Notes and Pictures After Day Fifteen

Notes and photographs relating to the five previous days of bicycle touring. (These are not in strict chronological order.):

Logistics -- Dad has ridden most of the miles with me, but Mom has joined me for 10mi here and there. Last minute, we decided on a more interesting route (and less snowy) than what I had originally planned. This means we're covering more miles than I think I can handle in 10 days. So we've loaded all three bicycles onto the back of my parent's Trailblazer and have driven one big segment in WY at the end of Monday, another short one in UT at the end of Wednesday, and we'll drive one last big one in CO tomorrow.

Dad loading the bikes on Monday.


The Weather Report -- Sunday: rainy and cold, mid to upper 40s. We wore plastic bags over our hands to break the wind. I wrapped my feet in grocery bags before I stuffed them into my cycling shoes. 3hrs and 30mi into our climb, Dad and I summited the pass. We blasted ourselves with the hand dryers at the visitor's center. Then we put on every article of clothing we could and descended 8 frigid miles to the edge of Bear Lake, stopping once to make sure our hands worked on the brake levers. Monday: beautiful morning sun, then scattered rain, temps rising to the high 50s. Dad and I chased a booming thunderhead for half of the day with a gracious patch of sunlight spotlighting our way along the wet roads. A little hail. Tuesday: very little rain, low 50s. Headwind. Dad and I traded drafts, with me mostly in the rear. Slanting rain at the end of the day. Wednesday: cool and sunshiny for first 2hrs of continuous climbing on the steepest grades yet. Then a sudden storm for over an hour. Temps dropped into the low 40s, mixed sleet and rain. Then more sun and spotty rain.

Sunday: Dad and me keeping our hands semi-warm.


Sunday: summiting the pass.


Sunday: Dad assuming compromising positions with a hand dryer.

Monday: A rare segment that we three cycled together. Happy sunshine.


Wednesday: Dad climbing in the sun up switchbacks of 9% incline.


Wednesday: Mom and me descending in the sudden storm. Very cold.


Riding Companions -- I can think of two things that make miserable riding conditions bearable: losing your mind (which I experienced in small doses on my first 10days) and having riding companions. The last four days of riding would have been my most difficult (even though they've been my shortest) had I been alone. But riding with either Mom or Dad has made a huge difference. Dad was worried about being able to keep up, considering the altitude and the fact that his son is in such awe-inspiring physical condition. He has definitely kept up. In fact, I've been ready to quit on a few days when Dad was gritting his teeth and ready to finish the last 10mi. And Mom has been cheerful and excited like a little girl to see the sights. I thought she'd have trouble biking at my speed, so on the first day I started slow. After a few minutes she told me, "I'm used to going a little faster than this, Brett." And on Wednesday, when she and I were getting lashed by sleet and I was in one of my most grouchy moods yet, I could hear her in the distance behind me singing, "Yippee, one more mile to go."



Wednesday: Dad and me summiting the big climb of the day.


Wednesday: Mom and me riding before the sleet hit us.


Food -- High luxury. We've eaten out a good bit. And Mom has cooked some great meals: chili, minestrone soup, fruit & nut pancakes. Mom even makes side-dishes for our camp dinners. We've had sandwiches with deli meat for lunch, and fresh chicken salad. And after our first day of riding, Dusty and Lisa even drove all the way up to Bear Lake to take us out for the famous raspberry milkshakes of Bear Lake. I can feel myself getting soft. Some mornings I even think, "We could just drive to the next campsite and start cooking dinner."

Sunday: Dusty and Lisa showing us the delights of the Bear Lake Raspberry Milkshakes. This is how good they are: we had just been riding for more than 4hrs in the cold rain. And we're eating milkshakes. And we're happy about it.



Sunday: Minestrone prepared by my mom in the fine KOA cooking arena.


Tuesday: Mom and Dad making chili.


Achilles -- Immediately into our first day of riding, after my 2wks of rest, I began to feel my right achilles aching again. After 3 more days of testing it, I decided to call Jessica, a friend who knows these things. She said something along the following lines: "Ibuprofen is not a long-term solution, Brett. Listening to your body is a long-term solution." The next day I offloaded all of my panniers except my right front one for tools and extra clothing. Until my parents head back East, I am going to take advantage of the car and ride light. Already it feels better.

