Pictures!

So I guess it’s been long time, no post. We did get in to Seattle, after a glorious final piece of the ride, and proceeded to spend three weeks in the neighborhoods, on the beach, and cozied up in real beds. Now I’m back at school, and Rhiannon’s on her way, so I decided I really should post those pictures.

They’re on Photobucket, under kt_harrison, or right here.

Now that I’m back at Yale everyone’s doing the “how’s your summer?” thing, and it’s a constant reminder that my summer was AWESOME. This trip was some of the most fun I’ve ever had, and certainly the longest continuous amount of fun. I’m not sure what the best part was, but certainly the most constantly surprising thing was the people we met: tons of incredibly nice people who made it possible for us to travel for almost no money by giving us their lawns to camp on, food to eat, hours of personal and political conversation, and space in their homes. That’s not to mention the really great people we biked with, who were all really great and very quickly felt like real friends. We ate lots of amazing food (as well as lots of food that was pretty mediocre but nevertheless tasted amazing), felt really strong, got rained on and sunburned (sometimes on the same day), fixed a dozen flats, analyzed the patriarchy, climbed two major mountain ranges, got to know each other really well (developing, meanwhile, our own distinctive Katie & Rhiannon argot), and spent all summer outside. It was totally great.

Thanks to everyone for staying in touch! That was great too!

Missoula!

Hello from Missoula, Montana! The last 24 hours have been a day of firsts, which is ironic considering that our trip is getting closer and closer to being over. Yesterday was our first day of over 120 miles (124, to be exact!), our first night ride (a hair-raising ride on a U.S. highway into Missoula, lit only by occasional headlights and the stars), and our first night spent with someone we met on the road (a lovely couple going on a 5-day bike ride told us about their daughter who goes to college in Missoula, and she has been kind enough to let us camp on their lawn, and use their showers and laundry!).

After Jackson, we spent a couple of days in the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. Sitting at the Old Faithful Inn (a couple of fellow cross-country bikers we met along the way let us crash with them in the Inn – a beautiful old lodge), watching Old Faithful go off from the patio, it struck us a very strange way to experience nature. Even though we were in a National Park, it seemed a lot more constructed and artificial than when we were biking through the mountains and rivers of Montana the next day, most of which was privately owned rangeland.

Katie and I are excited to take some time to explore Missoula today – with a population of 57,000 or so, it’s the biggest town we have been in since Pueblo, Colorado. The girl we are staying with told us that it’s considered the progressive destination for the Dakotas and Wyoming, as well as Montana. So now we’ll able to test our theory about how towns change based on what they’re surrounded by – does that make Missoula “bluer” or “redder”? (if those terms apply at all…)

As the trip gets closer and closer to being over, Katie and I keep trying to think if we have reached any conclusions about the country or ourselves. I think we are increasingly realizing that, if anything, the trip has only opened up more questions and, above all, more possibilities – for where we can live, what we can do, who we can meet, etc. But we still have another couple of weeks to make some grand discoveries – we’ll keep you posted!

Some pictures & brief ramblings

It’s been a while since we had all the essential factors in place for posting pictures, but finally at Felicia’s house in Wilson, WY they are all here: computer, basic iPhoto skills, fast internet, time. So here are a few more or less randomly selected photos from the most recent leg of our trip, between St. Louis, MO and Jackson, WY.

I am excited in the Ozarks, because hills are so great and I love the orange rocks!

taken when we were still excited about the plains, which did last a while. There were fields full of flowers, and look! There is Rhiannon on her bicycle, getting farther away as I fumble with the camera!

most of our clothes drying on the bleachers in a Golden City, MO city park

a small turtle rescued from the road. rescuing turtles sunning on the pavement was a good excuse for stopping in the middle of lots of hills in the Ozarks.

EUREKA!

one of a series seen along the state highways in KS.

probably our most exciting state entry, partly because I almost broke myself climbing the sign and partly because we were incredibly excited for the mountains & the West

Whatever the sky is up to has been a huge deal since the plains. This was one of those beautiful High Plains moments in eastern Colorado. Pretty sure this moment preceded a huge thunderstorm that almost blew us off the road several times.

Rhiannon & Liz hiking in the Nambe River, which is one of the most gorgeous places we have been, although you can’t tell it from this picture

the jewelry market in Santa Fe. Like the rest of the city, it is adobe or at least faux-dobe.

taking a moment to ham at the camera in the midst of one of my first tire-changing adventures. Little did I know I would be removing my wheel six or ten more times in the following week!

