Welcome to Life on GentleCycle

Our rambling life

Welcome Gentle Readers,

Susan and Jamie

We are Susan Carey and Jamie Wyant. In 2017 we sold our Salem, Oregon home and most of our possessions and moved with five elderly pets to Valencia, Spain.

After Lizzie, the best dog ever, and two of our four cats died, it was time to try something different. That's when we decided to ramble the world with one daypack, one suitcase, and one cat each. Sadly, we lost Ricco to kidney failure along the way and we were three. A few short months later Teej set aside the burdens of daily life and now it's just the two of us.

We write about our rambles, personal experiences, and what we learn from the people and places we encounter. We hope to influence you, our gentle readers, to consider your own journeys, whether stationary or mobile, internal or external.

About Life on GentleCycle

The basic idea of Life on Gentle Cycle first arose when we realized that we enjoyed slow, quiet, self-organized, semi-planned bicycle touring — an approach we called gentle cycling. When we retired it was like changing the setting on a washing machine from agitate and spin to "Gentle Cycle." The metaphor seemed to fit how our life had changed, so we kept it.

Our Companions Are Gone But Not Forgotten

Susan spent the last 16 years of her career at Willamette Humane. Sometimes we had 13 or so cats counting the litters we fostered in our guest bathroom. Not surprisingly, the companion animals who accompanied us to Spain all came from the pool of animals, unwanted, abandoned and discarded by others. Lucky for us -- these were the best friends we've had.

Living respectfully with companion animals has taught us that there’s no real boundary between us and the world -- no moral distinction between our welfare and the welfare of all beings.

If you want to keep up with new posts:

Like Life on GentleCycle on Facebook.

Use this RSS feed for email notifications.

No Sponsored Content

We don't have sponsored content on GentleCycle. We want you to know we aren’t being paid to say or promote anything. This is because we aim to keep our content honest. If we link to third party websites it is because we found the information there to be worthwhile.