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!

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Mormonism, Vegetable Mysteries, and More!

Hello from North Tonawanda, a town just outside of Buffalo, NY, and several miles away from Niagara Falls! Today was my first day of riding solo, and I am happy to report that it was totally great! Some more unorganized thoughts are below:

1. High school pride: in a bunch of towns that we have passed, the “Welcome to _____ ” sign at the beginning of town has also featured information on sports team accomplishments for the local high school, sometimes dating from over a decade ago. It made me think about how connected I would feel to my high school if I ended up living back at home and had my kids going to the same school I went to – and if high school was the last school I attended (or if the college I went to didn’t feel so culturally immersive).

2. Mormonism: yesterday, we passed through some major Mormon history! First, we went through the tiny town of Port Byron, where Brigham Young lived. Then, we went through Palmyra, a town near where, according to Mormon belief, Joseph Smith dug up the golden plates that revealed the teachings of LDS to him.

3. Sprawl or History: a couple of nights ago, we stayed with the family of a friend of the girls I have been biking with in Camillus, NY, a small town just west of Syracuse (essentially a suburb of the city). The town itself is just about as old, if not older, than Syracuse itself, and it got me thinking: at what point does a town stop being a historical settlement and become suburban sprawl?

4. The Cross-Country Voyage: The first night we camped out, in West Brookfield, MA, we heard from the campground owner about a 9000-mile, cross-country road trip he had made 15 years earlier. A couple of days later, we ran into a woman in Windsor, MA (the tiny Berkshire Mountains town) who had done a bike trip from the East Coast to Michigan. Yesterday, one of the people we stayed with talked about how he did a cross-country motorcycle trip many, many years ago to visit all of his contacts from when he was in the army (he said he would write them letters in advance, and then show up with either a bottle of whiskey or a roast beef as a housewarming gift). It’s amazing how many people you run into with this same kind of story, and it underscores how the idea of cross-country travel is set somewhere in the American imagination. There is a desire to feel like you can encompass the whole of the country in one fell swoop if you cross it – or you can at least get close.

That’s all for now, except for two short anecdotes from what I thought about alone on a bicycle today – in case I haven’t seemed crazy enough already! For the five miles outside of Albion, NY, I got completely fascinated watching strewn pieces of lettuce on the shoulder that I was riding on. Somehow, a couple of heads of lettuce must have gotten loose and bits and pieces were there for literally miles! Every time I thought they were finally finished, more would appear! Even though I thought about it A LOT, I still can’t figure out exactly how the pieces would have gotten torn and separated like that.

I also puzzled over this sign from the First Baptist Church in Medina, NY: “Choosing life in a pagan culture.” I guess sensical sayings are difficult with limited space.

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Hello from Rochester, NY!

So by now you all have heard the bad news about our (temporary) separation while Katie rests up and I do the opposite of resting up – keep pedaling!

The last three days I have been riding with two awesome young women (students at MIT) we happened to meet while couchsurfing in Albany (we were both set to stay with the same family on Saturday night – what a great coincidence!). They were kind enough to let me join them for three lovely days of flat riding through upstate New York, passing through Schenectady, Utica, and Syracuse, among other towns.

A few thoughts so far:

1. Roadkill: there is a LOT of it! Squirrels, possums, raccoons, etc. They are sometimes gory, sometimes covered in flies, and very occasionally flat as a pancake. Mostly they still look almost entirely alive, ready to spring up off the road and scare a passing cyclist.

2. Food: I had my first diner meal of the trip yesterday at Dave’s diner in Schuyler, New York. They had a bunch of memorabilia all over the walls, including a sign proclaiming: Hippies – use the back entrance (no exceptions). I couldn’t quite tell if this was meant to be ironic or not (for FORMAC students: they also had an old UNEEDA Biscuit advertisement posted, and later that day I saw a huge side of the building billboard ad in Syracuse for it!).

3. The kindness of strangers continues to astonish and amaze – from the Memorial Day partiers who offered us beer just before a one-mile long climb to the driver who stopped us today to show us a detour that saved us miles. Mike and Missy of Little Falls, NY, stand out by far for offering us their cabin to sleep in when we knocked on their door to ask about camping near their property. They were in the middle of an impromptu Memorial Day weekend family reunion and they promptly invited us in for dinner.

That’s all for now – it’s past my bedtime (early, I know…). Tomorrow is my first day riding alone, which is both very scary and very exciting. I will be incredibly careful to keep both my physical and mental health intact over the next few days as Katie does the same!