THE ROCKIES! Looking fierce.

Part of the view from the top of Hoosier Pass (11,500 ft and our highest point). This part is important because it includes our favorite road sign, TRUCK GOING DOWNHILL!

Freight train following the Colorado River. Our route often followed rivers and railroads because both are flattish. Trains are pretty great scenery; they’re lots of colors and carry interesting things and have lots of great graffiti everywhere.

The Grand Tetons in Wyoming! Most crazy looking mountains yet. So pointy and rocky!

Colorful rocks! This kind of wacky rock behavior is all over the place in Wyoming, and I am obsessed with it.

We spent a lovely day here with Felicia & friends & family. We’re right on the edge of both Grand Tetons & Yellowstone National Parks, not to mention lots of National Forest land. As you might expect, it is thoroughly gorgeous and everyone we met seems to be appreciating it fully, going rafting and tubing in the rivers and biking all over the place and hiking the parks. We’re now fully armed with an annotated map of Yellowstone that contains all the best spots only reachable by bicycle, where we’ll be heading tomorrow.

We’ve got an unprecedented 2 confirmed sleeping options for tomorrow! We booked a campground in the park since in Yellowstone, unlike everywhere else we’ve stayed, it is slightly difficult to camp for free (no houses to camp on the lawn, and lots of cranky park rangers waiting to kick you out of the most tempting roadsides). But then some fellow bikers we met earlier this week texted us and offered us the opportunity to share their floor in the Old Faithful Inn, which means sleeping inside for two consecutive nights, as well as all the warm and fuzzy feelings that come from meeting people with whom you stay in touch over multiple days.

We’ve had a lot of great encounters on this trip, which I’ve promised myself I will briefly chronicle the next time we’re on a computer. Meeting new people is usually pretty great, and on this trip–especially the last few weeks of it–they’re often punctuating hours and hours of people-free landscape, so we’re usually really happy to talk. But it’s been a pretty rare occurrence for us to run into anyone twice, and so the times we’ve done so it’s felt incredibly significant. So I guess that’s all to say that I’m looking forward to seeing these guys again, so much so that I have to kind of look at it and figure out why, because really I’ve only known them for two days. Conclusion: ongoing relationships are important, especially when they are scarce!

All of this is heightened in Wyoming, which more than anywhere I’ve been is the land of nothing. Felicia told me the population was less than half a million, and I can believe it. We bike miles between towns, and they’re mostly pretty insignificant even by the new standards we’ve developed. At this point, I consider a town pretty significant if it contains a gas station, a really big deal if it additionally has a grocery store, and populations above 1000 are something to remember.  It’s going to be weird going back to school: I’ve always thought of New Haven as a very small city, almost on the edge of a city and a big town, but now that I’ve traveled for months and  seen maybe 4 or 5 cities that are bigger, it seems huge, and everything about the basic city way of life seems very strange and far away and hard to understand. This is a strange thing to find myself thinking! I have never lived outside a city!

Final third?

So according to miles, we’re just a bit past halfway–we’ve done around 2700 miles, and have about 2000 mountainous ones left to do. But as Rhiannon commented, it really feels we’ve entered the third cultural or maybe geographic region. I really conflate those two regional definitions,  and in a way doing this trip has just made it worse. Biking means we spend a lot of time looking at the landscape, and have only a few really influential conversations each day with which to form a cultural impression of a place (although of course there are lots of signs, houses, pieces of infrastructure to check out for clues, too). I’m pretty confident in my visual impression of the Great Plains after staring at hundreds of miles of wheat fields and thousands of cattle, and that’s going to have a big impression on how I think about the culture of the place.

If anything, I’m finding at this stage in the trip that some of my older preoccupations are returning in full force. Looking at this many landscapes, both on the more natural and the more human-made ends of the spectrum, has made me want to remember everything I know about biology, and wish I’d paid a lot more to my mom’s birdwatching bouts, and had finished this awesome coffee table book I have called INFRASTRUCTURE. Each time we’ve crossed into a new region–the recent ones being the Ozarks Mountains in Missouri, the Plains in Kansas and eastern Colorado, and now the scrubby foothills of the Rockies in Colorado–I’ve completely freaked out about how gorgeous it is and also been filled with questions about what on earth is going on around me. I thought biking would mean that the changes to the landscape would be gradual and piecemeal, but that is completely FALSE. Moving out of the plains into the unfenced scrubland of east Colorado was pretty much an overnight experience: one day it was endless fields of grain and giant harvesting equipment and tiny towns with towering grain mills in them; the next, the roads curved, we saw cactuses and jackrabbits, the air was cool, the fences disappeared, and there were these round brown hills everywhere.

