Decided to sketch a handful of scenes from our last rest day in Denver.
Katherine
The locally famous La Filette, where I had a glorious almond croissant.
Spotted a bunny on a peaceful, and humid, walk through the neighborhood.
Bruno, our host Haley’s 5-month old puppy, who used us all as his chewing toys.
Assembly station for homemade pizza. Mmm.
Ody got rear-ended yesterday. Katherine was driving, and was hit by a driver going too fast and following too close while she stopped at a stop light. Anyone could’ve been in front of this driver; simply, Katherine was the unlucky person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Katherine handled the accident incredibly well. Without getting into too many details, she navigated working with the people who rear-ended Ody, figured out how to get a police report, found the necessary documents, all just minutes after getting rear-ended. Thankfully, the accident was more minor than it could’ve been. No one was seriously injured (Katherine is feeling pretty sore from the crash today, but she assures us that it’s fine. I dearly hope the soreness is improved tomorrow and in the coming days!). The rear bike rack took the brunt of the collision, folded over, made a (relatively small) dent in the car, and shattered the back windshield. While this may sound like a lot of damage, rear-ending can total cars, and this is definitely fixable.
Assessing the state of Ody
So, after we cleaned the car of broken glass last night, I called my dad on FaceTime to assess the damage, and try to figure out what needed to be done (thanks Dad for being our on-call car help!).
This morning, we set to work. Some called body shops, others called insurance, still others called car window replacement shops. Truly, the work this morning was all-hands-on-deck, and it was amazing to feel us navigating the challenge together. The glass shop here couldn’t fit us in until a week from now, which doesn’t work well with our constantly-changing schedule. As a consolation, they helped us put some plastic on the back, so bugs and rain will stay out. Thankfully, the shop in Colorado Springs had space on Monday, which is near where we are staying Monday night. We’re planning on getting the dent fixed in another city down the road.
Apparently my dad and little brother have a joke about Ody having nine lives, and this puts Ody down to six lives. At this rate though, we should just have enough lives left on Ody by the end of this trip.
I feel like I sing the praises of our hosts every blog post I write, but truly: the Warm Showers hosts are phenomenal. Our host this weekend let us park Ody in his garage, let us borrow his car while we were figuring out fixing Ody, and then made us a delicious dinner last night after it all. I am repeatedly blown away by the kindness, hospitality and generosity of these people. On our trip, we put ourselves at the mercy of the chaos and entropy of life. This is offset in part by great help we receive from people like our hosts.
Over dinner, Parth, Katherine, Vincent and I joked around about how something goes wrong almost every day on this trip. Yet, somehow it never feels that dire. This trip never pretended to be easy, and our first week(s) taught us to navigate challenging situations together as a team. Bike problems feel routine (and they are, due to a bike that shall not be named…), logistical problems are tackled with ease, and larger things like car accidents are chipped away at together, as a team. I recently remarked that we’re falling into a rhythm as a team, and I think a good part of that is our familiarity with navigating the challenging reality of this trip.
As always, my musings aside, here’s a summary of what we got up to today:
After navigating the car stuff this morning, we all set out to spend our rest day in our own respective ways. Vincent set out to do his regular adventuring (which today included getting a Denver library card). Parth made pizza dough, in preparation for making pizzas tomorrow night. Aja explored Denver around on her bike, alongside a stop at REI. Katherine went to a long-awaited doctor appointment for her knee. I grabbed lunch with a friend who happened to be passing through town. This, of course, is in between the general resting, napping, and bike repairs characteristic of our days off.
Yam and hotdog curry, as prepared by Parth for the team for lunch. It was quite tasty!
Attentive readers may notice that that is a short list of Spokes. We are down to just five Spokes for most of this weekend. Sophia flew out to North Carolina to see family, and Timothy is seeing his partner, Julia, who flew in for the weekend.
Some of us reconvened in the evening at Denver’s RiNO district, which is characterized by trendy bars and restaurants nestled among large murals. We grabbed dinner at Denver Central Market, where we got to hang out with Julia, and generally bask in the freedom and oddity of being in the largest city we’ve been in in a month.
Hanging out at dinner!
And so we go, towards another day, uncertain of what the days will bring. We do know for certain that challenges will come around eventually, but so will the great days of amazing biking, big laughs together as a team, and just the general delight that traversing the country at 15 mph brings.
Onward,
Joel
Just kidding.
Turns out I got tired last night which is why I left you with the gigantic squirrel (Marmot) cliffhanger.
So today I’m actually gonna give you a blog post, although if you’re interested in something coherent and unfettered, you’re probably better off spending your time staring at a lake (or reading about some old dude *cough* - Thoreau - talk about it instead), since I can barely sit in my saddle for thirty minutes without being distracted and taking a detour to check out a cool rock.
Even though I drove the car for 30 minutes today (and didn’t do any biking), I managed to get sidetracked until 11pm with random things in the city. We finally hit Denver today, which was actually a rude awakening when I ‘re-realized’ that most people are a lot less trusting than the folks in the 20 person towns we’ve been passing through.
