Bicycle trip to San Francisco.
Arrival On July 14, 2011, Mike and I rolled across the golden gate bridge. We d traveled just under 3600 miles from when we d started our trip in northern Virginia, 59 days prior. When we were halfway across the bridge, my front left pannier gave out and tumbled off my bike. I d joked throughout the trip that I expected my entire bike to crumble similarly, right when we crossed the city limits,…
As I write this, my laptop battery shows a charge of 11%. That 11% is the last I ll get out of it until I send the laptop back to Asus shop in Taiwan for repairs, which, in all likelihood, will take close to two months. Needless to say, this throws a wrench into the production of posts and the upload of pictures. Coincidental that such a failure should happen just as I gear up to repay a serious…
Day 38, June 24th; morning light streamed into a bedroom and I sensed nothing but quiet. I rolled around, trying to forget what day it was and what I knew the day would entail. That day, we d be leaving Pueblo and entering into the Rocky Mountains. Getting up was difficult and wonderful 1 for a variety of reasons. When I finally did rise, around 10AM, I found Mike downstairs. He d been up for at…
Before bed the night prior, Patti had suggested that we go to Bishop s Castle the next day. Seth had also recommended this place, sort of ominously, on Lisa s back deck, saying that we wouldn t see anything like it anywhere else. We were piqued, so we agreed and a visit to the castle was slated as first appointment for the day. We lingered around the house for a while, using up the early morning.…
I know updates are becoming more and more infrequent. We re entering an extremely demanding leg of the trip, with long rides across windy, uninhabited desert. I m on a rest day right now and I ll push as many updates as I can while in civilization. Updates from here on out may be sparse until we re through the majority of Nevada. This is dependent on signal, time, and whether or not I m still…
We awoke, surprised, in the shade. The portable storage unit that we d camped behind in the soccer field had shielded us from the morning sun. June 21st, La Junta, CO. That day we were headed to Pueblo, where we d be staying with Patti, a friend of Vanessa s. Excited at the prospect of a rest-day, we packed up quickly and rode for a fastfood place to change our clothes. We made it, ate, and split…
Mike woke me up in a frantic scramble. It was June 20th in the artificially-lush city park of Lamar. We ve gotta pack up the tent. Like now. Thunderstorm. And, accordingly, a boom of far-off thunder followed shortly, like in a bad TV drama. I bought the likelihood of an oncoming rainy tantrum, so I shook the sleep from my eyes and began to steadily, mechanically roll my sleeping bag and stow my…
I m abbreviating these posts so I can get onto the more interesting days while they re still fresh in my head. We woke up June 19th from an uninterrupted sleep in a single at the Flamingo Motel, Dodge City, KS. We plowed through the typical morning routine quickly, packed our bikes, then went to cash in on the continental breakfast offered beside the check-in desk. Mike and I wandered in and began…
We woke up in puddles. June 17th, day 32, Dodge City park. I lifted my head from the damp sleeping bag and prepared to take stock of the damage. Mike was just stirring, so we sat up in tandem and moved our dripping sleepware off of the concrete. Last night, in the thick of the sprinkler attack, I hadn t considered that wet sleeping bags can t be rolled up and stored during a day of riding, under…
We sat like early-rising catatonics, watching Animal Planet at 7AM in Gene s house and eating fruity pebbles while the kids climbed on us. We packed up the bikes and said our goodbyes. We biked through towns with behemoth windmills and curious roadside decorations. We stopped at a place for lunch with homemade pies where we talked briefly with two waitresses 1 . Names like Dante, Clinton,…
I woke up in Mark s basement in a king-size bed. I remember feeling immediate distress at the idea of leaving that bed. Mike walked in the door and said, better get up. It s going to be a hard day. Headwinds? Headwinds. Both our rear tires are flat. I propped myself up and looked around. Light from the open door streamed into the otherwise dim room. That kind of light always gets me up. I brushed…
We awoke in the sunny Ark City park. The concrete was surprisingly comfortable, so I rolled away from the sunshine and towards the metal frame of a picnic bench for a few extra minutes of shuteye. Mike, of course, was up and halfway through the routine of 23 things he does every morning before I can even make words. After a few minutes, I gave up the ghost and opened my eyes. My nose was congested…
The day to Arkansas City (pronounced r-kansas ) was one of those days. One of those days when I dream about Greyhound buses and spend most of the day wondering what kind of moron bikes 3600 miles across a jagged landmass when there are machines that do the job eight times faster and with considerably less pain. We left from Caney heading north. We still had a tailwind going, which helped us up the…
I m sitting on a bench in the windy city park of Caney, Kansas. Big incandescent lights throw pools of orange down on most of the park. This ocicat, probably a stray, sits next to me, occasionally making brave stabs at scaling my keyboard and mucking up my text file. It s ten o clock at night, but that doesn t stop the locals from running around, within earshot of the park, trying to catch a…
Rest day in Tulsa. Will fill in later.
