12 Months On

12 Months On

So, I guess I didn’t exactly finish off this blog did I... I got kind of busy at the end of the trip and then busier when I got home. To anyone I hadn’t already bored into a stupor with my rambling, I’m sorry.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the trip in the last few days, as it’s the one year anniversary of me setting out. As it happens, I’m writing this on a flight back to the US (well I started writing it there anyway). 369 days have passed since discovering my bike rather bent out of shape at JFK. This time I’m flying to Boston for a somewhat shorter 2½ week trip down the east coast.

I suppose I should start by finishing off the story from last year. I think I’d got as far as Montana. After that I headed back to the west coast on another lovely overnight train journey. I had a couple of days in Seattle, including a trip round a fantastic sci-fi museum (yes, I’m sad). I took advantage of being in a big city for the first time in six weeks by enjoying a, let’s call it, broader range of food than had been on offer in small town Wyoming and Montana. From there I headed on to Portland for another great couple of days with Sean and Laura from Colorado, as Sean also had a house in Portland.

In Portland there’s a local chain of pubs called McMenamins. In addition to having a few “normal” locations, they’ve also bought up some really random ones. The two that still spring to mind are an old school, where they’ve turned the classrooms into different bars, and an old poor house, which now has numerous themed bars, restaurants and even two 18 hole par three golf courses. I swear I lost more balls in hedges than I got in holes and it was pretty much dark by the time we’d finished, but ordering more beers from, I guess, “waiters” driving round on golf carts was awesome.

I can’t remember if I mentioned this earlier, but I’d rejigged my plans earlier in the trip to create a spare week at the end for a trip to Hawaii and a bit of downtime. I won’t go into details here, because I don’t really have space and I’m always mindful of a song by Frank Turner called “I Really Don’t Care What You Did On Your Gap Year.” I’ll just leave it with these pictures and the advice that, if you get a chance to go, you really should.

As for adjusting back to normal life, it was actually remarkably easy. I’d come back with a plan for things I wanted to change in my life, and I set off to make it happen. I hope no one reading this minds if I don’t share every detail of that here (I’m not really the type to share too much about my personal life) and some bits are very much that. I’m actually pleased to say that it’s going relatively well. I decided to stay at work in my old job. The balance between leaving and searching for something that I’d get more satisfaction out of vs. staying and continuing to fight for the way I felt things should be done came down on the side of the latter. I realised that I was spending too much time getting frustrated by the here and now, and not enough focusing on the long term and the direction I wanted things to move in. I’m pleased to say that this is actually going pretty well. Work was never a big part of the plan though.

The rest of it was based on getting to a point where I enjoyed my life outside work more, as the solution to the problem of achieving some kind of work/life balance. I’ll always have work related things pulling me in one direction (I can’t help caring about it), and, if the alternative is sitting around trying to find something to watch on TV, then it’s always going to be hard to avoid the lure of doing that extra little bit of work. Therefore less time for anything else, therefore even less outside work, therefore do more work, therefore less time for anything else... You get the idea. I needed a few things outside of work to make that side of my life more appealing. (This isn’t meant as a criticism of my friends in Leeds, before any gets offended. Entirely self inflicted.)

The first step in this was to make a physical move up to Edinburgh. As a city, I absolutely adore it, and the idea of living there really excited me. I moved about seven months ago now and found a beautiful flat in an old Georgian tenement block, and ever since I’ve been settling into the area and trying to make a life for myself there. Some things are going faster than others, but it was never going to be an overnight process. I’m even learning to drive! Yes, I should have done this a long time ago, but I really had never wanted a car before. The temptation of being able to get out into The Highlands at the weekend is strong enough to make the difference though. That and the fact that I now live 12 miles from work and, although I cycle in most of the time, it would be nice if my second option was a car rather than a half hour bus journey followed by a half hour walk.

Anyway, there you have my update. Thanks to those people who made nice comments about my blog. They were really appreciated. I don’t think blogging about my life is something I’ll continue with though. There just wouldn’t be enough to write about! Maybe a more political blog under a pseudonym. I was about to ask people to post suggestions, but that would defeat the point of the pseudonym really. It’s taken me a couple of sittings to write this, so I’m now on day four of the trip and on a train from Philadelphia to Washington D.C. I hope everyone else has had as good a year as me.

Andy

Yellowstone, Montana, Broken Bikes and Illness

West Yellowstone is the Yellowstone equivalent of Estes Park that I mentioned in my previous post. They’re both little towns right on the edges of a National Parks, which seem to exist almost solely to provide the valuable services of accommodation, food and entertainment to those spending their days enjoying the beautiful nearby surroundings. As I cycled down the little road between the core of Yellowstone Park and West Yellowstone on a Saturday morning, a line of traffic about six miles long and growing on the other side of the road, I knew I’d made the right decision to make sure I got through the Park before the weekend.

I took the next day off and went to one of the visitors centres, which had some films about the park and bears showing in an IMAX cinema. Having nearly dozed off before the films even started and again many times during it, I wandered back to my room to take a nap. Waking up as it got dark, 6 hours later. I ate breakfast the next morning at the same place I’d been to the day before, where the quality and sheer size of the blueberry pancakes was just (and only just) enough to offset the completely disorganised service.

Next came the relatively small town of Ennis, followed by the slightly larger town of Dillon. And this is where the problems really kicked in.

I was carrying three spare inner tubes, which I figured, unless I was really unlucky, would be enough to last me until the next bike shop on my route. Before the ride to Dillon, I’d known for a week or so that my rear tire really needed replacing. By the time I reached Dillon it had about 1,400 miles under it and was, to put it simply, knackered. I was probably being picky by not replacing it earlier, but I was looking for exactly the kind of tire I wanted, which didn’t seem to be that common. I’d only been passed one bike shop I think and the only tires they carried that were the right size were more akin to mountain bike tires (i.e. big and chunky, which slows you down), as opposed to the relatively small amount of tread I wanted on mine.

