would launch into a string of expletives that could make my eardrums clench. My palms sweat just thinking about it now.

Cycling always calmed the seas between us. He taught me how to ride at an early age—straight to two wheels as I recall—and eventually presented me with my own fixie (complete with a front brake). On a bike he brought me into his world, whisking me with him through the city traffic like a trained assassin. I relished every second of it. No matter where my travels took me after I moved out of my parents’ house, I could always count on getting a spin in with my dad when I came home.

Then a year ago, my grandfather fell ill. In a matter of months, he went from an able-bodied giant who painted his own house at the age of 84, to a frail old man who could barely make it to the bathroom. It seemed to happen overnight.

Although he never said a word about it, my dad seemed unable to accept my grandfather’s decline. When discussions veered to end-of-life care, Dad let my mom speak for him, retreating to his bike. Perhaps he feared that acknowledging my grandfather’s mortality would force him to look down at his own place on life's escalator. Maybe he couldn’t accept that no matter how hard he pedaled, no matter how many crashes he miraculously walked away from, Dad couldn’t turn back the clock—mortality would always be out of his control.

Dad’s thinking wasn’t far from my own. For most of my life, I had thought of him in Hunter S. Thompson’s own terms: too weird to live, and too rare to die. But the reality was that our days together were, and had always been, numbered. Like all fathers and sons, we only had so many more adventures, so many more rides, so many more memories we could make together.

That’s what gave me the idea to go to Italy.

Despite how adventurous he is on a bike, Dad isn’t much of a traveler. He has a phobia of flying, and the last time he left the country, Reagan was in office. Yet Dad always fantasized about traveling to Italy to visit the tiny village of San Donato, his grandfather’s birthplace. His father, who was now in hospice care, never got the chance to visit the village, and it was one of his biggest regrets.

“Let’s do it, Dad,” I said to him over the phone. “We’ll go in honor of Papa.”

Once when I was young, maybe 12 years old, my dad and I spotted a bunch of college kids jumping off an old railroad bridge into Cape Cod Canal. “Let’s do it, Dad,” I said, half kidding. The next thing I knew I was staring down 30 feet to the water, imagining my gruesome landing in the shallows. “You got this!” Dad yelled up.

Some twenty years later, he was still game to take another plunge. We each loaded a backpack with one change of clothes, one cycling kit, two pairs of socks, sneakers, and emergency sleeping bags, and then boarded a flight to Florence. The plan: rent bikes and ride to San Donato, some 425 miles away.

“There. Route 22 takes us right into Siena,” Dad said, dragging a sweaty finger down the map we had pocketed earlier at the bike shop in Florence. “It’s a straight shot.”

It was somewhere before the last climb on our first day, and we’d already gone off course. I didn’t dare tell him that we were lost.

“Yeah, I see that,” I said. “But my route has us going 408 and then connecting with 22 right before Siena.” Dad scanned the map.

“That’s going to add another 20 miles,” he said. “What, are you taking us the scenic route?”

“Exactly,” I shot back.

We were hot, tired, and dehydrated. I could smell the fumes of frustration building in the air, and braced for my father to boil over. A day earlier, Dad had been dropped in a foreign land, far away from the routes where he knew every pothole by heart. I could see him grasping for some sense of control and security, and worried that the abrupt detachment of being abroad might break him. Instead, he folded up the map and slid it into his back pocket. He threw his leg over his bike, squeezed a long drink from his water bottle, and flashed me a crazy grin. “Ready?”

With that, our roles suddenly shifted. After decades of protecting me and commanding the lead—through city traffic, off railroad bridges, through the course of my life—my dad was turning over control to me. Now I was his sense of security. “Let’s do it,” I said.

Each day we ground slowly and steadily up thousands of vertical feet. We broke 6,000 feet over the 52 miles from Florence to Siena, then another 6,770 the following day en route to San Casciano dei Bagni, a third-century stone village overlooking Tuscany. Occasionally the climbs pitched at a torturous 20 degrees. With my heart punching my ribcage like a speed bag, I worried that one of these climbs could actually kill my father. (I wondered how much a good urn costs in Italy.)

