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

Big Sur and the ride to San Francisco

Dear god I’ve become useless at getting round to writing this. Just like my diary from Central America last summer, which still only contains half the trip but has now sat by my bed for a year waiting for me to finish it. I’m thinking that might not happen.

So, having just watched England stumble to a very pathetic draw against Algeria (why do we have so many gifted footballers and yet not one player with a creative bone in their body?) and drunk four pints, which at 6,500ft are having more of an effect than normal, I thought I’d write another blog entry. Apologies if it seems unduly depressed.

My last entry (apart from the train one) had left me in San Luis Obispo, which is a very nice pretty town in Central California that is about 10 miles from the coast. The name is abbreviated, fairly appropriately, by the locals to SLO. It’s also home to Cal Poly (California Polytechnic State University), which meant the entire place was full of testosterone fueled frat boys. Apparently even more so than normal, because that was a reunion weekend where everyone who’d graduated in the last few years came back into town to catch up (/get drunk). You might be gathering that from this that drunk American college boys aren’t my favourite group of people. And you’d be right. I don’t like generalizations and most people I meet are great individually, but as a collective the nearest UK equivalent seems to be guys on a never ending stag do.

It was also Memorial Weekend, which mean prices for hotels were astronomical, if there was space at all. My usual lack of forward planning meant I didn’t realise this until the Wednesday night. I’m happy to characterise this as something like an idiot tax. If you can’t be aware enough to see it coming then you have to pay more. Sort of like the having to replace various high technology gadgets after dropping or spilling coffee on them (not mentioning any names, but you know who you are!)

As a result of this the cheapest motel room I could find for the Saturday night was $150. Thankfully I met a couple of guys in a bar on my first night who told me about a hostel in town and I managed to get the last bed they had for $27. I might have had to lie to the motel I was meant to be in about a blown tire meaning I was going to be a day late arriving, but I think it was worth it for the amount of money I saved. Happily they filled the room anyway.

Because of the number of people in town that weekend there were quite a few things happening that weekend. Unfortunately, my stinginess (which amazingly Word recognised as an actual word) meant that I didn’t get to see any of them. MGMT were playing some big festival on the Friday night just outside of town and I found a girl on the internet who had a spare ticket, but she kept changing her mind on the price. I’d get a facebook message one minute saying $40 and then a text five minutes later saying $70, so, given my lack of transportation there or back and the fact I don’t like MGMT that much, I decided it wasn’t worth the money.

Rather more depressingly, they also had a massive beer festival over the weekend that I couldn’t get a ticket for. In town there were quite a few nice places, but everything seemed to centre around one bar. They had seating for a couple of hundred and did food to go, but there was a permanent queue of about 60 people outside from midafternoon until 10pm every day I was there. I think a third of the building was just given over to a huge fridge to store all the food they went through! Far better though I found a little bakery that made these little doughy mounds stuffed with raspberries, which was possibly the best bready thing I’ve ever had. I also got my hair cut by a guy who was completely obsessed with British TV and seemed to have actually watched far more of it than I ever have.

From there I followed the coast north again, via some kayaking in Morro Bay, into the Big Sur area, where I found myself humming The Thrills song of the same name over and over again for at least a couple of days. The area itself was stunning. If you’ve ever seen the episode of Top Gear where they drive a car along the French Riviera, imagine that plus a bit more. The climbs were tough, but the descents were amazing, with the ocean on one side and cliffs on the other. I had my first night camping, which was a great success until the following morning when the fog rolled in leaving me and everything else with that slightly damp feeling. There weren’t even any showers to warm me up.

Once I returned to civilisation I had a fantastic evening at a hostel in Santa Cruz, which was only about two blocks from the beach, and a night in a hostel that was a converted lighthouse. After that there was just the matter of a ridiculously steep climb up into the clouds in Daly City to get down into San Francisco. Climbing on city streets is so much harder than in the countryside, because the gradients tend to be a lot steeper.

After a couple of weeks where I’d spent much more time in the country than the city, San Francisco felt huge. Just riding through Golden Gate Park seemed to take me half an hour. San Francisco was a bit of a paradox for a cyclist. There were tons of us around and quite a few cycle lanes, but we seemed to get less respect from car drivers than anywhere else I’d been. I was told there’s a bit of a war going on between the two and that the cyclists are getting slightly militant. One afternoon a month they take over the whole city centre and just ride round and round disrupting traffic, which can’t be helping matters. Then you get things like this http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_15246548?nclick_check=1.