On the ride to Ennis, I’d had one puncture that required a change of tube. The next morning it was flat again, so I pumped it up and hoped that the puncture was a really really slow one. After less than 10 miles I had to accept it was not and burnt my second tube. I spent about 40 minutes half way up a climb, looking out over a beautiful valley, swapping the tires between front and back to try and minimise the amount of weight on the most in trouble one, but they’re both pretty worn at this point.

Later in the day, I had to change, what was now my front tire, again and somehow it was flat again(!!!!) the next morning. Still, Dillon had a bike shop, so I pumped it up enough to roll round town and headed off to find it. When I arrived there were no signs of life and a sign on the door with the pretty limited opening hours (4pm-7pm Monday and Thursday). This was at 10am Wednesday. I went round a few local stores to see if they could recommend anything, but just left further discouraged after they waxed lyrical about how great the guys who ran the bike shop were only to say that they were also pretty unreliable and there was every chance they might not bother opening the shop the next day.

What followed was one of those chains of events that always leads me to believe I’m an extraordinarily lucky person and probably leads many others to hate me for the exact same reason. I honestly believe that these things happen when you act properly, really have time for completely random people and smile a lot, but there you go. It started with me deciding that my best option was to hitch my way out of town. There was an interstate that passed through, so I found a petrol station near the exit for the town.

As a random aside here, petrol, sorry, gas stations in Montana were amazing. Gambling is legal throughout the entire state and every single gas station seemed to come with an integrated casino.

Before I started hitching, I thought I should go into the gas station to ask their permission to stand on the road outside and try to get their customers to give me a lift. Although I’ve done it before, I also thought I’d get their thoughts on where best to hitch from. That prompted the staff to start chatting and suggest across the road, which was where I was going anyway, but also to suggest a car tire place just round the corner that they thought might have bike tires. I nearly wrote it off but, after 10 minutes of completely fruitless hitching I got bored and went to check the tire place out. With no hope what so ever I walked in to beg for help, where I met the wonderful Cici and for some reason she decided to ignore her own job for a bit and solve all my problems for me. Although they, obviously, didn’t sell bike tires, she started calling round lots of random local stores for me until she found somewhere that might be able to help me. It turned out a couple of kind of “all purpose cheap” stores in town also sold bikes (mainly kids ones), but one of them also sold tires in my wheel size. So I headed off over there, where it turned into goldilocks and the three bears with a rubbish ending, as there was one a little too small and one a little too large, but nothing quite right, so I left before the bears could turn up and eat me. After failing at hitching again for a couple of hours I went back to the tire place to say thank you to Cici and she mentioned that there was a Greyhound bus that passed through town at 4pm. After that it was a simple matter of going back to the shop that we’d found before to get a bike box and finding ‘Jim’s Smoke Shop’, where I could buy a ticket, boxing up the bike, a few hours on the bus and I was in Missoula.

Missoula is one of the biggest cities in Montana and also very much a centre for cycling. Plenty of bike shops around, even if the staff in the one I went to were pretty snobby. Unfortunately, after fixing the bike and one very nice day in town, I managed to catch a pretty nasty stomach bug, which just knocked me completely flat. I hardly managed to leave my room for three days, surviving on a little bit of food that I managed to get on a dash to the supermarket and the kindness of the lovely lady who owned the little motel.

As I’m pretty sure everyone reading this will know, even when you start feeling better, you certainly don’t feel up to doing huge amounts of exercise. Because the trip was getting near the end and I was pressed for time, I wasn’t able to hang around another couple of days just waiting. Instead I had to get back on the bus again. All in all, the buses took me about 350 miles through beautiful countryside that I would dearly love to have ridden, but c’est la vie. No use in holding onto the anger.

The bus took me as far as Kalispell, where I checked into one of the nicer rooms that I’ve had on the trip, ordered pizza, so I had something to nibble on all day and rested up, so I could ride the following morning. From there I rode up to Glacier National Park. Having been ill, I decided at the last minute to book a room in a motel just outside the Park, which already had the most stunning views.

There I had a nice evening with three English guys, two of whom now live in the US, who had got together for a long weekend of hiking. It was fun winding them up with tales of precautions they needed to take against bears.

The road into Glacier Park itself is fairly narrow and steep, so there are quite a few restrictions on when you are allowed to ride bikes on the road. I’d planned to ride up to a pass over the continental divide (for the final time) and bikes weren’t allowed on the last bit of the climb after 11am, which meant starting at first light. Quite a few people had actually told me that the ride is beautiful done at night under a full moon. Unfortunately, although I happened to have arrived at the right time, it was far too cloudy. The motel was good enough to store all my stuff, so I got to do the climb carrying 20kg less weight. Less challenging riding = even more time to enjoy the beautiful views.

The lovely people at the motel then let me have a shower and gave me a ride the train station, which was 25 miles away.


Anyway, I’m now in Seattle (and this blog is almost up to date!!!!!!!!!!!). I’m sat having a quick drink in what is supposedly the original Starbucks, before taking a tour of the Seattle Seahawks stadium and doing some shopping. I’ve spent the last 2½ months with just three t-shirts, but as my cycling is done I can stop caring as much about weight or space for extra food and carry enough t-shirts that I don’t have to do washing twice a week.

(Should add, to avoid confusion that I was in Seattle when I wrote most of this blog. I just haven’t had chance to finish it until now.)

