Welcome Gentle Reader,

We are Susan Carey and Jamie Wyant. In 2017 we sold our Salem, Oregon home and most of our possessions.  We set out to meet new people, explore new places, and experiment with new ways of living.   After three years in Valencia, Spain, it was time to try something different.  For the unforeseeable future we plan to be slow vagabonds, traveling light — one daypack, one suitcase and one cat per person.  We’ll spend two or three months here or six months there.  Open to what will be.

We believe that to fulfill our time is better than to merely fill our time.  We are so lucky to be able to retire.  We’ve done the slog.  We’ve been up and down.  Our donkey years are finally over.  Now that we are “living on gentle cycle,” we have the health, freedom, and resources to reach even further into the development of our souls.

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 newly renamed blog, Life on GentleCycle is where we tell the story of our journey.  We are on more than one journey though.  There’s our vagabond journey through the world.  Then there’s the journey of continual becoming, the growing of our souls.

We use our blog and Facebook page, also called Life on GentleCycle, as catalysts ---> an incentive and reward system that motivate us to an engaged exploration of living gently in the world.  Which is to say, knowing that we will be sharing with you, gentle readers, motivates us “to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside us, to make our souls grow.”

We write about our personal experiences and what we learn from the people and places we encounter.  We hope to influence our gentle readers to consider their own journeys, whether stationary or mobile, internal or external, as opportunities to grow their souls.

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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.