“How you doing, Dad?” I asked over my shoulder on a particularly cruel climb.

“Good...man.” I heard, between breaths.

Cresting the top of the climb, I kicked out of my pedals and waited for him. He pulled up to me like a beaten stray dog.

“Well that sucked,” I said.

“Brutal,” he laughed. “Even my eyebrows hurt.”

Yet somehow Dad seemed to get stronger with each day. Meanwhile, my body began to break down. I was hauling a 20-pound bag off my seatpost, which forced me to climb each hill from the seated position or risk tipping. As the trip wore on, my knee began screaming with every pedal stroke. I gobbled ibuprofen like Skittles, but nothing dulled the bone-on-bone torture. Doubt crept in, and I began to play out a scene in my head: unclipping and telling my dad I couldn’t go on.

“No, you got this buddy, you got this,” I kept telling myself. “You got this buddy, you got this.”

“What?” my dad asked.

“Nothing, nothing.” I mumbled.

The agony raging in my knee paled in comparison to the mental torture of letting my dad down. He had turned the trip over to me and now I was thinking about quitting.

When the situation couldn’t possibly get more desperate, it did. The cable to my back derailleur snapped like a severed tendon and got sucked into the bike’s frame. We were 40 miles into an 82-mile day, with the crux climb of more than 6,000 feet looming ahead of us. My knee was throbbing, and now I had lost my ability to shift.

We pulled to the side of the road. Dad and I flipped the bike. We studied the frayed cable for a long time in silence. We were in the middle of nowhere, and he was thinking what I was thinking: This is where the trip ends. There were forty miles of steep climbs ahead of us, and my bike was stuck in the big ring. It was impossible.

When I was a senior in college, Dad moved me into my house off campus on a frigid fall morning. We strapped a mattress to the roof of his car and set off on the hour-long ride. About halfway through the trip, a loud thud began echoing through the car. One of the ties had come free, and the mattress was flapping in the wind. But instead of pulling over and refastening the ties like reasonable people, Dad and I just rolled down our windows and held the mattress by hand for the next 30 minutes in the biting cold.

I learned a defining lesson that morning. For better or for worse, my father and I share a rationale that is one part fiendishness and one part raw will. If the solution comes down to a matter of suffering, nothing is impossible.

“I have an idea,” he said, perking up. “If we can get it in the easiest ring, you can climb the hills and then coast the rest.”

“Basically make it a singlespeed?”

“Exactly.”

He popped the spring out from the derailleur with a hex wrench. “Spin that,” he said. I cranked the pedal by hand while he manually shifted the gears until it was in the easiest ring.

“There,” he said, wiping his greasy fingers on his jersey.

I flipped the bike and reassessed: I now had one gear, one good leg, and one long-ass day ahead of me, but my attitude had shifted. Our hands were holding the mattress again, and we weren’t letting go no matter how cold it got. I threw my aching leg over the bike, squeezed a long sip of water into my mouth and shot him a grin.

“Ready?”

“Let’s do it,” he said.

One night during the trip, I received a text message from my mom, asking if we could call my grandfather. His condition had worsened and she was worried that we wouldn’t get back in time to see him. Dad had tears in his eyes as he spoke to his father 4,000 miles away. “I love you, Dad,” he said meekly, before turning the phone over to me. Papa’s voice was weak. “Are you taking care of your father?” he asked.

“We’re taking care of each other, Papa.”

Finally, after nearly two weeks of filling our jersey pockets with candy wrappers, emptying bottle after water bottle, and soaking in the Italian countryside, the village came into view. Nestled in the mountains of Abruzzo National Park, San Donato looked more magical than I’d ever dared imagine. A ray of sun pierced through the clouds and coated the village in a light that I can only describe as providential.

As we neared the town, I told Dad to take the lead so that I could take photos of him approaching.

“No,” he said abruptly. “I want you to lead us in.”