Hmmm.
Andy

Trains

I’ve been stressing a bit over the last couple of days about trains in this country, but I think I finally get it.

Without getting a visa (see all Jess’ recent fun, for those who know her) I can only stay in the US for 90 days. When I worked it out roughly, I think the route I want to follow is probably about 120 days, which means I need to take public transport at some point. Trains in the US are pretty rare. Until last weekend, I don’t think I’d ever met anyone who’d used one. Particularly over a long distance.

Even though the train was going to take 20 hours to do just 800 miles (without any layover), which seems insane, it seemed like everything was going to be perfect. Unfortunately the station I wanted was unmanned, which meant that no one would be around to unload my bike. So I was faced with a choice. Get off 200 miles before or 100 miles after I actually wanted to, which was just a little frustrating.

However, having spent nearly 9 hours on the train, I think I get it. This isn’t a means of long distance travel. For that you drive or fly. This is just an extraordinarily picturesque tour. So far we’ve scaled the snow capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and then watched the sun set whilst cruising the desert in Nevada. There’s even an entire lounge coach with virtually floor to ceiling windows down both sides, so you can admire the view unencumbered.

When I wake up in the morning I’ll be in Salt Lake City. No effort. No hassle. And seats that wouldn’t be out of place in premium economy on a transatlantic flight (they might be better than that, but I’ve got no experience of the higher classes). If I had more money, I could have done the whole thing with fine dining and nice wine. Instead I have some pasta I made this morning and half a bottle of red that I was given free on a wine tour the other day. The old lady running the restaurant car seems like quite the control freak though, and her frequent aggressive announcements over the PA make me think I’m definitely in the best place.

I realise I’ve jumped slightly with the trip, but I’ll catch up the rest soon. I just felt like writing about this tonight.

Andy

Books, Otis Reading and some other stuff

Sitting on the dock of the bay in San Francisco waiting for a ferry, which apparently is the bay that Otis Reading sang about, although not the dock. The dock is over on the other side. I’m also told that it was the last song he wrote before he died in a plane crash, and that the reason there is whistling at the end is that he was going to add some more lyrics. Or so said someone I met the other day. Could be complete rubbish. No idea which way the tide is going either.

Anyway, as far is this blog was concerned, I think I’m still in LA. I left after one night and took a nice scenic route through Beverly Hills to get back to the coast. In California even the people coming to rob your house are cartoon characters.

After that I had a night in Venice at a hostel that had been recommended by one of the guys that I work with. The area itself was just a mile long chain of beach front shops either selling tat or promising to- diagnose you with some condition and proscribe you weed for it. Neither exactly my thing. It was great fun for people watching though and I found a fantastically random book in a cute, and supposedly famous, book shop on the front.

The book was called “First Contact: Or, it’s later than you think. (Parrot Sketch not included)” and was buy a guy called Evan Mandary. I only read it a couple of weeks ago and I already want to start it again. I think it was the first time since I originally read the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy series that a book made me bang my head on a table in frustration at having not seen an incredibly obvious joke coming, because the writing disguised it right up until the last second. Well worth the read.

Speaking of the Hitchhikers’ Guide, I’m just in the middle of the 6th instalment (“And Another Thing...”), which was written by Eoin Colfer, since unfortunately Douglas Adams is no longer with us. It’s been pretty good so far, albeit a little light on Arthur, but I’ll let you know more when I finish it.

Books are becoming a pretty big expense on this trip. Far more expensive than the UK. The average price for a paperback seems to be about $16.50 (or $15 plus tax), so about £12. As I’m on my own, I’m burning through about one every 4-5 days, so thank you to Brian, who I met in San Francisco and is in much the same situation, for trading.

From Venice is set off along a coast that had turned almost due west to place called Oxnard. This really shouldn’t have been a hard day’s ride, except that a gale force wind coming in off the Pacific restricted me to a maximum of 10 miles/hr turning a 3½ hour ride into a 5 hour muscle destroying one. I had a couple of nights there to rest up, as I hadn’t had a day off since I set out from San Diego. In that time I ate a huge Italian meal (enough for about 3 people), got frustrated for most of my day off that the internet in my room wasn’t working (I’d unplugged the phone to plug my laptop in and apparently it also acted as the wireless router for my room), spent a couple of hours chatting to the manager about my travels and his great advice (whilst he tried to fix my internet) and discovered Denny’s.

After Oxnard came Santa Barbara, which was a beautiful place in a picturesque setting.

