Sliding into home

Our trip to Denver was interesting: we were driving a motorized vehicle for the first time in almost a month. We were driving in a hard rain, also the first time in almost a month. We had stayed later than we thought we would since it was so hard to leave our new family. We rolled into a small motel near the airport and went straight to bed. But, the satisfied grins still remain on our faces. What a trip!!!! We're already planning the next leg for 2008.

Some miscellaneous thoughts:

For our partners' points of view, see their blogs:

http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/ Go to Journals>Rick Barder

http://www.TransAm2006.blogspot.com


I had such a good time that I don't even care that my neighbors are making fun of my bike tan.

Sally Wheaton filled our water bags before we left our house in Lolo, saying that one of the things they love about their home is that the water tastes so sweet after coming down the mountain. Through the whole trip, we never had water that tasted so good, and I thought of her every time I took a sip of water. And that was often.

The winds in Wyoming are so dry that when we stopped at the Visitors' Center in Riverside, Bill the cowboy gave us lip balm, courtesy of the state!

Bike trips are like what I've heard mothers say about childbirth: when they are over, you've forgotten the painful parts and all you remember is the fun stuff.

Half the fun of travelling is thinking about how you'll tell the stories once you get back home.

Staying connected with people back home adds to the fun.

When all is said and done, most people can reach across their differences and connect through what is common: Life is Good!

By the way, I've fixed it so that anyone (not just registered users) can comment. Please do.

We'll be adding pictures as soon as we catch our breath!

Pueblo and beyond

Tuesday afternoon, we all headed in different directions to scout out various businesses for the next day. We agreed to meet in the hotel lobby to go to dinner. We needed to find the bike shop that would pack and ship our bike and trailer, we wanted to find a place to rent a car, we all decided to scout places to have dinner and for some reason, Chris and I had fixated on having a pedicure the next day to celebrate reaching Pueblo.

Pueblo is actually the halfway point on the TransAm route, so the three we would be leaving had actually reached quite a milestone, too. Rick was meeting his brother who was going to be attending his wife's family reunion and we had finished our trip. Needless to say, there were lots of emotions flying around and all of us were trying to avoid thinking about separating on Thursday morning. We were successful on all counts in terms of finding the necessary businesses for the next day. Dinner took place at the Shamrock Pub, about two blocks from the hotel. We were pretty much the only patrons in the place, so the bartender was happy to set a couple of the tv screens to pick up the Tour stage. They even provided us with the remote so that we could turn up the sound and mute the commercials.

We lingered over dinner and wine, and then Roger, Chris, Bob and I returned to Roger and Chris's room which was on the right side of the hotel to view some fireworks. Roger and Chris were quite excited about their first July 4 in "the Colonies" and we all chatted and laughed while we had a large-screen view out of their hotel window. Eventually, we wound down and headed off to bed with plans for errands and time to meet the next day. (Note: on a bike trip, a really late night is 10:00 p.m. This was no exception.)

Bob and I savored our breakfast buffet at the hotel. After the past three weeks, even the littlest things seemed like an amazing luxury. Our conversation mostly centered around how much we would miss our companions, who were family by then. We mused over how, at the beginning of the trip, we considered changing our flight because we had begun to doubt that we would be able to make Pueblo in time. We definitely enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment when we realized that the second half of the trip really showed us how much stronger we had become.

The bike shop was great: competent help, wonderful merchandise (yes, we shopped!). We made the arrangements for the shipping; Roger, Chris and Rick left their bikes for some halfway-point maintenance and then we all went on our way. Chris promised to contact me if she found a nail salon that had appointments, and we headed off to pick up our rental car. Bob had offered to find a U-Haul box for the trailer, which we knew would make it easier for them to pack and raise our chances of getting everything back to Pittsburgh promptly.

It was while we were on that trek that I got the opportunity to do my first text message. Chris had figured out that somehow, it didn't cost extra for her to use texting on her British cell phone, but making voice calls was expensive. She texted me that we had nail appointments at "1530," so my excitement grew as we finished our errands. After lunch at a local landmark, Redtop Burger, I set off with Roger and Chris and Bob went back to the hotel to relax.