Wind, Wyoming & Lots of National Parks

With my body in a rather worse state than when I’d arrived and feeling very much in need of more sleep, I begrudgingly left Boulder to ride back up into the Rocky Mountains. Estes Park is known as the “gateway” to Rocky Mountain National Park, which, being right by the gate, I guess it is. Very much a tourist town it was a shortish ride, but substantial climb. Maybe it was an omen for how the next few weeks were going to go, but within about 20 miles I was dealing with my second puncture of the trip. Instead of the parking lot of a fast food restaurant, as the first had been, this time I was fixing it in the baking sun on the side of a twisty mountain road.

I’d actually planned to ride much further that day to make up for leaving Boulder a day late, but, by the time I fell into Estes midafternoon, it was pretty clear I wasn’t going any further that day. Maybe it had something to do with the hangover.

I was hoping to ride up into the Park the next morning, but as soon as I stuck my head outside it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen. Some pretty imposing dark clouds had taken up station barely above the sides of the valley I was in and completely obscured the huge peaks of the National Park. I popped down to the local bike shop for a new spare inner tube and some advice from the locals, which was basically to go back to bed and forget about riding anywhere. I think I ended up ordering takeaway pizza, because from 11am it just lashed it down for hours.

The next morning things looked a good deal better, but I arrived at the park entrance to be told that the road through was closed for the foreseeable future, whilst they cleared the snow and ice that had been left over from the previous day’s storms and the corresponding low overnight temperatures. Panicked at the thought of losing another day (not sure why now), I was just plotting alternative routes, trying to get mobile phone reception to call the friends I’d been staying with over the weekend and talking to Rangers about what conditions would be like if they managed to open the road. I was just about to ride back into town to make a phone call, when one of the Rangers I’d been talking to stuck his head round the door to say “oh actually, the road’s open now. It’ll all be fine.” So off I went.

(Random aside, because the conductor on the train I’m on just created the word “detraining” to mean getting off the train)

The climb into the national park took me to the highest point of the whole trip, at over 12,000ft. Once I got above 11,000ft, I was up in the clouds and visibility started to deteriorate.

In the end it just became unsafe to ride. Visibility dropped to about 20 yards and, although I did have lights, cars were coming up behind me with a speed difference of 15-20mph, which didn’t leave them a lot of reaction time. There was no sign of the fog lifting, so I decided to start hitching. Amazingly some cars still didn’t have their lights on and they really were completely invisible until they were almost upon me. One very nice family did stop, but their estate car was already crammed with two parents, three kids and all their luggage. They offered to try and slide my bike across the top of it all, which would have left one end hanging over the kids heads, but it was dangerous to try and do it where we were. I turned round and rode back down to the previous lay-by, where I got a lift in seconds from a retired couple.

I stayed with them to the summit through snowstorms, lightening and roadwork, before parting company for the ride down. Even with three layers and gloves on, I had to stop every couple of miles to warm my hands up before they froze to the brake levers. There was a lot of water on the road as well and I really missed the mudguards on my old bike.

To try and get back on track, I made the following day the longest of the trip at 110 miles. It felt so nice not to have mountains to climb that riding was easy and I left Colorado for Wyoming. This also took me back onto a route followed by cyclists riding coast to coast, and camping that night I met a couple of very nice Dutch ladies who I would see a number of times over the next few days.

We joked about the fact that there seemed to have been an inch wide crack across the road shoulder every 10 yards for the previous 30 miles, each of which had a similar affect to a small speed bump. Little did we know, riding conditions were about to get a lot tougher. The next day was a 60 mile ride across the rolling Wyoming plains, which were pretty exposed to the 30+mph wind blowing in from the west (gust up to 50mph I was told!). The last 20 miles of the day, my route turned due west, straight into the teeth of the wind, and I think it ended up taking me about 3 hours when just over 1 would have been more normal given the road. When I caught up with them again a couple of days later, I heard that the Dutch ladies had been blown off the road a couple of times by the cross winds earlier in the day and hadn't even tried to ride into it. They just got a lift. Wish I’d done the same to be honest. At least with hills you know that there must a corresponding descent somewhere along the line. The wind just saps your energy with nothing in return. I had a day off the next day to watch the world cup final, because there simply wasn’t anywhere but my hotel room that I thought I’d be able to guarantee finding it.

Certainly not in my next point of call, Jeffrey City. This is another one of those places that is a city by name, whilst failing to meet pretty much any other reasonable definition. I was told there was a campsite there and a motel, as well as a bar that was run by a lady who didn’t like cyclists very much. On arriving I decided that was probably charitable. The motel did exist, but it looked like none of the rooms had been rented out in some time. There was a note on the door of the office to say that, if you wanted a room, you needed to go see so-and-so at the liquor store, which was also looked like it hadn't been open in some time. The campsite, then, was just a patch of ground next to a little shack with some benches in. In truth, it would have been perfectly fine, were it not for the fact that Jeffrey City is quite near a river and has quite a sizeable problem with mosquitoes. If you were outside, as soon as you stopped moving, they descended on you.

That left the bar. And when I say left the bar, I mean it. It was the only business in town that appeared to be operating. What I’d been told about it on the other hand, was complete junk. The lady who ran the place was absolutely lovely and looked after me very well. I stayed and chatted to her and the other people who came in all evening (one even drove home and back to get me a can of bug spray). From them I got the other side of what I’d heard about the place from cyclists. Here was a story about a bunch of tourists coming through, complaining about the lack of facilities in the town (as though it is the fault of the people in the bar), complaining about the lack of food choice and that they didn’t have the TV on ESPN. Treating the locals like dirt, because they couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live in a town like that. To said locals, the bar was like a little community centre. It was about the only place in town with wifi. Several people left their laptops there and they’d get together to play games online. When groups of outsiders turn up and just start whinging, I guess it is pretty understandable that they don’t get a great reception.

Three more days riding (still into the wind, still miserable) took me up to the Togwotee Pass across the Continental Divide again and down towards the Tetons. I’d been told tales of these imposing mountains, which appear to just rise straight up out of the ground, all jagged edges and spiky peaks, but I’d kind of written them off as “just another chain of mountains.” Of which I’d seen plenty. Wow was I wrong!