Tulsa is everything that Coppola s Rumble Fish led me to expect; all manmade gleam, western neon, and noiry art-deco. *Rumble Fish*, 1983. We came into the city through the west along 412, a sun-soaked strip of discount body shops and Mexican restaurants. The roads were reasonably well-paved, especially relative to the outskirts of Memphis. Zagging neon lettering already advertised Tulsa s…
We woke up in the airplane hangar and did the usual morning stuff using the upstairs bathroom. When we finally made our way down to the main floor, Marvin and his son, Matthew, were grilling sausages just outside the hangar by the de facto diningroom table. We met Matthew, who likes Jim Carrey and Mystery Science Theater 3000 and had spent the last three years in Monterey running some branch of…
I ll be condensing the entries for the following days up until Tulsa. Giving each day a full treatment has proved to be too demanding given the amount of downtime we ve had in the past few days. Mike and I woke up in the Hillbilly Motel and got the hell out as fast as we could. We ate biscuits and gravy at a gas station and stocked up on carbs for the ride through the Ozarks, where we suspected…
I woke promptly on Wednesday, June 8th, on Richard s living room couch. Mike was sprawled on an armchair under the cover of a blanket. I raised my head out of the warmth of the couch s corner and looked around slowly like a groundhog surveying a cold winter morning. We eventually brought some motion to the living room and made a few visits to the bathroom, waking up Richard in the process.…
We woke up Tuesday, June 7th, to McCrae s small-town morning heat. As is typical, Mike got up before I did and, though I heard him rustling around the tent, I rolled over, shut my eyes, and told myself to keep sleeping. The heat has a way of discouraging that. No reason to rush, though. We had an easy day ahead: only 35 miles to Conway. Sometimes we inevitably have short days because of the…
We woke up behind the FlashMart, the tent moist with dew, and groggily wandered into the convenience store, our hygiene gear in tow. The lady working the counter was different than the one that d seen us lounging around last night, so we got a healthy, bewildered stare. We weren t wearing our bike clothing, so, for her, the probability that we were vagrants was significantly higher than if we were…
After ingesting a batch of beer and misadventuring across Memphis, we slept like rocks. We rose at 7AM; back to business. Mike made 4 packets of oatmeal to split between the two of us and it took less than 5 minutes to renew our memberships in the Clean Bowl Club. We dressed, packed, and loaded our bikes outside Brittany s door. One last sweep of the apartment and we were gone, traveling the same…
Light was streaming into Brittany s living room through a sliding glass door when I came to on Saturday, June 4th. I was on a leather couch caty corner to the kitchenette. Gentle knocks of glassware connecting with counter-top came from nearby arrhythmically. I looked up to see Brittany making coffee; if she was aware of my consciousness, she didn t show it. I spent a few minute rolling around and…
We enjoyed a comfortable sleep on the night of our rest day, but I ended up waking up a few times in the dark; my body must ve been fully charged and ready for road use. Some time later, alarms chimed 1 and we rose at around 6:30AM. After the awful heat we endured en route to Bolivar, we d wised up and agreed to start earlier and take advantage of cool dawns. We cleaned ourselves up to (but not…
We did no traveling today, so I m lacking both a map and an elevation profile. Mike and I mostly spent the day on the sofa or at the kitchen table hunched over maps. I banged away on the netbook, trying to catch up on the dailies. My legs were humming, as though they d been plugged into a power-outlet, which seemed to be a good thing. Later in the day, some friends of the Jordans came over and a…
No pictures for today. I only took 3 and they re not especially worthwhile. Over the course of the trip, Mike and I have developed the near-acrobatic ability to sleep side-by-side on a small area without rolling into (or onto) one another. We had this specialized training to thank when we awoke on June 1st, each somehow contained to his own side on the double bed in room 103 of the Parsons Inn. At…
I woke up in Room 27 of the James K. Polk motel feeling the jittery ache of fever. It was May 31st in Columbia, Tennessee. I consulted with the mirror and saw that my eye was still red, though it had improved from the previous day. Claims from the internet notwithstanding, no thieving prostitutes had visited us in the night. If they had, they d left me undisturbed and cleaned up after themselves.…
When I woke up at Brad s on Memorial Day morning, my inner eyelid felt like sandpaper. My eye was swollen and immediately started tearing up after opening it. I wandered shakily out to the bathroom and confirmed in the mirror that my left eye was furiously red. Uh oh. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn t be a big deal; I d take it easy for a few days without wearing contacts. Unfortunately,…
The morning of Sunday, May 29, the two of us awoke to sunlight streaming through the open door of our hut behind the Cumberland County fire station. I got up pretty immediately, grabbed my hygiene gear, and headed inside for a walk through the station to the bathroom. On the way to the bathroom, I passed a few of the firemen watching TV in a dimly lit room a great plan for around 6:30 in the…