Roger accompanied us because the Post Office and University were close to the salon, and he had posting and internet tasks to accomplish. We tried in vain to get him to join us in the indulgence of a pedicure, but he would have none of it. When we entered the salon, the nail tech asked Chris and me if we were sisters. Upon reflection, it wouldn't be hard to believe; we're about the same size, short hair, bike tans, quick wits, sparkly personalities, etc. It was the first pedicure for both of us and we were given the royal treatment: foot massage, a massage chair in which to sit during the process, the works! Chris also had a manicure and when we left, we felt glamorous indeed. Roger provided the requisite positive reinforcement, waxing eloquent about the beauty of our toenails all the way back to the hotel.

The day had flown by; Rick of course found some other cyclists to join us at the Shamrock for dinner: Tim, a young man from Yorkshire, and three American guys who had just graduated college. They were all going east to west. The three Americans were travelling by alternating one driving a van to the day's destination, then riding back to join the others. Therefore, we were quick to point out, though they were less than half our ages they were riding with no weight while we oldsters were riding totally unsupported. So there.

The evening came to an end too quickly. We had to make the drive to Denver to be ready to fly out on Thursday morning. Roger and Chris walked back to the hotel with us, and we had a teary good-bye with promises to email daily and to visit them in London soon. Chris and I had exchanged helmets on arrival in Pueblo, since mine had a sun visor and hers did not. (The sun would probably be brutal through the Great Plains of Kansas.) So, we had mementoes of each other to help us out until we met again.

Guffey to Canon City to Pueblo

By morning, we were eager to leave the hospitality of the Guffey community. We had a patched-together breakfast in the "luxurious" cabin where Roger and Chris stayed. Oddly, there was no running water, there were antlers hanging everywhere, and prominent among the seating options was an old wooden wheelchair, but there was a coffeemaker and microwave. We drank the coffee in shifts, as there were only two mugs, but by then we were a family and had learned to share.

We rolled out of Guffey without a backward glance, partly because as we left we had a view of the hill we had climbed the previous night. In our buffalo-induced stupor we had just kept pedalling. As someone mentioned later, we were all afraid that if we spoke, we wouldn't have been able to go on. In any case, it turned out that the hill was a 7% grade! Difficult at any time, but darn near impossible at the end of a 70-mile day that included the highest pass any of us had ever ridden.

At this point, with very few exceptions, we did get a fairly good downhill run eventually. After a second more civilized breakfast, we coasted into Canon City. Canon City, (which should have a tilde) is home to the Royal Gorge. The gorge is a 1,000 foot deep canyon that at its narrowest point is only 30 feet wide. There is a two-hour train ride into the Gorge that we wanted to take, so we all met in the municipal park and cycled on to the train station just a block or two away. Providence once again intervened, and our plan of taking the 12:30 train and then pdealling to the next town had to be amended. The 12:30 was sold out, so we bought tickets for the 3:30 and decided that the little motel across the street looked like a good bet. It was.

After meeting the owner, who hailed from Warsaw, Poland we paid our very reasonable rate, took showers, settled in and met to walk back to the train station. The train ride didn't disappoint. There is a lot of history contained in the canyon, ranging from an abandoned hotel to warming huts that were placed there in the early 20th century for the railroad workers. The reamins of a wooden aquaduct that once brought water to the town lined the canyon in various stages of decomposition. The tour was narrated by a lady who sounded as if she'd lived through a lot of the history; it was a relaxing way to spend the afternoon.

Afterwards, we found a decent Chinese restaurant and enjoyed another genial meal. Roger, Chris and Rick went in search of a bar for a nightcap and OLN to watch the Tour de France stage; Bob and I opted for ice cream at a Baskin Robbins we'd spotted earliier. The next morning, we set out for our last day of riding. (Hard to believe?) We headed for a Fifties-type diner we'd seen the day before. Just after we got our coffee and tea, Roger and Chris came in to join us. They had visited the attached convenience store the night before to buy milk for their cereal and found the diner so pleasant-looking that they decided on breakfast out. Three of us feasted on a specialty: French toast covered with warm caramel sauce and sprinkled with chopped walnuts and bananas. Roger treated himself to eggs Benedict. It was a fitting beginning to our last day.