I stayed there for a night on a cute little campsite before riding up into Yellowstone National Park the following day. Where the Tetons far exceeded my expectations, Yellowstone was a bit more of a meh. Don’t get me wrong, sheer range and unusualness of the geological features make it impressive, but I guess when it comes to this kind thing I like being smacked in the face by the scale of it. Yellowstone was more of a “we’ve got this, and this, and this, and this, and this...,” but unfortunately the place is huge and I didn’t have time to see it all.

Still I thought you’d all appreciate a video I took of Old Faithful erupting. It's difficult to gauge scale, but all that is going on about 150 metres away.

A weekend out of the mountains and current delays

So the observant amongst you may have realised that I didn’t actually cover the promised three weeks in my previous entry, or maybe you just got lost in my rambling and it just felt like three weeks to you? Sorry. I’m going to be a little less ambitious this time and just tell you about what must go down as the most fun weekends of my trip so far. Certainly more so than the current one.

From Gunnison I rode to Salida, which is another very outdoorsy little town in Colorado and marked the halfway point in my trip timewise (thanks again Katie for picking me up when I needed it). After that, and another beautiful mountain pass, I dropped down into an area filled with world famous ski resorts, Breckenridge, Frisco, Vail and Aspen amongst them. Even in the summer they weren’t exactly quiet and were definitely still expensive. In Breckenridge I stayed at a little B&B/Hostel owned by an English couple, who’d moved to the area many years earlier for work and decided to stay. I also ran into a couple of really interesting guys who were hiking the continental divide. One of them with his two huskies, which sounded great fun.

When I was in Durango a few weeks earlier I’d promised a couple of the guys I met (Sean and Eric), who lived in Boulder, that I would do my best to go visit them. I was also really keen to go visit Brian who I’d met in San Francisco, who lived in Denver. To do this meant dropping down out of the mountains for a few days and onto the plains to the East (only just mind). The border between the two is so distinct, so final, that it’s an amazing view in either direction.

Apparently people don’t cycle from one to the other though. The main route down to Denver for cars is an interstate, which I wasn’t allowed to ride on and the only route that I could find descended through a pretty narrow canyon, which was a massive amount of fun, from a town called Black Hawk. Gambling used to be illegal everywhere in Colorado, but 20 years ago it was legalised in Black Hawk and the adjacent Central City, which were both old 19th century mining towns. Although this has regenerated the area, all these towns are is a series of casinos. Black Hawk actually has a population of just 118. Central City (the larger of the two) was actually quite cute, as laws have essentially kept the outside of most of the old buildings intact. Black Hawk was not. In fact the city has recently banned bikes on the basis that there isn’t enough space on the roads for cars, buses, trucks and bikes. If I’d been caught riding, I would have been fined $68! After riding about 80 miles that day, I had to spend 20 minutes walking the final one, which was kind of frustrating.

Most people at home will know that I’m not exactly a gambling man, so are probably wondering why I’d want to visit a place like this. Basically I thought it would make a change and it actually turned into one of the best evenings of my trip. I’d managed to get a last minute deal on a room in one of casinos and I think it was almost certainly the nicest room I’ve had in three months. I had set myself a budget of $100 that I was going to go gamble with that night. Then I discovered that the casino had a really nice steakhouse and, predictably, my plans changed somewhat. One fantastic meal and bottle of wine later, and with $90 of my budget handed over to the restaurant I thought I’d play some black jack, which was a very short experience. I sat down at the table and changed $5 of my remaining $10 and had it pointed out to me that the minimum bet was actually $10 (so the stack of chips the Japanese business man at the other end of the table must have been worth well over a grand). Anyway, so I only had one hand. First card Jack. Second card Ace. $15 won. Still, only enough money for two more hands, so I figured I should take my winnings and run.

The following morning I was expecting a 30 mile ride down into Denver. As I got onto the outskirts I was caught up by a local guy out for a ride. We rode along chatting for five minutes and he offered to take me on a bit of a loop further round to show me some of sites and get me as far as a bike path that would take me into the city centre. We even spent twenty minutes sat up on a ridge, whilst he dialled into a conference call (my brain hadn’t thought the phrase conference call in some time!). The highlight was probably the spectacular Red Rocks Amphitheatre, where a natural rock formation in Red Rocks Park has created an amazing (and apparently acoustically stunning) outdoor concert venue that has played host to the likes of The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, U2 and, this weekend the apparently huge locally and amazingly named, although I’d never heard of them, String Cheese Incident.

I’d managed to find a dirt cheap motel only about a mile from downtown Denver, so after a nice ride down some pretty bike paths, which were a lot nicer than wading through city traffic, and getting settled I headed into town to find something to eat. Having not been to a big city for a month, I promptly got very confused by the shear range of options available to me and ended up wandering round for an hour before choosing somewhere. I think it was at this moment when I realised I actually missed city life. Yes it’s nice to get out in the country, but, to live, wow it’s nice to have all this other stuff around.

The following evening I was meeting up with Brian to go watch a baseball game. I’d been trying to catch one ever since I got into the country and it just hadn’t worked out, so I was really looking forward to it. As expected we didn’t actually watch the baseball that closely. In fact we didn’t even go find our seats until about 2/3rds of the way through. Instead we just wandered around the outfield on an open walkway, ate a hot dog and drank a few beers. Once we did go sit down, there was a great view of the sunset over the mountains. It being Independence Day weekend, we were all given little American flags on our way into the stadium (Jess, I’m keeping it for your going away party) and they had a huge fireworks display.

The fireworks were a great idea, but before they could set them off they had to empty some of the stands onto the outfield. A process that, thanks to making people walk the entire length of the stadium twice in roped off cordons, took a really long time. Worth it though.