We awoke Saturday, the 28th of May, in Don Fritz s first floor apartment in Knoxville, Tennessee. We were dressed and halfway packed when Don got up and began talking to his extremely shy cat, Billy. Don was trying to chide Billy into the kitchen for a meal despite Billy s acute distrust of us strangers. Billy the cat, swerving toward Don to avoid us. Once we were packed, we retrieved our locked…
We awoke to our alarms akimbo in the still-dark, dingy motel room in Bean Station 1 . After five minutes or so, we were wolfing cold pizza that we had ordered the night prior. We made short work of four slices, then got to packing quickly. We found circumstantial evidence the day before that the Good Ol Boys are running some kind of shady prostitution ring out of the Bean Station Budget Inn, so we…
Last night, Mike was so enthralled with gardening that he forgot to bring his sleeping-bag into the tent; this resulted in him waking up around 3AM and rolling around in a daze until someone mixed consciousness with warm mud and threw it in my face around 6:20AM. We groaned our collective groan for a few minutes, likely scaring away all wildlife within a 10ft radius, and then disassembled our…
Mike and I went to bed around 11PM last night in Bob Atkins Wytheville home after talking with Bob about inductive chargers for electric cars, venture capital, and finally (the terminus for all conversations even vaguely related to money) the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007. We yaked pleasantly for an hour or two in his livingroom, enjoying modern furniture and the view of Wytheville visible…
Mike and I collected ourselves from Sam s floor in Blacksburg with surprising alacrity; we were out the door in under an hour and a disheveled (and probably not entirely awake) Sam waving us out of his neighborhood by 8AM. The initial ride was easy, and I quickly found my mind drifting from our immediate surroundings. At the send-off party, Danny Shiner remarked that one of the coolest aspects of…
I don t have time to do a full update for Day 6, so here s a Best Of: Short ride from Roanoke into Blacksburg up some damn steep mountain roads. Passed a patch of donkeys in a valley. I yelled "EEYORE!" more times than I'd like to admit. Took my bike into a shop, Hokie Spokes, which I highly recommend. I just wanted to use the guy's table vice to get my freewheel off, but he ended up truing my…
We woke up in our weird camping spot near an entrance to the Appalachian trail and groggily began morning activities. Disassembly and changing clothes were a little tricky, since the terrain we picked to camp on was uniformly peppered with strange, shin-high plants which may or may not have been poison ivy. I did a lot of high stepping. After the usual fifty minutes of changing, hygiene, and…
We woke up in our strangely inclined tent on the morning of day 4 and we were ambitious. We d taken half the last day off after the insane bout of climbing we d done in hopes that it would prepare us adequately for round two with the Parkway. What naive children. Waking up was excellent. We were inclined downward, our feet lower than our heads, and we d left the window of the tent transluscent so…
Pictures will be on Flickr. No time to embed them. For a brief summary of today, let me refer you to the elevation profile. The values on the vertical axis range from 700 feet to 3500 feet. The day got off to an ominous start. We left camp early, having taken a while to cook breakfast and clean up. We dumped our trash behind the elementary school which was earlier eminating strange bells and…
Despite a wonderful send-off from Sue, Laura, and Chris, today was a considerably harder bike than yesterday. After cleaning our food-bag, practicing hygiene (a soon-to-be rarity), and eating a healthy breakfast cooked by Sue, we packed and shipped out. Whenever I get the pictures from Sue, I ll upload them to the flickr. Shortly after leaving Sue s, Mike led the two of us down one of his…
Tuesday was a frantic scramble to get our stuff in order for this morning s big leave. After scooping Mike from his Mclean cheteau, the two of us skittered around Reston tying up loose ends; this included: getting Tang 1 and other bare necessities from Giant, searching for a 1 crescent wrench (futile), and taking inventory of our gear in typical J&M style (read: primitively disorganized). Of…
Since James was too hungover after our going away party the previous night, TStephens, Dennis, Nottingham and I decided to spend a splendid day biking in spite of an ominous weather report. We met up in Clarendon and headed out to the National Arboretum in Northeast which I ve somehow avoided going to for the past 22 years of living in the area. On the way there, I managed to make what I thought…
Fueled by the realization that the semester is almost over, James, Vanessa and I managed to book it from Fairfax to DuPont circle just in time to miss the departure of the DC critical mass ride. However, with some expert navigation and luck, we managed to meet up with the mass near K street. From there, some older couple on a tandem took control of the mass and led us on some tedious route.…
Met up with Will Bartlett in at the Caboose in Vienna for a nice, hilly ride through McLean and Arlington. Lots of steep grades and two bananas. We initially planned on going at a leisurely pace, but we didn t. Things to note: James was too tired to go biking since he was up until 4 a.m.\ the previous night. Some guy honked and flipped me the bird as he passed Will and I on a 25 mph road when we…