We had decided ahead of time to deviate from the Adventure Cycling route on this day, based on the advice of a native of the area we'd run into a couple of days before. Rather than wind through several small towns on narrow shoulderless roads, he recommended State Route 50, which was about 10 miles more direct, graded like an interstate and with an eight-foot shoulder. It was the best advice we got.

The road and the day were just made for the tandem. Fortified by the French-toast extravaganza, Bob and I cranked out the final 40 miles of the trip and arrived at the Marriott in Pueblo exactly two and a half hours after we started. The pleasant ride ended at the most luxurious accommodations of the trip (not counting Dan and Sally's wonderful new guest quarters in Lolo). Some days before, Chris had found out about a special the Marriott in Pueblo was running for the Fourth of July. She, Rick and Roger were planning to use Pueblo as a layover day, so we all made reservations at a great rate and checked into the Marriott for some R and R.

The 400 thread-count sheets, huge rooms, ample breakfast buffet and overall wonderfulness of the hotel and the town were the perfect way to end the trip.

Hoosier Pass to Guffey

The euphoria that came with conquering the pass lasted for most of the day. Good thing, too, because the day eventually travelled the interesting passage from the sublime to the ridiculous.

After lunch and an ice cream stop, we headed into the home stretch. We were bound for Guffey, where there was a great hostel/campground arrangement run by a veteran of the original 1976 TransAm crossing. It was described to Roger and Chris by Joy, a rider doing the EastBound route by herself. They had been very impressed with her, and she had waxed eloquent about how great the place was. Keep all of this in mind for later!

About a half-hour after our ice cream stop, we were behind Roger and Chris when a man in a pickup going the other way stopped to mention that "There is a buffalo on the road." Certainly not something you hear every day, and actually we had no idea what to do with that particular piece of information. We headed on to where we could see the buffalo in the distance as well as Roger and Chris stopped in the middle of the road. (Later we realized that they were ready to "send the tandem on first" for lack of a better plan!)

Back in Yellowstone, we had received advice from a ranger about how to deal with moose (act big and agressive and they'll usually go away) and how to deal with bears (act submissive and back away slowly). The only advice anyone ever had about a buffalo was "don't get into a confrontation with one. We were truly stymied, but somehow it felt better that we were there together.

Another cyclist approached from the other direction, and then we were five. We thought of Rick behind us, and hoped that he had been given the same warning. The buffalo was easily 1,000 pounds and obviously upset about something. We decided to try the avoidance route and we all moved to the opposite side of the road. So did he.

We all crossed the road again. So did he. And he was getting madder. A thousand pounds of testosterone and muscle, with a brain the size of a pea is a very bad combination. Just as we were sure we would all die (at least we were together), a cowboy in a pickup came by and said: Get inside the fence and I'm going to try to drive him down the road. (Mind you, we felt safe inside the fence and with someone having at least a suggestion of plan, but this was actually the fence which the buffalo had just crashed through in the first place). The buffalo took off in the direction we had come from, so that helped us, but really made things difficult for the cowboy. Crashing through another fence on the opposite side of the road, he took off to freedom. Question: where does an escaping 1,000 pound buffalo hide?

Happy to escape with our lives (literally) we looked forward even more to the hospitality of '76 Bill and his Eden-like hostel. No one told us that the last mile and a half were up; after the Hoosier Pass, 70 miles in between and the "buffalo incident" as it came to be called, we were exhausted mentally and physically.

The hostel made the "buffalo incident" seem like a logical thing. Rather than Nirvana, we were projected into the Twilight Zone of lodging. Bill and his wife Colleen were aging hippies operating a "museum" which contained mostly animal bones, an antique store which was actually more a pile of junk on the hillside, and the bunks. More about those in a minute.