Brian and I had missed last orders at the bar in the stadium. Basically they serve until the end of the 7th inning, but, thanks for a pitiful performance from the Colorado Rockies batters in the second half of the 7th, we didn’t make it to the front of the queue in time. After the game we headed off to a nearby bar with one of Brian’s friends, Shaunna, and her boyfriend Andrew.

The next morning I rode over towards Boulder to meet Sean and Eric, where we had another mountain bike ride planned. I ended up slightly late as the ride wasn’t quite the nice flat cruise I’d been led to believe and the temperatures down on the plains were quite a bit higher than I’d been used to up in the mountains.

We’d planned about a 20 mile route going out from and returning to Eric’s house, but midway through the guys made the excellent suggestion that we finish up at one of the local micro breweries for a couple of beers. Eric’s lovely wife was good enough to come down and pick us up, so we could grab a shower before going out for dinner and hitting the town. For anyone interested, Boulder definitely had the best (and largest amount of) breweries of anywhere I’ve been on the trip.

The Sunday was Independence Day and I was lucky enough to join Sean, his girlfriend Laura and two rather excitable but (worryingly) adorable little dogs in spending it at a beautiful house on a lake with a keg, bbq, several of Sean’s old work colleagues and their families. Horrible way to spend a day. In fact it was made even more spectacular when a huge thunderstorm rolled through late in the afternoon. Although it drove us inside and put paid to most of the big fireworks displays around, I couldn’t help but stand out on the decking staring up into the sky. I didn’t have my camera with me, but quite a few others were taking photos. I’m trying to get some of those.

The next two houses down were defying the rain and launching their fireworks anyway, so Sean and I positioned ourselves right between the two and got happily damp as guys did their best not to kill themselves in setting them off. Eventually out came the tequila with each shot followed by a round of head butts. Participated in somewhat more enthusiastically by some than others, which I’d imagine was fairly highly correlated with the degree to which a person’s head hurt the following day.

I woke up pretty early the next morning and walked out into the lounge to get a drink just as the sun was coming up over the lake and reflecting off the beautiful dark wood floors. We stayed the following morning for a boat trip, swim in the lake and a quick lunch before driving back to Boulder. I’d planned to leave that evening for a short ride back up into the mountains, but we seemed to manage to find ways to use up time (leaving slightly late, deciding to get an appointment at the Apple store in Boulder to try and get my IPod fixed, missing said appointment and getting a later one, getting some food in a restaurant whilst waiting for appointment, demonstrating to girl in Apple store that I wasn’t being dumb and that the thing really was stuck in a never before seen loop. Ok, so that’s mostly IPod related). By the time we’d finished it was nearly 6pm and far too late to set off, so instead we had another drink and then it gave Sean and Laura the opportunity to show me a bit more of Boulder. Didn’t quite manage to get to bed as early as we planned though.

I didn’t really want to leave when it got to Tuesday morning, but I was sent on my way again with a great breakfast in my stomach and a very interesting book from Laura.

As for now, I was nearing the end of the cycling part of my trip, but it appears it may have ended sooner than planned, which is a real shame. Last week one of my tires essentially gave up the ghost. I had been carrying three spare inner tubes with me and I had to use all of them in just over 24 hours. This got me as far as the biggest town in the area, Dillon with a population of about 2,000, which is apparently the hometown of Eric Daniels, who is the Chief Exec for the bank I work at (or so says Wikipedia).

It was a nice little town, but didn’t have the spares I needed and I ended up getting a bus for 200 miles to the last big place on the route, Missoula, population about 65,000, where I was easily able to get it fixed, but immediately caught a stomach bug that has completely knocked me out for the last few days. The lady who runs the motel is taking care of me and has been to pick me up some stuff from the supermarket and brought me breakfast yesterday. I’m a little better now than I was a couple of days ago (in the sense that I can leave my room), but I’m nowhere near a fit state to ride and I can’t really afford to lose any more time here, so tomorrow morning I’m getting back on the buses again to somewhere near Glacier National Park. If I can recover in another couple of days, I’ll be able to ride through the park, which I’m desperate to do, but otherwise it’s a bus tour. Either way, by next weekend I’ll have taken the train back to the West Coast. Rather a depressing week all in all, but please don’t feel sorry for me. It’s all part of the adventure and is making for some interesting stories.

Durango to Gunnison

I’ve rewritten this introduction, because I wanted to talk a bit about the fact I’m struggling slightly at the moment. It’s not that I don’t want to be here and I’m desperate not to waste the rest of my trip, because I realise how lucky I am to have this opportunity. That said, I’m starting to find things a bit tough. One of the major reasons for this trip was to think about my future and make some decisions. I feel like I’ve made those decisions now and I’m eager to get on with things (I’ll wait until I get back before talking about what though, because in certain senses it’s more an order of priority than set plans and there are people I need to talk to first). I’ve never been someone who wanted to go travelling for six months or so and I definitely needed a break, but now I think my brain is a little bored. On top of that, cycling all day most days leaves you with a lot of time to think, and I feel like I’ve run out of original thoughts, which just makes the days take longer.

I’ve been in Wyoming for a couple of days now, which isn’t helping matters. It’s the kind of place where you can see the road stretching out in front of you for miles, which is spectacular in a different way to the other places I’ve been, though not bad in itself. As you can imagine though, it’s a landscape where the wind just blows straight across the plains. Thankfully it seems to have dropped a little for tomorrow, but for the last three days I’ve been riding either into or across winds between about 20 and 50mph. To give you an idea, on not particularly hilly terrain with no wind, I probably average about 17mph. The last 20 miles yesterday was on exactly that kind of terrain, but straight into the wind, and I averaged about 7mph.