It’s fantastic, especially after the experience with Kansas, which honestly upon a few days of experience was not the best. More than anything else, it felt like pedaling slowly through an incredibly hot, humid, and windy factory of the worst parts of the American diet–just wheat, corn, soy, and cows. Also, we talked to folks in Kansas who really miss the flat when they go away, and like being able to see 10 miles, but I find it hard to understand how that  much flat space can feel like anything except violence to the human imagination. I mean beauty is everywhere. But I was glad to leave.

And I will be glad to leave this coffee shop. I apologize for the relative incoherence on display here. FOX is currently commentating on the Michael Jackson paternity crisis, baseless attacks on Sarah Palin, and the energy bill.  As a result, maybe 75% has already exploded and it therefore unavailable to help spruce up this blog entry.

Hello from THE WEST!

We have spent two days now in the beautiful mountains around Santa Fe, New Mexico, and it certainly feels like we have finally biked past the Great Plains! Yesterday we biked into Pueblo, Colorado, where we were picked up by my friend Liz to stay with her and her family on the Nambe Pueblo Reservation near Santa Fe. We left our bikes at a bike shop in Pueblo to get them in shape for the Rocky Mountains, as we took a couple of days off to get our bodies ready to start pedaling again.

By all appearances, we have truly reached “the West” (we were finally sure of this when we saw the Stetson window at the Western Apparel Store in Pueblo), and we are so excited for what feels like the final leg of our journey. But we didn’t suddenly reach the West, as I might have expected – as early as northern Kentucky, we started seeing convenience stores called “Cowboy” and “Cowgirl.” This only increased in Missouri, and by Kansas, we were seeing business and town names lettered in classic old West font and cowboy paraphernalia everywhere. In Kansas, we learned, this is a tribute to the history of the cattle drives from Texas up into Kansas.

In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense that each of these areas would have been considered “the frontier” at different points in history, and that the way people think about these places now would reflect this history. But at the time, it seemed strange to think that we would have already seen monikers of the Western frontier when we were less than a third of the way through our trip. I am now excited to see how these impressions change as we get into the mountain towns – a completely different kind of Western history. What happens when your geographical history gets eclipsed by new developments? In a way, this sensation reminded me of how I felt thinking about historical settlements in the East that have become suburbs of large cities, visually obscuring the unique history of each place.

Similarly, it has been fascinating to suddenly discover new layers of history in Colorado and New Mexico. Throughout the trip, the founding dates of towns and buildings have become more and more recent, but here we have started seeing the older Spanish settlements, as well as the incredible history of the Pueblo civilizations. I was so amazed to see the architectural uniformity of the city of Santa Fe, which is regulated to preserve the appearance of adobe buildings. Although Santa Fe is one of the most touristy locations we have been on the trip, the question of how communities (however small) interact with their history has definitely been on our minds. As we get further West, and the history gets more and more recent, I will be curious to see how immediate this history seems.

Some inconclusive reflections in STL

So here we are in St. Louis, sitting in the Lawlors’ lovely home, after all kinds of food and showers and wonderful things. Biking since Cincinnati has been pretty great, at least that’s how I rose-colored-glassesly choose to remember it. Our route took us into Kentucky with occasional dips into Indiana, and our desire to spend all of our money on food and none of it on housing took us to people’s doors to ask them if we could camp in their backyards almost every night. People’s readiness to take us in, combined with their for-serious southern accents, leads me to call this “southern hospitality.” But maybe it’s more in the nature of “rural hospitality” or “people are nice everywhere” hospitality. Unclear. Anyway we’ve seen a good variety of places in Kentucky/Indiana/Southern Illinois, which felt like they were cut from largely the same cloth as a region. We hit Owensboro, KY, the depressed post-industrial city; Louisville, KY, the revitalized downtown with the Kentucky Derby and the real city vibe; Junction, IL, a little residential pocket by State Route 13 without a gas station to its name; Neunert, IL, an even tinier residential pocket along the Mississippi floodplain occupied by maybe 50 people, all of whom seem to know each other intimately, which is being legislated out of existence as the government tries to keep people from building too close to the river; and Carbondale, IL, the hip college town that made us feel exactly like we were at home, which was nice but also, as Rhiannon pointed out, kind of weird. Why should we feel that close to home?