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One to Buffalo, One to Boston

So, our whole plan has hit a bit of a hitch, and the crew has temporarily split. No, we have not yet had our first fight (although we keep speculating about what it’ll be)–the problem is disease, specifically mono. On Day 5, which was also kind of a scorcher, the sore throat that has been tickling me since Boston blew up into more of a problem. I was having trouble swallowing, feeling feverish, and exhausted at the top of every hill. Not being entirely lacking in common sense, after some encouragement from my mother, I got myself to urgent care in Albany with the help of our incredible couchsurfing hosts. This time the mono test came back positive.

Fortunately, there are various silver linings. First of all, the bike trip is continuing. The second night we stayed in Albany, another pair of female twenty-something cross-country cyclists stopped in, and expressed interest in riding out together, so Rhiannon has joined them. They are totally great and I think we have a pretty similar ethic about the trip–fairly ungadgety, taking a non-traditional route (different ones, though), low maintenance about proper campgrounds. The main difference is that they have been training since September, where as we only thought of doing this in January and started really training on Monday.

They’re keeping their own blog, which I would link to if only I knew the URL. The plan is that Rhiannon will be traveling with them, if all goes well, up until the Buffalo area, when they’ll be heading into Canada, and Rhiannon will be likely be heading south through Ohio solo, since she has no passport to go to Canada even if she wanted to.

For my part, my parents drove the three hours (only three hours?! it was five days!) from Boston to pick me up, so now I’m home in my kitchen. I’ll get a chance to see a bit more of some of my friends here, and watch entire seasons of Six Feet Under (something which I have fortunately avoided doing at school). I will also be sleeping for at least 12 hours a night with the goal of a speedy recovery, so that I can rejoin Rhiannon somewhere along the road. Because she is a goal-oriented gal, we’ve set the goal of my rejoining by St. Louis, which is both a significant location on our route–the last one before Pueblo, CO–and somewhere that she should reach after about 3 weeks of travel, which is a good recovery estimate for the kind of very mild case of mono that I have.

This all means that Rhiannon is going to be riding solo for a few weeks, unless she can track down a companion somehow or other, of which she seems skeptical. It also calls into question the continuation of our trip blog, since she has been by far the less eager blogger! However, she has made a commitment to updating the blog when possible, since, in her words, she will be “desperate to communicate” and also to reassure everyone that she is not dead. She still refuses to Twitter, though. Hopefully we will hear from her about this. I will now join in heckling her to update, because I want to know what’s up.

Ah! But there are also lots of things to say about the days of riding that preceded this trip-altering event! I will attempt to communicate them in bullet form, in no particular order:

• we had two mega-successful couch surfs, with people who I will not name here lest they have net.privacy concerns, but they were both completely lovely. In Amherst, we stayed with some graduating seniors who shared their falafel & one of their last nights on campus with us. In Albany, where we crashed for an extra unexpected night, we stayed with an incredibly open and generous family who, additionally, were absolutely in love with the place they lived, which made for some wonderful conversations. They also had two incredibly charming children who overcame Rhiannon & my shared reticence around kids, which is a major win.
• free stuff count continues upward: one free night of camping, free New York State bike maps, free cookstove when ours broke.
• we made friends with our first group of bikers–like, big folks on motorcycles–who we met in Windsor, MA, which is an absurd little town at the top of a hill whose two noticeable buildings are a tall, white, eminently New England church steeple and a structure that is simultaneously gas station, general station, and US post office. I have no idea if anyone lives there or not, but it was a wonderful destination after a day of climbing in the Berkshires, which is our first named range of mountains (OK, some people call them hills.)  Most of the time when you are approaching a town, you will be heading downhill, because reasonable pioneers in the 18th/19th century wanted to settle down by a river where there was good farmland and good transit and good weather. But not Windsor!
• A side note on the Berkshires: they are described on a green highway sign thusly: “Welcome to the Berkshires! America’s Premier Cultural Resort!” Har har.
• I’m totally in love with Albany, for a collection of not very interesting reasons that fortunate fellow Aaron Podolny received in a rapturous email. Why do people say bad things about Albany? It is so pretty, and also appears to be the only real city on our route between Boston and Buffalo. The politics seem like they are maybe a little filthy but as a visitor on a bicycle it was pretty great.
• In Western Mass, the Jesus signs had already begun. We were a little freaked out by the overpowering size of the lettering on “When no one cares… JESUS DOES !” and baffled by “Jesus Saves, Government Spends.” That kind of sentiment 1) makes me understand better why Mitt Romney was ever elected governor of Massachusetts and 2) makes me wonder about how the red parts of blue states compare to the red parts of red states, because these parts of Western Mass feels like what I imagine Kansas to be like. My gut feeling is that I am wrong and that Kansas is much worse but Rhiannon advances the alternate hypothesis that red parts of blue states are even redder in reaction, just like blue parts of red states are bluer in reaction (see Austin, TX or Asheville, NC)

Anyway, Rhiannon can take it from here. Go Rhiannon!

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