Anyway, I’m going to try and speed through about three weeks in one entry here, because I’ve slipped about four weeks behind. Ooops.

Descending makes climbing entirely worthwhile. I think my favourite descent of the whole trip was down into Durango. Ten miles downhill through a sweeping canyon. Straight into a huge cloud of flies that were buzzing around the traffic lights at the bottom where you turn into town. Never did find out what had died, but I did get lots of sympathetic looks from the people in cars as they rolled up their windows. The downside was that I had to go back up the exact same hill to get out of town again three days later.

The reason I was turning back on myself was to visit Mesa Verde National Park. Whereas most National Parks were created to celebrate great natural landmarks, Mesa Verde is dedicated to human achievements. About 800 years ago the “Ancient” Puebloans (I’m not sure something 800 years old is ancient, but there you go), began building their dwellings on natural shelves formed part way down cliffs. Often the only way to get to and from them was to just climb straight up and down to the cliff top or valley floor. The ruins themselves were interesting enough, but certainly didn’t want comparison to the Mayan ruins in Central America or the great temples of Ancient Egypt. What made it worth the visit was the setting.

I very nearly didn’t get there at all. One of the people I met in Colorado told me they pretty much have three seasons. Winter, spring and road works. When I turned off the main road to head into the park there was a sign saying that the road into the park was being resurfaced and that it wasn’t suitable for bikes. I had a chat with the ranger at the gate and we figured it would probably be ok. The advantage of having a touring bike like mine, as opposed to a full road bike, is that the slightly chunkier tyres can cope with a bit of gravel and bumpy surfaces. Getting into the park involved about a 15 mile ride and a couple of thousand feet of climbing. The lower surface was gravel, whilst from about 4 miles onwards they’d just ripped the top surface off the road leaving just a ridged underlayer. On the way back down, I honestly thought my arms were going to fall off the bike was bouncing around that much.

From there I rode up into the mountains proper for the first time where I met Jeff, a college professor, and Kevin, one of his students who were riding coast to coast over their summer break. We all ended up staying at newly opened hotel in a little town called Rico, which was basically a big old house that where each bedroom was let separately. It even had a little kitchen we could use. Sort of a cross between a hotel and a hostel. The lovely lady who owned it let the others stay for free in return for creating a facebook page for the hotel.

The next morning I climbed up over 10,000ft to go over my first proper mountain pass. I’m not quite sure how to describe it the feeling when I got to the top. I’d done most of the climbing the previous day and probably only left myself with about 10 miles and about 1,500ft to climb, but it was still a slog up through a long, narrow valley with endless banks of evergreens lining the sides. Then, all of a sudden, the landscape just opened up and I was on the edge of a grassy plateau ringed by jagged snow capped peaks. The sweat (and very nearly tears, but they were avoided by venting out loud and quite a bit of swearing) was absolutely worth it.

Aside from the scenery and sense of satisfaction, by far the biggest reward from climbing is that you have to come down the other side. That day was actually my second longest of the trip so far, as I topped 100 miles. I stopped for lunch part way down in a little town called Telluride, which in the winter is a very popular ski resort. It’s in what’s called a box canyon, which basically means that you can only get in at one end. It’s your archetypal tourist honey pot. Beautiful with lots to do and correspondingly expensive.

Because the town itself is in a canyon, it’s expansion is limited, so they’ve built a big ski resort up in the mountains above the town to house the many visitors in winter (and quite a few in summer by the looks of things). The two areas are connected by means of a cable car, with the actual ski area in the middle, and I got the cable car up with my bike, so that I could ride see the resort and ride down the hill again. Man, did I regret it. The resort itself looked like someone had taken seen a picture of a little Swiss alpine town and turned it into a pavilion at EPCOT (anyone who’s been there will know the kind of thing I mean), then taken a photo of that and expanded it into a full resort. On top of that the whole place was just a maze and it took me half an hour of riding up and down fake landscaped hills to find my way back to the main road. At least I got to do the 1,000ft descent back down to the valley bottom again.

From there it was mostly downhill and once I dropped back below about 7,000ft the terrain just shifted back from alpine forest to high desert.

As my odometer ticked over to 100miles for the day I arrived in Montrose, which has a population of about 12,000 making it the biggest town for 100s of miles. Enjoying a return to civilisation, I decided to take a day off. It also gave me a chance to go to the cinema and watch Toy Story 3 (awesome!).

About my only big disappointment of the trip was that getting a train from California to Eastern Utah meant I missed the Grand Canyon and Canyonlands National Parks. Because of this, I put slogged my way up an incredibly steep 10mile climb to the somewhat long-windedly named Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. I’m so glad I did. I was just sweeping down a hill into the park expecting the canyon to be a bit further on when all of a sudden it was right there in my face. Queue me shouting out loud. Much to the amusement of the girl stood at the side of the road surveying visitors. The photos I’ve got really don’t do justice to the steepness and depth of the thing.

That night I ended up stuck in a motel that was rather more expensive than I’d have liked, because I happened to arrive in Gunnison (the town, rather than the National Park) at about 8pm on the day that the cycling Tour of Colorado also finished there. The only room left was in a motel just outside of town and they knew it, so were price gouging. I managed to negotiate them down, but at least it gave me somewhere nice to watch England getting thrashed by Germany the following morning!

Salt Lake City to Durango

My 17 hour train journey dropped me in Salt Lake City, as the sun rose over, somewhat unexpectedly, mountains. No lake in sight. I don’t research these things too well in advance. Unfortunately there wasn’t much sun visible either, as it was obscured behind quite a lot of rain clouds.