We barely brushed the south, according to the maps, but for a couple of folks who’ve never really been there before it felt like we were in the heart of it. We saw  a few characteristic industries (tobacco and coal–although at first we had no idea what tobacco plants were and theorized they might be soybeans…FAIL), saw plenty of gun shops and confederate flags and massive anti-abortion ads and “pregnancy crisis centers,” heard folks saying positive things about Sarah Palin, drank sweet tea, heard the accent (which I know is supposed to be different than a Southeastern accent but honestly I have trouble telling the difference), and definitely encountered the friendly people.

Over the course of riding, we’re often faced with these decisions about our route: to follow the recommended, but perhaps circuitous and hilly, backroads route? or to take the state highway that we can so clearly see? Choosing often comes down to a decision about whether we’re going for the destination or the journey–do we want more pleasant biking along pretty, hilly roads without the fear of death from truckers and road-raging drivers, or do we want to endure some heat islands and some road rage and some really ugly sprawl in exchange for flatter, faster, straighter routes to our destination? The answer turns out to be “it depends,” and that when we don’t have much of a destination to look forward to we’ve tended to go backroads, to follow the impossible curves of the Ohio River rather than cut away from it, to take the steep hills that a state highway would never climb. But we have so little time to spend sitting still, and sometimes we’ve wanted to get to a destination in time to see it a little. You can see a lot from the road, but you don’t get to talk to so many people as when you take the time to sit down somewhere.

Rain is great for that. Yesterday we were going along a coal road full of heavy trucks and steep hills and a tiny shoulder, and it was hellishly rainy, and we both slipped off our bikes at one time or another because the traction was so bad. So needless to say once we arrived in Chester, IL, at 9:30 AM after riding for three hours in the rain, we found ourselves a diner and crashed at a table, looking like drowned rats I’m sure, and ordered plate after plate of food, and in the end got into a conversation with a guy whose name I never got, who I have been referring to alternately as Sarah Palin Man and as Widow Chaser. He initially came to our attention when he was talking with his friend about what an intelligent and competent woman Palin was, and what high approval ratings she had in Alaska, and her good handling of the state’s financial situation, and anyway this whole conversation was going on pretty loudly so without consultation, Rhiannon and I started furiously eavesdropping and eating our toast very quietly. When we actually started having a conversation with him instead of just listening on, he also told as about an instance in which “the people spoke and were heard,” which was in a court decision to strike down a dastardly law requiring motorcycle helmets. He is the Widow Chaser because, totally unbidden and without segue, this reasonable-seeming guy started telling us about his dating problems. As a fifty-something man whose wife had died years earlier, he was having trouble finding a suitable lady friend because there “I can’t just find a good widow–most of the men are still alive at our age” and “I don’t like dealing with divorcees and their issues–some of em have kids, some of em have ex-husbands that they talk to all the time, and I just don’t stand for that.”

This conversation was the conclusive proof that we cannot have a single conversation with an older man on this trip that does not give me deep feelings of distress about gender relations as they currently exist and as they interact with , from the “you are exactly the right height for a women “date rape happens, but we haven’t had a violent crime here in years because it’s hard to rape a little girl if she’s gonna blow your head off!” guy to the “you are a coupla gorgeous babes” guy to the “your legs and butt look really toned!” progressive hippie man in the coffee shop. None of this was even remotely threatening but was just bizarre. To Legs and Butt Dude: you are very nice! But I just met you! There is no reason to compliment parts of my body! Or to kiss me on the head for that matter! Anyway. Hopefully we will come to more conclusive conclusions on gender dynamics than “they are not that great,” perhaps with the aid of some supermarket romance novels. You know–research.

Blind picture posting

Flew in to Cincinnati today via some strangely empty flights–both legs were barely half-full. Secret talent: I am so great at napping on planes and in airports. In my youth I was one of those people who can’t sleep in public. That is all behind me now, and I probably doubled my night of sleep through some mega-napping.

Also, Rhiannon and I managed to assemble my bike out of the box with only small interventions from Awesome Bike Shop Man John at Biowheels, which based on this encounter I have decided is the greatest shop in the Cincinnati metro region. I learned something about brakes, but still very little about spokes. Next time!