Unfortunately that meant I couldn’t afford a hotel there, so I had to go a bit further along to Goleta, which is home to UC Santa Barbara. I thought I’d find a nice chilled out studenty bar to sit in and watch the basketball that was on last night. I didn’t really look at a map before setting out from the motel and just relied on directions from the girl at reception, so, after crossing a bridge over a highway (which I should have done), I turned left instead of right and ended up walking through an industrial estate for two miles before I could get back across the highway. Happy days...

Most of the ride at this point followed what’s known as El Camino Real, which is a road built by the Spanish when they were first colonising the California area. It linked a series of Missions that they were building up and down the coast from Baja California (now still part of Mexico) up to San Francisco. The distance between the missions was about a day’s ride on horseback (30 miles?), so that someone travelling up the coast had a safe place to stop every night. A number of different roads now follow the route, but they are often marked by bells at the side of the road.

The following day didn’t get much better, as the inner tube on my back wheel failed about half an hour before the end of my ride for the day. For this trip I’ve pretty much decided I can’t be bothered faffing around trying to patch these things up. I can remember all the messing about with buckets of water, pencils, sandpaper and glue from when I was a kid and for the sake of the £3 for a new tube it doesn’t seem worth the effort. I changed it in the parking lot of a fast food place. Not sure what happened to the famous American hospitality. I’ve seen some of it elsewhere, but all I got was laughed at. By this stage towns were getting a lot further apart than they had been further south, so I guess I should just be thankful that it didn’t go earlier in the day when I’d have had to change it on the side of the road with people streaming past me.

It was also the day of my first “big” climb. I have to say, I wasn’t that impressed though. My maps have some elevation plans on them, so I knew that I had to climb from pretty much sea level to 1,200ft over the course of about 2½ miles. To me that sounded like quite a lot, so I took a break for about half an hour at a truck stop at the bottom. Happily though, the climb itself really wasn’t that tough. Nothing too steep. All nice gradual gradients. I guess training in the Dales did me some good after all! Still, I know I’ve got much bigger climbs to come in Colorado...

The next day I headed off to San Luis Obispo, which is a really nice little student town slightly inland, but I think this post is long enough. At least I’m now only 1½ weeks behind reality, so I’m catching up.

Andy

San Diego to LA

Right, time for a quick burst of writing I think, because all this seems like a really long time ago. I always say with holidays, or any change of situation recently, that it hardly seems to take any time before my mind just starts to accept it as being the new normal and everything else starts to feel like some dim and distant past. Obviously when you head home...

Given that I was on a new bike, I figured that I probably shouldn’t go straight to doing massive distances on a daily basis. I settled on about 40 miles a day, which was probably 20 fewer than my plan. There were also so many places that I wanted to see that there really didn’t seem any point in rushing through.

On the second day I had to cycle across Camp Pendleton, which is a US Marine Corp base. My map directed me across it and it seemed like it was just a cycle route to avoid having to go on the freeway. When I got there it turned out to be a fairly major road, albeit with a couple of Marines checking the IDs of everyone entering and playing games to see who could come up with the most entertaining pose. It was a really desolate place, which I guess is why it was turned into a military base, but the contrast was all the greater as the rest of the coast is just one long urban sprawl.

I spent the second night in Laguna Beach in Orange County. TV had led me to expect a pretty pretentious place with lots of cool bars. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was a completely chilled out place. It wasn’t even that good for a night out, although I did meet a few nice people and got pointed in the direction of a random roof top bar in a hotel that was great for watching the sunset. Unfortunately I didn’t appreciate quite how far away it was, so it was pretty much dark by the time I got there. The view was still amazing though. I also met a lovely girl from Louisiana, who was in town with her Aunt and had the most stereotypical accent I think I’ve ever heard.

I hadn’t bothered at all with the beach in San Diego, because the weather was just a mass of grey cloud. It’s called May Grey apparently and happens every year. Followed by June Gloom. Not exactly the year round sunshine. Something happened as I went further north though, because the weather just cleared up completely and every day was just never ending sunshine. The prospect of being able to just spend a few hours a day lying on the beach didn’t exactly increase my motivation to start cycling longer distances!!

On the third day I went through Newport Beach, which genuinely did feel like being in an episode of The O.C.

I couldn’t afford to stay though and after a couple of hours lying in the sun at Huntingdon Beach I headed into the 5,000 square mile city that is the Los Angeles area. I’ve got to say, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected.

Because I followed the coast most of the way, I spent a lot of time (probably at 100 miles over a week or so) just cruising down cycle paths across beaches. Perfect for chilling out and people watching.