My bike had been boxed up before putting it on the train, so, after the damage my last bike took on the flight out to the US, I was understandably a little worried. Thankfully everything was fine. I managed to drag the box as far as the Greyhound bus terminal to put it back together and ride to my motel. I was hoping for a (very) early check in. Partly because I needed a shower and a bit more sleep, but mainly because it was the day of the England vs. USA game in the world cup and I was already sufficiently concerned for our performance that I planned to watch it on my own rather than in a bar where I was likely to be the only Englishman. I also had contingency plans in place to go hide under a rock for two weeks if we lost. As it was, I actually slept for so long that I missed the England goal.

It says something that, barring one calamitous piece of goalkeeping, we would have won the group and, despite our complete lack of pace and creativity through the core of the team, could have made it to the semi-finals, but I don’t think this should lessen the fact that our performances were well below the level most of us had probably expected a year ago.

The combination of rubbish whether, rubbish football and the fact that there only seemed to be about four people in the whole city weren’t combining to make Salt Lake City seem like the most appealing place in the world.

I went for a quick ride to explore, but I didn’t want to stay up too late, because I knew I had a 9am bus in the morning and my bike needed to be taken apart and boxed up again. Salt Lake City was founded by a group of Mormon’s and is still the headquarters of the church. The one thing I’d been told not to miss was the Temple and it was definitely the closest I’ve seen in the US to the grand old cathedrals of Europe.

My bus journey took me another couple of hundred miles down the road to Green River, in Eastern Utah, where I was essentially deposited at what seemed to be a truck stop in the desert. I knew I had a 50 mile ride with absolutely no services along the way, so thankfully there was a diner that had all you can eat spaghetti for lunch, yum.

That day I was heading for Moab, which has a reputation is a pretty cool little town in the desert with lots of opportunities for mountain biking and rafting. The main reason I was going, however, was Arches National Park, which is an amazing area where different types of rock and the way they each respond to the irresistible force of erosion has produced some spectacular rock formations. All of this takes place in front of the huge and snow capped La Sal mountain range, which forms part of the western Rockies.

To me the deserts have been by far most spectacular landscapes. Everything else has been similar to what we have at home or elsewhere I’ve been, albeit on a smaller scale. The deserts have been almost unreal. Too much to take in. Enough to make me wish I’d spent more time there, although I did get lucky because the heat wasn’t too severe. In fact, prior to today (but that’s a whole different story), the only time I’ve got really soaked on this trip was on the ride to Moab. The heavens opened, the hailstones were bruise inducing and in about 5 minutes the road was just swimming with water. A couple in an RV were very nice and slowed down to check I was ok, but by that stage I was already wetter than Marty Pellow and would just have got their car sopping wet too.

From Moab I was heading for Southern Colorado and on the way I got to see some truly desperate small towns. I read a book earlier in the trip by Thomas Frank about politics in Kansas and what leads a fundamentally working class state to continue to elect very conservative Republican politicians. One of his major points was that it’s a response to a perception of the Democrats as smug, academic and out of touch with the strong values held by people in Kansas, unfortunately this smug, academic and slightly taunting polemic was exactly that. Definitely one of these books written to amuse those who already agree with you. That said hidden in the rants are some interesting points. One of which is about the decline of many small towns in Kansas, which simply don’t produce anything, leaving correspondingly high rates of unemployment, where those that can get out do and the population gradually ages away to nothing. Some consider this a tragedy and a decline of a traditional way of life and maybe it is. What he claims characterises these towns is that the only businesses that seem to service are second hand shops. Having ridden through a number of similar areas in Eastern Utah and South Western Colorado, I am definitely starting to see what he was getting at.

The riding conditions here were a lot tougher than in California. The temperatures were higher, the sun stronger and, importantly, I’d made a jump to a higher altitude. Moab is at a higher altitude than Ben Nevis and the day I left I climbed another 3,000ft to above the 7,000 level and the Colorado plateau, and I haven’t really been below this since. Although I thought I adjusted pretty quickly, with hindsight I don’t think this was the case. After five days riding back to back, I felt like I needed a break, so I headed to Durango for a long weekend, because I thought it would be a bit livelier than anywhere else in the area.

Even someone who is as happy with their own company as I am wants to be sociable occasionally, so whenever I’m in somewhere that has a hostel I try to stay there. When I was in some of the bigger cities on the west coast this didn’t work that well, because I didn’t have a great deal in common with most of the people I met (aside from a few notable exceptions), because, for a start, I’d had a job at some point in my life. On the other hand, in the smaller towns I’ve met plenty of really nice people. The hostel in Durango in particular was probably the best I’ve ever stayed in. It felt more like a little house, which I guess it was, but to the point that you actively wanted to keep the place clean and tidy, because someone had obviously gone a lot of effort.

One top of that, I just lucked out and ended up there at the same time as a really good bunch of people. There was Daniel from Portland who had just finished an awesome 4 day ride road some of the mountains around Durango, Sean and Eric from Boulder who were having a long weekend there to do some mountain biking, Felix from Germany who finally gave me someone to talk to about the World Cup and Dan who was looking for somewhere to live in Durango whilst he was studying at the college, along with plenty more people besides.

Had a great weekend of local beers and watching football. The highlight though was mountain biking with Eric, Sean and Dan. I felt slightly spoilt to be honest, because my first proper experience of it was on a trail that I’m just not sure I’m going to be able to match in the UK. I was trying to find a weblink that describes it better than I could for anyone reading this who actually knows about mountain biking, but safe to say that I might well be buying a bike when I get back home.

San Francisco to Sacramento (and more Sci-Fi rambling)

You know that you can sometimes tell when a storm is coming? This is one of those times. I’m tucked up waiting for it in a little bakery in Montrose, Colorado, watching every bit of dust and rubbish on the streets get picked up by the wind and blown around in tight cyclones. Where three hours ago there were beautiful sunny skies, now everything is dark and the air feels like it’s trying to strangle you. All very much like the bit with the plastic bag in American Beauty. I’ll stop there though, because I think you’ll all appreciate it if I don’t start going on about how there is “so much beauty in the world.”