The house in Indian Hills is beautiful, and the Lanier family are incredible hosts. Flying into Cincinnati we got a great view of the city and the surrounding countryside. It’s a lot less farms than I expected! I was envisioning fields as far as the eye could see, but after the plane dropped below the clouds, the only land devoted to agriculture (or anything else) was in the valleys and the half-mile of land right on top of the bends in the Ohio River.  Lots of trees with just fingers of farmland. Pretty.

What follows are a smattering of pictures which we uploaded today for the first time in a while (read: since Day 0). Most of them I was not present for, and Rhiannon is industriously packing in the next room (which I also should be), so captions will be fun.

Rhiannon eats an apple on day 1. See, no hands! Clearly, on that first day, we had not developed the ravenous, all-hands-on-deck approach to food that we currently possess.

Day 4, in the Berkshires. I post this one only because it demonstrates that I was so full of energy upon reaching the top of the hill that I decided to climb a huge rock next to the highway and try to capture the splendid vista. Of course it turns out the vista is not so splendid as it feels when you just climbed it, but it is kind of pretty right?

Hmm, this appears to be a very nice mural! I guess I shouldn't post pictures with neither explanations nor recognizable people in them.

Rhiannon at Niagara Falls!

Looks like a rib fest to me.

This is a charming (sideways) view of our tent in front of a sunset on Lake Erie. I believe this is before the nighttime thunderstorm that sent everyone else packing into their cars. But Rhiannon had no car, so she persevered. At least this is how she tells it.

And then there’s our new masthead, featuring one tired biker parked in the shade of a charming gas station inspecting the contents of her water bottle. I think it sums up the situation pretty well that this gas station was memorably charming.

Route comments: tomorrow we’re wending our way through downtown Cincinnati (first time to get lost on the trip? time will tell) and making it about halfway to Louisville, our next major destination. Hopefully we will have a couch surf there, but really who can say.

Relaxing in Cincinnati

I arrived in Cincinnati safe and sound on Thursday night, after a relaxing day of riding almost exclusively on bike trails! Southwest Ohio is home to a huge a biking community with lots of bikeways to take advantage of – for example, Xenia Station, an old train station site, is now a local hub connecting around 170 miles of paved trails. I saw tons of folks of all ages and speeds out on the trails, so it looks like they get a lot of use!

I am staying with my college roommate’s family here, and they have been incredibly welcoming! Her family has a lot of connection to the city, so they were the perfect people to show me around and tell me about some of the fascinating history of the city. As promised, I have sampled some of Cincinnati’s famous cuisine – we went to Skyline’s for Cincinnati style 5-way chili, which is served over spaghetti or as a coney sauce on a hot dog, with a heaping pile of shredded cheddar cheese on top. Its distinctive (and delicious) taste comes from its secret blend of spices, which is rumored to include chocolate and/or cinnamon – sources vary. We also tried out Graeter’s Ice Cream, known nationwide for its thick, creamy texture and its small-scale production (all ice cream made in 2 gallon batches!).

Katie is flying in tomorrow, so here my solo adventure of the last two weeks comes to an end. I’ll admit, I was pretty nervous about heading out on my own, but it ended up being a fantastic time. Thank you so much to all of you for your best wishes (and your worries) along the way – it meant a lot to know that there were people thinking of me!

Something that is not the goal

What we hope not to become. (Credit to George Ulrich for the link.)

Ribs, Pancakes, and Pie, Oh My!

Hello from Butler, Ohio – 930 miles from my starting point! Since Niagara Falls, I have been trekking solo using Adventure Cycling’s Underground Railroad bike maps. I biked along Lake Erie until shortly after crossing the border into Ohio. Since then, I have been heading southwest on my way to Cincinnati, where Katie and I will be reunited to continue our journey westward!

I don’t have time for a long post, but I wanted to give you all a quick update on some of the fantastic food I have been eating!

I rolled into Erie, Pennsylvania, on Friday night after a very long day of battling the headwinds off of Lake Erie only to discover that I had come upon Erie’s annual Rib Festival. Rib Festivals are apparently a very big thing for people that make ribs – each tent had dozens of placards listing the awards they won, and some even displayed their trophies out front. I was advised by some local experts to get ribs that were charcoal grilled or, even better, with cherry wood.

Yesterday, I passed through Burton, Ohio, nicknamed “Pancake Town USA” because it makes all natural maple syrup in a log cabin in the center of town. I had a delicious breakfast with cinnamon pancakes slathered in their fantastic syrup – and then I got a slice of their renowned pie, to top it off!

Now, I am looking forward to some of the world-famous ice cream in Cincinnati!