I pushed forward and the street narrowed into the grip of ancient buildings, leading me to the city center. Old men sat in the piazza, drinking cappuccino and smoking cigarettes. I coasted past them towards a tall stone monument in the center, erected in memory of those lost in World War II. As I clipped out of my pedals to get a better look, I spotted it, right at the top. A lump lodged in my throat. I waited for my dad to pull up alongside me. "Look," I said, nodding upwards.

He narrowed his eyes on the monument and immediately welled up into tears. We stood there silently, reading our last name in the stone. “You’re the best,” Dad said, his voice trembling. He pulled me in for a hug.

As I’d become aware that my grandfather was nearing the end of his road, I’d prodded him for words of wisdom. I was hoping that he would bestow some life lessons that he’d amassed over his 86 years. But no matter how I asked the question, it always came back to one simple answer: Family. Keep the family together.

I now understood more clearly what he meant. Family can seem like a foregone conclusion. Something that you’re just born into and accept as your reality. But that’s really just about genes and blood ties. True family takes time and effort to nurture. It’s about getting lost and pulling together, instead of being pulled apart. As with many lessons in my life, and that of my father’s, it took a long bike ride for us remember that for our family to stay balanced, we have to keep on pedaling.

Published by Bicycling Magazine here

[robertcocuzzo]

My father was born to be a rock star, but instead of picking up a guitar, he climbed onto a bicycle. “He’s the kind of cyclist you hate,” my mom tells people, laughing. At 64 years old, Dad still commutes to work through the city on a brakeless fixed-gear, weaving through traffic, flipping people off, and occasionally spitting on the windshields of anyone unlucky enough to cut him off. His riding style has deep roots; over the years, he’s been hit 19 times. That’s no exaggeration: Fourteen of the crashes were with cars, three were with trucks, and two were city buses. After one of these accidents, my mother called me into his hospital room. “You have to talk to him,” she said to me behind the curtain. “He can’t go on like this.”

Sitting on the end of his hospital bed, I made my case. I told him that he had a responsibility to our family to not end up a vegetable, or worse, a ghost bike on the corner of some cold city street. He heard me out and nodded, but I knew nothing was really going to change. Dad depends on the bike for his sanity. His commuting is less about getting to work than it is about the adrenaline rush of running with the bulls. He doesn’t drink, smoke, or eat meat; the high of the ride is what my father lives for. “I live in the big ring,” he likes to say. Taking that away from him, or ratcheting his riding down by even a pedal stroke, would only make him—and everyone around him—absolutely miserable.

Unfortunately, Dad’s riding philosophy didn’t always carry over into his parenting style. He did everything in his power to keep us safe, which sometimes meant showing up to extract me if I was out past curfew. Our family did things his way, with very few objections. If we got lost driving, the car would turn into a ticking time bomb. Throw in a little traffic, and Dad would launch into a string of expletives that could make my eardrums clench. My palms sweat just thinking about it now.

Cycling always calmed the seas between us. He taught me how to ride at an early age—straight to two wheels as I recall—and eventually presented me with my own fixie (complete with a front brake). On a bike he brought me into his world, whisking me with him through the city traffic like a trained assassin. I relished every second of it. No matter where my travels took me after I moved out of my parents’ house, I could always count on getting a spin in with my dad when I came home.

Then a year ago, my grandfather fell ill. In a matter of months, he went from an able-bodied giant who painted his own house at the age of 84, to a frail old man who could barely make it to the bathroom. It seemed to happen overnight.

Although he never said a word about it, my dad seemed unable to accept my grandfather’s decline. When discussions veered to end-of-life care, Dad let my mom speak for him, retreating to his bike. Perhaps he feared that acknowledging my grandfather’s mortality would force him to look down at his own place on life's escalator. Maybe he couldn’t accept that no matter how hard he pedaled, no matter how many crashes he miraculously walked away from, Dad couldn’t turn back the clock—mortality would always be out of his control.