Bob's Rock Shop -- In Kemmerer, WY at the end of Monday's riding, my mom stepped into a local rock shop. (Rock shops are about as common in Wyoming as 'coffee' shops are in Amsterdam. And their owners are equally religious about their respective products.) Dad and I joined her a few minutes later. Bob, the sole proprietor, was sitting in the corner holding a smoldering cigarette. I didn't see him put the thing to his mouth for the full 30min that we were in his shop. Bob is a short-answers, foul-mouthed, old man. (Normally for men his age I use the word, "gentleman", but in Bob's particular case, this descriptor doesn't apply.) Bob's single passion is rocks. And 99% of the rocks and petrified tree limbs and fossils in his shop he dug up, chiseled out, and polished by himself. He has no training, but he knows his stuff. "I read books about rocks. I got a lot of books in the back. You wouldn't believe how many books I got." In one display case he has a full fossilized skeleton of a prehistoric crocodile that he found and scraped out of the surrounding rocks over the course of one winter. We didn't ask where he found it. We sensed we weren't supposed to ask that sort of thing. My mom, being curious, asked if she could poke around in his back room. "Sure thing. It's my workshop. It's where I cut the rocks and polish them." We all joined her. Bob showed us his diamond blades and polishing belts and shelves stacked to the ceiling with rocks in various stages of preparation. He showed us one fist-sized rock that he said he'd been working on for 2yrs. "It's got fiery opal in it, you see. If I cut it just right and bring out that fire, you know what I mean? If I cut it in just the right place, this rock would be worth, oh, $2000." It looked like a plain old rock to me. I asked him what he'd done on it over the last 2yrs, if he'd chipped at the side or something. "Oh no." He looked at me sternly. "Oh no. I come back here, and I pick it up like this, and I think about it. I've got to find the right frame of mind to work on this rock. You can't just go in and start cutting the damn thing." He showed us a piece of flint that looked like a paleolithic knife. We asked if it was some Indian artifact. "No. I use this to scare away those kids with body piercings, those left-hand smokers." I don't know what left-hand smoking is, but I don't ever want to do it around Bob. After a thorough tour, Mom and Dad let me pick out my favorite piece of petrified wood and Bob sold it to us for $30.



Monday: Bob showing us around his beloved workshop in the back of his rock shop.


Flat Tires -- For those of you taking bets, I've now had 6 flat tires. You may want to readjust your betting structure. My 5th flat was a slow leak on Tuesday. I pulled out about 8 tiny pieces of sharp flint embedded in my front and rear tires before replacing the rear tube. My dad had no pieces of sharp flint embedded in his tires. (Maybe this disparity arises from the fact that he rides out in the middle of the lane, while I ride conservatively on the shoulder.) My 6th flat, occuring 45min later on the tube I had just replaced, was a sudden puncture and outrush of air. I had run over something very sharp, leaving a tire gash even bigger than the one that stopped me 30mi short of Logan two weeks before. Again, my tire boot did not provide enough structure to support my tube pressure. Luckily, I've learned some patching techniques since my first blowout. I layered 6 pieces of gorilla tape on the inside of my tire and inflated my tube to full pressure. Worked great. I've ridden over 50mi on it so far, and plan to ride until it blows, or until I get to CO Springs, whichever comes first.




Tuesday: flat #5.



Tuesday: flat #6.


Accommodations -- My parents and I started this 10day segment planning to camp primitively every night. On the first evening, after riding all day through cold rain, we stopped in at a little KOA, "just to see about the prices." (KOA means super-tourist cop-out in my family.) Shivering there in the KOA office we discovered that they had cabins with space heaters available pretty cheap. "They're called Primitive Cabins," we said to eachother. "They don't even have linens." We hemmed and hawed and then decided we'd take one, "just this first night." Then, as we unpacked in our cabin and cranked up the heater and sat down on our padded beds, we each had the very same two thoughts in quick succession. The first was, "Really, if we didn't have gear to dry out, we'd be primitive camping tonight." The second was, "This is nice." Writing this note five days later, I count 3 nights in KOA cabins and 2 nights in motels. We haven't unpacked our tents once. We're becoming KOA Primitive Cabin connoisseurs. "Oh, this one has the double bunks and the porch swing. And it's the same price as the ones in Garden City."


Sunday: primitive survival techniques.



Thursday: organizing gear for our day off.




A Day Off is Reviving -- Today, the fifth day of our leg together, I had scheduled for my parents and me to explore Dinosaur National Monument and to rest. We did a little of the former and a lot more of the latter. In more specific terms, we spent almost 5hrs this morning and afternoon camped out in a corner of a coffee shop in Vernal, UT. My dad and I read and uploaded pictures from our cameras. My mom touched up a few watercolors she's sketched out over the last week. All of us got online and caught up with the real world. In the late afternoon we roused ourselves to finally explore DNM. It's a bastard child of a park. Nobody seems to know about it. This is a misfortune. (To everyone who was not us: we had the park very nearly to ourselves.) The geology there is jaw-dropping. We drove 30mi along a canyon rim, passing pronghorns and mule deer and plain old cows. We hiked out to a promontory from which we could look straight down 2000ft to the confluence of the Yampa and the Green Rivers. The canyon floor was tilted in crazy directions. We could see layers of rock representing hundreds of millions of years arched like so many decks of cards being shuffled. Made us dizzy.




It's now in the am hours, and my parents have long been asleep in our little motel room. So I better wrap it up. Tomorrow we'll start riding again from a 3-house town called Lay, CO.