The man selling the bicycle fabrication tools is named Erik. We’re sitting at a bar in Santa Cruz, eating pizza and drinking IPAs. We pretty much have the place to ourselves.

Erik tells me he’s thinking of eating psychedelic mushrooms, something he hasn’t yet done in life. He thinks he’ll “microdose,” he says.

I must talk him out of this insanity.

“The only way to trip,” I say, “is all the way.” “If you’re gonna eat mushrooms, eat the whole batch. A macrodose.”

I argue my point in terms Erik can appreciate. No stranger to outdoor adventure, I ask Erik to describe for me one of his bold excursions.

Erik has summited remote peaks, pedaled for days on end, and otherwise put himself at risk in the backcountry for the same reasons we all do.

He describes his typical solo backpacking trip: the anticipation, the fear, the work, the danger, the pain.

“And when the trip is complete?” I ask.

“Bliss,” Erik says.

“And so it is with the mushroom trip,” I say. “You might as well get a prescription to Ritalin if you intend to microdose. But if you want the lifechanging experience, it needs to be on the scale of summiting the mountain. A trip isn’t a trip unless it’s a journey.”

And so it is with the road trip, or any serious undertaking in life.

I must’ve questioned my decision to buy Erik’s tools a thousand times before I left for California. Full of doubt, I stuffed some clothes into a backpack, laid a bedroll in the back of my Jeep, and left home with elevated heart rate. I stopped to rent a trailer. After hitching it, I contemplated driving back home, but I continued on.

I stopped 30 minutes out of town in a McDonald’s parking lot and further deliberated.

It’s not that I was afraid of failing—not consciously, anyway. I was concerned that it was a decision in the wrong direction, inconsistent with certain values and, ultimately, irrational and unreasonable.

I also know that all acts of courage are irrational. “The heart has its reasons of which Reason knows not,” wrote Blaise Pascal.

I lit a cigar, turned up some music by Hermanos Gutierrez, and continued down the open road westward, arriving at Santa Cruz two days later.