Dad’s thinking wasn’t far from my own. For most of my life, I had thought of him in Hunter S. Thompson’s own terms: too weird to live, and too rare to die. But the reality was that our days together were, and had always been, numbered. Like all fathers and sons, we only had so many more adventures, so many more rides, so many more memories we could make together.

That’s what gave me the idea to go to Italy.

Despite how adventurous he is on a bike, Dad isn’t much of a traveler. He has a phobia of flying, and the last time he left the country, Reagan was in office. Yet Dad always fantasized about traveling to Italy to visit the tiny village of San Donato, his grandfather’s birthplace. His father, who was now in hospice care, never got the chance to visit the village, and it was one of his biggest regrets.

“Let’s do it, Dad,” I said to him over the phone. “We’ll go in honor of Papa.”

Once when I was young, maybe 12 years old, my dad and I spotted a bunch of college kids jumping off an old railroad bridge into Cape Cod Canal. “Let’s do it, Dad,” I said, half kidding. The next thing I knew I was staring down 30 feet to the water, imagining my gruesome landing in the shallows. “You got this!” Dad yelled up.

Some twenty years later, he was still game to take another plunge. We each loaded a backpack with one change of clothes, one cycling kit, two pairs of socks, sneakers, and emergency sleeping bags, and then boarded a flight to Florence. The plan: rent bikes and ride to San Donato, some 425 miles away.

“There. Route 22 takes us right into Siena,” Dad said, dragging a sweaty finger down the map we had pocketed earlier at the bike shop in Florence. “It’s a straight shot.”

It was somewhere before the last climb on our first day, and we’d already gone off course. I didn’t dare tell him that we were lost.

“Yeah, I see that,” I said. “But my route has us going 408 and then connecting with 22 right before Siena.” Dad scanned the map.

“That’s going to add another 20 miles,” he said. “What, are you taking us the scenic route?”

“Exactly,” I shot back.

We were hot, tired, and dehydrated. I could smell the fumes of frustration building in the air, and braced for my father to boil over. A day earlier, Dad had been dropped in a foreign land, far away from the routes where he knew every pothole by heart. I could see him grasping for some sense of control and security, and worried that the abrupt detachment of being abroad might break him. Instead, he folded up the map and slid it into his back pocket. He threw his leg over his bike, squeezed a long drink from his water bottle, and flashed me a crazy grin. “Ready?”

With that, our roles suddenly shifted. After decades of protecting me and commanding the lead—through city traffic, off railroad bridges, through the course of my life—my dad was turning over control to me. Now I was his sense of security. “Let’s do it,” I said.

Each day we ground slowly and steadily up thousands of vertical feet. We broke 6,000 feet over the 52 miles from Florence to Siena, then another 6,770 the following day en route to San Casciano dei Bagni, a third-century stone village overlooking Tuscany. Occasionally the climbs pitched at a torturous 20 degrees. With my heart punching my ribcage like a speed bag, I worried that one of these climbs could actually kill my father. (I wondered how much a good urn costs in Italy.)

“How you doing, Dad?” I asked over my shoulder on a particularly cruel climb.

“Good...man.” I heard, between breaths.

Cresting the top of the climb, I kicked out of my pedals and waited for him. He pulled up to me like a beaten stray dog.

“Well that sucked,” I said.

“Brutal,” he laughed. “Even my eyebrows hurt.”

Yet somehow Dad seemed to get stronger with each day. Meanwhile, my body began to break down. I was hauling a 20-pound bag off my seatpost, which forced me to climb each hill from the seated position or risk tipping. As the trip wore on, my knee began screaming with every pedal stroke. I gobbled ibuprofen like Skittles, but nothing dulled the bone-on-bone torture. Doubt crept in, and I began to play out a scene in my head: unclipping and telling my dad I couldn’t go on.

“No, you got this buddy, you got this,” I kept telling myself. “You got this buddy, you got this.”

“What?” my dad asked.

“Nothing, nothing.” I mumbled.

The agony raging in my knee paled in comparison to the mental torture of letting my dad down. He had turned the trip over to me and now I was thinking about quitting.