(Yes, I know this photo needs cleaning up, but the best editing software on my laptop at the moment is Paint and it didn't know how to zoom out from the full size photo. Just in.)

I was going to see a band at a venue in West Hollywood, so I gathered up my guts and headed inland. I guess it must have been a pretty nice day, because there was no sign of the smog that I’d been told about, although there sure as hell were a lot of cars! Not the most bike friendly place.

In general, I’ve found the US pretty good for cycling so far. Most of the roads have really wide shoulders, so it’s like having a permanent cycle lane.

I was staying at a hostel in Hollywood, which was fun and I wandered round doing the tourist bits in the afternoon.

Nic (W), I even managed to get a photo for you.

Possibly the most embarrassing experience of my life as I tried desperately not to look like I was hanging around in the street waiting to take a photo of Audrey Hepburn’s star on the Walk of Fame. It would have been fine, but for the couple who spent what felt like half an eternity, but was probably about a minute and a half, taking photos of each other with it.

The gig was awesome. Far were amazing (http://www.myspace.com/far and http://www.antiquiet.com/features/shows/2010/05/21-far-troubadour/ ) and the venue was really cool too. I even got to have some fun getting a bus there and back. Unfortunately, by the time I got back to the hostel, everyone else had gone out, so I didn’t really get to experience much by way of LA nightlife.

Enough for tonight I think. I promise to post more photos soon. At the moment I’m about 20 miles outside San Francisco in a hostel that used to be a lighthouse, so there’s still quite a lot more to write about.

SoCal

SoCal (yes I am cool enough to call it that, honest). What can I say? I know it gets talked about in the media as being a bit weird at times, but I never thought I would walk past an archery range and see a guy leaving dressed as an elf with his bow and quiver strung across his back.

Ironically, as I moved further north towards LA, things have actually got less weird. Or maybe just more like it is on TV.

I’m very behind with my blog here, so I’m going to update it gradually over the next few days.

It feels as really long time ago now, but my first couple of days were pretty eventful, so it’s worth going back that far.

Firstly, my bike didn’t exactly make it to the US in one piece. Well, to be more precise, it was in one piece. Just one with a few bends and dents that led the guy in the bike shop I took it to for help to respond “Nah, that bike’s totalled. It looks like they ran it over with a truck and then dragged it across concrete.” Having seen bits of how luggage is treated at airports, that wouldn’t surprise me. Oh, and this was after having failed to put the bike on the flight from New York to San Diego, which led to it disappearing for 24 hours and then magically turning up at the hostel in the middle of the night. Just unfortunate that unpacking it was something on a depressing experience.

Anyway, no more on that. I’m talking to American Airlines about compensation, but thanks to Luke and his colleagues at Cal Coast Bicycles in San Diego (hi, if you’re reading), I have a new bike, which I’m very happy with, and was able to leave San Diego on the day I’d intended.

Sorting all that out took one of my two days in San Diego. To distract me from my, at that point, just missing bike, I spent my first day doing what most people I’ve been on holiday with will know I specialise in. Namely walking miles and miles and miles to do some random exploring.

Before seeing the aforementioned elf, I found a random two block street festival. It was meant to be an arts festival, but, on top of some fantastic photography and the expected performance stages (and, well, beer and food), the majority of stalls were an eclectic group pushing everything from Animal Protection charities to laser hair removal to Chinese massage. Oh, and I saw a pug in a leather jacket. I do feel I failed here by not managing to get a photo.

Other than that, it was exactly the kind of Americana I was looking for. One of the stages had a local dance troop. Unfortunately their leader had failed in attempting to burn their music onto CD, but that didn’t stop them!! They just danced along anyway, as she called out the steps and sang. The second song was Take Me Out to the Ball Park and, oh yes, the entire crowd joined in. I know it sounds like I’m taking the piss a bit here, but we’re talking about 10 year old kids on stage. It was actually really nice.

In the afternoon I walked over to the San Diego Zoo, which has a reputation as one of the best in the world. It was definitely pretty good and I’ve got quite a few nice photos. Plus I saw about 10 meercats trying to go down a whole at the same time (I love meercats) and a baby panda. The zoo was huge and I walked round it for hours. Yet some woman seemed to have decided the most suitable way to do this was dressed like Sandy at the end of Grease. Heels included.

Sorry this entry’s been pretty long and detailed. I promise they won’t always be like this. Unless you all like my little stories that is. Next time, San Diego to LA.