There was also something advertised as a cabin. We had decided to let Roger and Chris have that since we'd copped the master suite the night before. We opted for a bunk, which was basically a storage barn with a shelf that held a pad to roll our sleeping bags out on. Mercifully, it was clean and safe, although the fact that anyone could come by and throw a bolt that would lock us in kind of spooked me.

The shower that was near us was not operating (almost a mercy, since it was basically a tub out in a field with a water hose attached and an outhouse), so we walked the half-mile or so to the other shower. After showering quickly (we didn't trust the hot-water supply) we went to, yes you guessed it, the town bar to eat.

This is a story which will play much better in person, so I'll save the really gory details.

Kremmling to Breckenridge

Kremmling was an interesting place. Our first order of business was to find the bike shop to take care of a minor problem with the chain adjustment. The bike shop owner gave us advice on places to stay and eat. We ended up at the Eastin Hotel and Hostel, where we were able to choose between rooms with private baths and rooms with use of a bath down the hall. The two couples chose the private bath option, with Rick opting for a hostel style room. We went to yet another bar, where we enjoyed "cowboy" food. Actually, I was able to snag a huge shrimp cocktail, probably the least fat-laden meal I'd had to that point.

When we left Kremmling the next morning, we were treated to a typical Colorado secondary road: narrow, no shoulders, plenty of truck traffic. We were beginning the climb toward Breckenridge, about 70 miles of up. We were looking forward to Silverthorne, where a bike trail began which would take us into Breck, as the locals call it. It was at the beginning of this 15-mile trail that we noticed a problem with our back wheel on the tandem. A tick-tick-tick sound that corresponded with braking revealed that our back rim was literally self-destructing. On cue, it started to rain.

Since we had the condo reserved for the night, finding a place to stay was not a problem. We skipped the bike shops in Dillon and Frisco to push on to our destination, since our map showed that Breckenridge had several bike shops. They did, but they were the kind that specialized in renting bikes and selling very expensive equipment and clothing, not the kind that wanted to help long-distance cyclists in need.

Eventually we determined that our best option was to get the local taxi service to take us back to Frisco where a shop actually had a wheel that would work on the tandem. (This is not a common thing!) One hundred forty dollars later (taxi and wheel) we had liftoff. We had a great conversation with the taxi driver, a young man who had majored in criminal justice in college and started this business a year ago.

Meanwhile, back at the condo, it was decided that Roger would do the grocery shopping, since we were all craving a home-cooked meal. He braved the traffic and yuppie pedestrians bent on spending their money to go to a supermarket. Fortunately, he had completely emptied his panniers beforehand. He came home with two avocados, lemons, teabags, coffee, two pounds of shrimp, two pounds of pasta, alfredo sauce, two pounds of bacon, two loaves of bread, 18 eggs, mozzarella, tomatoes, hot peppers a large bottle of champagne and 12 beers. After we chided him for over-buying, we set about doing laundry and making dinner. It felt heavenly to have rooms in which to move about, and we were given the master bedroom suite in honor of our hard day with the wheel.

We polished off plates of shrimp-laden spaghetti Alfredo, ostensibly under the heading of "carbo-loading" for the trip the next morning to the top of Hoosier Pass,over 11,000 feet in elevation.

In the morning, I was in charge of breakfast. I microwaved the bacon (part of a cooking lesson for Roger and Chris who'd never tried that) and scrambled a dozen eggs. We had decided that any leftover bacon would make good sandwiches on the road. I felt bad that we would be wasting six eggs, since obviously a dozen would be plenty for five people.

Hmmm. After everyone had been served, I looked at the tablespoon or so of eggs that were left for the cook. The other six went into the bowl and we managed to polish off 18 eggs and two pounds of bacon! But, we had that pass to climb...

It was indeed a climb, but in the way of the Rockies, gradual enough and with breathtaking scenery that we were able to tackle it in pretty good time. We'd estimated that it may take us three hours, but we were in a photo frenzy at the top in almost exactly two. Rick had been concerned about having his equipment sagged because his gears aren't exactly low, but he made it fully laden just behind us. He'd gotten a slightly later start. (What else is new?)