Biking Belarus

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Scott Smoot (helmeted) with Suzanne and Dimitri at the Victory Monument in Minsk.

 

Am in Minsk. Meet me w/ Dimitri? I sent that text to my friend Suzanne when I knew that my bike path to Moscow would pass through the capital city of Belarus.

Minsk is the latest stop on a virtual itinerary of places I've lived or loved in the world. I apply the miles I ride on trails around Atlanta to my imagined trek. I make a postcard at each stop and write what's meaningful to me there.

While neither I nor Suzanne have been to Minsk, the family of her friend Dimitri immigrated from Belarus, so I took the opportunity to issue that euphonious invitation.

Suzanne's the one who could make such an impossible lunch date happen. One of her degrees is in project management, whereas I don't like to obligate myself to following any plan at all, even if it's just for lunch. So I've been grateful to her for pushing me into many adventures I might have missed: trips to Broadway, to New England, and to a cultural olio called Postmodern Jukebox.

I drew her out of her comfort zone to create roles for St. James Church's Mystery Dinner Theatre. We wrote scripts in-house that spoofed community concerns. For example, the name for Suzanne's character contained at least five different references that would amuse anyone from the Diocese of Atlanta, Sylva Candler-Stycks, Captain of the Altar Guild.

[Read about our plays Curse of the Waffling Bishop and What Slays in Vegas.]

To see more postcards of my world tour -- from NYC to LA, San Francisco to Quebec, Iceland to Ireland, and around Europe -- use the arrows (posted above and below).

Miles YTD 1320 || 2nd World Tour Total 14,855 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: Moscow

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.