When the situation couldn’t possibly get more desperate, it did. The cable to my back derailleur snapped like a severed tendon and got sucked into the bike’s frame. We were 40 miles into an 82-mile day, with the crux climb of more than 6,000 feet looming ahead of us. My knee was throbbing, and now I had lost my ability to shift.

We pulled to the side of the road. Dad and I flipped the bike. We studied the frayed cable for a long time in silence. We were in the middle of nowhere, and he was thinking what I was thinking: This is where the trip ends. There were forty miles of steep climbs ahead of us, and my bike was stuck in the big ring. It was impossible.

When I was a senior in college, Dad moved me into my house off campus on a frigid fall morning. We strapped a mattress to the roof of his car and set off on the hour-long ride. About halfway through the trip, a loud thud began echoing through the car. One of the ties had come free, and the mattress was flapping in the wind. But instead of pulling over and refastening the ties like reasonable people, Dad and I just rolled down our windows and held the mattress by hand for the next 30 minutes in the biting cold.

I learned a defining lesson that morning. For better or for worse, my father and I share a rationale that is one part fiendishness and one part raw will. If the solution comes down to a matter of suffering, nothing is impossible.

“I have an idea,” he said, perking up. “If we can get it in the easiest ring, you can climb the hills and then coast the rest.”

“Basically make it a singlespeed?”

“Exactly.”

He popped the spring out from the derailleur with a hex wrench. “Spin that,” he said. I cranked the pedal by hand while he manually shifted the gears until it was in the easiest ring.

“There,” he said, wiping his greasy fingers on his jersey.

I flipped the bike and reassessed: I now had one gear, one good leg, and one long-ass day ahead of me, but my attitude had shifted. Our hands were holding the mattress again, and we weren’t letting go no matter how cold it got. I threw my aching leg over the bike, squeezed a long sip of water into my mouth and shot him a grin.

“Ready?”

“Let’s do it,” he said.

One night during the trip, I received a text message from my mom, asking if we could call my grandfather. His condition had worsened and she was worried that we wouldn’t get back in time to see him. Dad had tears in his eyes as he spoke to his father 4,000 miles away. “I love you, Dad,” he said meekly, before turning the phone over to me. Papa’s voice was weak. “Are you taking care of your father?” he asked.

“We’re taking care of each other, Papa.”

Finally, after nearly two weeks of filling our jersey pockets with candy wrappers, emptying bottle after water bottle, and soaking in the Italian countryside, the village came into view. Nestled in the mountains of Abruzzo National Park, San Donato looked more magical than I’d ever dared imagine. A ray of sun pierced through the clouds and coated the village in a light that I can only describe as providential.

As we neared the town, I told Dad to take the lead so that I could take photos of him approaching.

“No,” he said abruptly. “I want you to lead us in.”

I pushed forward and the street narrowed into the grip of ancient buildings, leading me to the city center. Old men sat in the piazza, drinking cappuccino and smoking cigarettes. I coasted past them towards a tall stone monument in the center, erected in memory of those lost in World War II. As I clipped out of my pedals to get a better look, I spotted it, right at the top. A lump lodged in my throat. I waited for my dad to pull up alongside me. "Look," I said, nodding upwards.

He narrowed his eyes on the monument and immediately welled up into tears. We stood there silently, reading our last name in the stone. “You’re the best,” Dad said, his voice trembling. He pulled me in for a hug.

As I’d become aware that my grandfather was nearing the end of his road, I’d prodded him for words of wisdom. I was hoping that he would bestow some life lessons that he’d amassed over his 86 years. But no matter how I asked the question, it always came back to one simple answer: Family. Keep the family together.

I now understood more clearly what he meant. Family can seem like a foregone conclusion. Something that you’re just born into and accept as your reality. But that’s really just about genes and blood ties. True family takes time and effort to nurture. It’s about getting lost and pulling together, instead of being pulled apart. As with many lessons in my life, and that of my father’s, it took a long bike ride for us remember that for our family to stay balanced, we have to keep on pedaling.

Originally published on Bicycle.com