A Beautiful Story About A Peterborough Woman's Plan To Retrace Her Late Dad's Bike Trip In Ireland In 1973
/[UPDATE (July 7th): Huffington Post picks up our post.]
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ORIGINAL POST (July 6th)
Peterborough's Megan Murphy was broken and lost when her mother and father passed away—her Dad, Marty, in 2004 at age 57, and Mom, Mary, in 2012 at age 65.
She was depressed after their deaths—both lost battles with cancer, and Megan had been by their side all along—and had lost her spirit for life. She could barely breathe. And so, she did this a lot...
Her parents had been everything to her...
On the eve of her 35th birthday, she found herself returning her engagement ring to her newly titled “ex”-fiance after a five year relationship, packing up her small car with all her belongings, and moving back to her childhood home after her Mom's death...
Once there, she began going through all her parent's old belongings...
Among the belongings, tucked away in a long ignored box, was a diary of her Dad's she’d believed had been lost years before in a house fire. She read the diary. She was enthralled. In the wonderfully descriptive journals, her father wrote about a solo bicycle trip he had taken through southern Ireland in 1973 at age 26 when he was trying to "find himself". The diary chronicled his trip in the beautiful country, his ancestral home, and how this essentially became his journey into manhood.
Megan also found his 1973, 10 speed Peugeot hanging in the rafters of the family garage. It was on this bike, she writes, that her father discovered on his Ireland trip "the beauty of the country that was his ancestral home, the sacredness of solitude, the sting of loneliness, the joy of laughter and the value of his fellow man. He stopped. He took a moment to stand on the precipice and just breathe."
Megan became obsessed with the idea of re-creating her Dad's trip.
"Maybe if I go backwards and recreate this journey, I can find my own path forward," she writes. And live again. Be this Megan again...
Megan took that old, 40-year-old bike with such a rich history and refurbished it. And now it's this...
She brought it back to life and is training on it because she has an amazing plan. A beautiful plan. She's taking the bike, his journal and a film crew to Ireland to retrace his steps. To find her lost spark—"to find my whimsy again," she says.
Megan now, her Dad then
Megan, an actor, comedian and radio show host in Peterborough, is calling this documentary she'll be doing in Ireland, appropriately enough, Murphy's Law. She's funding it through inheritance money from her parents, and by raising money through an Indiegogo campaign. Her goal is $25,000, and she has raised more than $8,000 so far. She needs your help to keep the momentum going, and there is plenty...
Because really, her journey isn't just a personal one about finding herself and learning more about her Dad, her parents, her life, and what makes her happy. It's a universal one we all go through with finding ourselves, finding the meaning of life—and where we're supposed to fit in that. One Hollywood ending could have her meeting an Irishman and riding off into the Irish countryside on that bike with him...
And maybe marrying that Irishman, and having an awesome wedding and marriage like her parents...
Another narrative could be Megan just finding her true purpose in life. And being this again...
...and not this..