Before I forget, I promised I’d post my verdict on the sixth Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy book by Eoin Colfer. If you’re a fan of the first five, I think it’s definitely worth reading. For completeness sake, if nothing else. (If you aren’t the slightest bit interested, you might as well skip to the next paragraph now, whilst I let my geek out for a bit.) Can you honestly tell me you don’t want to hear how Arthur and co escape from the impending destruction of “the” earth at the hands of the Grebulons? A few bit part characters from previous books return, get developed further and play pivotal roles in the story. There are also a lot of random diversions to quote bits from the Guide, which I missed in the last couple of Douglas Adams Hitchhikers books, although they aren’t terribly original.


(For anyone skipping the sci-fi bit, I’m afraid I’m still on Hitchhikers, as the previous paragraph was becoming unwieldy and I thought a new one was required, so you’ll want to skip this paragraph too.) There are some memorable lines, although the occasional contemporary reference, whilst funny, makes me think it won’t age as well as the other books. A typical example being:
“The ship was yellow and ungainly and would never feature on a froody Sub-Etha spaceship show where middle aged ex-racing drivers threw it around a test track while making jolly xenophobic remarks and claiming not to understand all the knobs and dials. This ship was clumsy in the way that comets are not.”
One of the great things about the original is that a sci-fi novel originally published more than 30 years ago, with the radio play even earlier, avoids feeling dated despite the technological changes in that period. Beyond that, I stand by my original remark that there isn’t enough Arthur in book six, but give it a try. That said, I’m now reading “The Last Don” by Mario Puzo (author of the Godfather), which I picked up for free in a book exchange at a recent motel, and it’s a far better book, so maybe I’d advise you read that first.


Enough of my sidetracks. I had a fantastic time in San Francisco. I liked the city just as much as I’d expected to and for one of the first times on the trip I was actually sociable! The hostel had a nice sociable atmosphere and there always seems to be plenty of people around and up for a chat and a beer. In particular though it’s worth mentioning, Brian from Colorado, who was in a similar position to me, although he’d actually left his job with a bank and was taking a bit of time to travel, and Tatsuro from Japan who turned out to be a Leeds fan. Thanks to some advice from Jess, who’d been there before, my wandering around the city was slightly less aimless than normal. Parts of the city were incredibly steep. I think the weirdest thing I saw was a section of Lombard St, which has a natural 27% grade. It is made artificially windy (as in twisty, they don’t have a big fan at one end of it), so that traffic can actually traverse it. Still seemed pretty steep to me!

I also spent a day on a Wine Tour out to the Napa and Sonoma valley. In the morning though, we went to Muir Woods, which is a grove of Redwoods named in honour of John Muir who was the founder of the Sierra Club and considered very influential in the establishment of the first National Parks in the US. The trees were 100s of years old and it was a fantastic walk. I even have a grainy and jerky video on my camera of a family of deer that were wandering around at the far end of the trails. As for the actual wine part of the day, it could have been worse! Spending an afternoon being driven between various vineyards, being plied with “sample” after “sample” of different varieties. After I explained at the last vineyard that I wasn’t able to buy anything, because I was travelling on a bike and couldn’t carry it (not to mention the £30 price tags), they were kind enough to dig out a half bottle and gave it to me for free.

After a much need four nights, I loaded the bike up again and crossed San Francisco bay on a ferry to Vallejo. It was a pretty clear morning, which provided by far the best views of the city and the huge bridges that span the bay.

The day before I was due to leave I found out that Vallejo was home to one of the Six Flags theme parks. Six Flags has a reputation for some pretty cool roller coasters, so for $30 a ticket I thought it was worth a visit. I’d made an assumption that, with it being a Tuesday and schools not quite having broken up, that it would be pretty quiet and I could just hit loads of rides and be on the road again by midafternoon with my brain still vibrating around my skull. I’m not sure what other people’s schools were like, but at the end of every year they tended to organise a few trips that people could go on in the last week of term. One of which was always Alton Towers or Thorpe Park (big theme parks in the UK for anyone from the rest of the world reading this). I’m not going to go any further with this, because I’m pretty sure you can all imagine the chaos that ensues when 3,000 school kids are dropped on a theme park with minimal supervision.

The next day I rode on to Sacramento where I was due to get a train. Before that though I had a nice couple of days, including a lovely evening chatting with a French-Canadian couple where I wowed them with my command of their native language (honest). Unfortunately my travel plans fell apart when I went along to the train station the day before I was due to leave, to scope things out. I think I mentioned this is a previous post, but the stop I wanted was unmanned, so they wouldn’t have been able to unload my bike, which had to be disassembled and stored as checked baggage. In depression I headed back to the hostel where I found a copy of Star Wars on video (yes, video) and spent two hours going over my alternatives, with some help from another guy in the hostel who was stranded in Sacramento after the steering on his car broke and he was going to have to wait five days for a part.

Funny how life always manages to remind you that your problems are normally pretty minor. No matter how important they might seem.

Finally, listening to Glastonbury over the internet. It’s a shame this trip meant I had to give my ticket back. I wasn’t that bothered about most of the bands playing, but it would have been nice to have gone with so many of my friends. Hope everyone is having/had a great time. Inexplicably BBC 6 Music is available live in the US, even though any other live streaming content seems to be blocked. The Flaming Lips are being so incredibly stereotypical it’s untrue. Ten minutes on the air and they’ve already hit “ain’t smoking weed cool” (crowd cheer and which the BBC just apologised for) and “didn’t George Bush suck” (crowd boo). I know I’m not a fan of Bono’s rants, but that kind of thing always just seemed too tick box. Groove Armada and Gorillaz, much better.

Storm has now passed by, so I’m off to get some food before going to see Toy Story 3 at the cinema in a bit.

Andy