I went downtown to get a bite to eat and ended up getting a bag of microwavable quinoa + rice + lentils from Target grocery, which led me to ask - and get rejected by - 4 different restaurants (and a 7-eleven) while trying to find a place to use a microwave. Denver is clearly different from smaller towns that we’ve passed through before. But then again, every place that we’ve stayed in has been different. It’s noticeable in the terrain, but it’s also noticeable in the people.
I talked to someone today who told me he’s on a quest to touch the lives of city-folk one at a time by greeting random strangers on the street. I talked to someone (a host!) a few days ago who spent an hour and a half tellin me on the proper way to complete a door; and I talked to someone a few weeks ago gave me some tips on making friends in new places, based on her own experience of living in and traveling to various countries throughout Asia (Vietnam, Thailand, and Japan).
This trip has really humbled me and given me an extreme appreciation for learning about people. I feel like I get a new perspective with every person that I meet, and I’m left each day feeling like there was even more that I could’ve learned. Before this trip, I wasn’t that enthusiastic about biking so darn slowly in so many random places (practicality is one of my guiding principles), but that’s because I didn’t realize that it could be a good opportunity to meet new people.
There’s something to be said about the kindness and trust that people give you when you show up riding a bike. But I guess that’s partially because bikes don’t exactly make the best getaway vehicles.
But I think it’s also because there’s an appreciation for discovery, shared among people everywhere. And that sense of adventure is linked to traveling at an agonizingly slow pace. I’ve realized that I wanna keep touring after this trip, not for the biking, but for the people.
I don’t want to forget how motivated I was to become “handy” after listening my host lecture me for 2 hours on woodworking. I don’t want to forget how much I appreciated the “workshops” that I’ve been given by my teammates on bike fixing, cooking, and traveling. I don’t want to forget how I cried the first time, collapsing from exhaustion in Nevada, when I didn’t think I could keep going. And I don’t want to forget how I I cried while cruising down the Rockies, overwhelmed by the rush of slashing down thousands of feet of elevation and getting air-time while flying over bumps.
I want to keep the roaring of the river, the tingling of the hot springs, and the warmth of sniffing 10 types of mint plants all inside my head.
But I’m a forgetful guy.
And it turns out that my head is kinda small.
So I probably won’t remember any of that.
If nothing else though,
I hope that I remember the people.
(And the feeling of being rejected from using a microwave by the short bald guy at the pizza place on 16th street)
Vincent
P.S. Shoutout to our amazing hosts these past couple of days!
Sean and Jenny: got us to explore cool places in town, helped fix bikes for us, and inspired me to commute to work next year!
Scott and Angela: made us lasagna mmmm and muffins and bread! Taught us a lot about bike touring and shared wonderful stories
Anne and Bill: made us happy, gave us a lot of laughs, FOOD, bike + car fixes, and help with route planning :)
Sean and Jenny!
Scott and Angela!
Anne and Bill!
This is all I have to say.
- Vincent
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(>.<)
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Just kidding… you really think that’s all I got?
More to come soon — after a nice night of sleep zzzz
We woke up today at 5:45, which is on the early side for most Spokes mornings (our median wake-up time is around 6:30). At this point, we’ve fallen into a morning routine. Everyone packs up their sleeping bags and belongings first thing in the morning, and after eating breakfast we split up the tasks of packing the car, preparing the cooler, inflating bike tires, and filling up our water jugs. On the first day of the trip we didn’t get out the door until 1pm. Now we’ve shaved down our morning routine to a little under two hours. So today, after a delicious egg breakfast (thank you to our Steamboat Springs hosts for letting us use their chickens’ eggs! It was lovely staying with you) and the usual tasks, we were ready to go. We were planning on setting up Katherine’s GoPro today, but the straps on it proved challenging to our uncoordinated fingers. Maybe if we spent more time sewing and less time biking, but alas. Perhaps by the time tomorrow’s blog post rolls around we’ll have some crisp, HD GoPro footage to share.
Today was supposed to be one of the Big Days, our first day of crossing the Rocky Mountains. 9 hours of biking, 5000 feet of elevation gain. It was intimidating, but unlike the climb over the Sierras, I felt equipped. I was excited for the challenge. The ride started innocuously enough. The first stretch was a flat bike path passing through Steamboat Springs. Parth’s bike had some troubles, but it would be a weird day if it didn’t. They peeled off to go to a bike shop to get it fixed, and the rest of the morning bikers – Sophia, Vincent, Aja, and I – pressed onward.
Our first rest stop. The road is steeper than it looks! Photo courtesy Parth.
After about half an hour, the dreaded uphill stretch came into view. Really, it was just a mountain with a road blasted out of its side, snaking around the edges. And for the rest of the leg, the road went up. It didn’t flatten or dip. It just kept going. At the bottom of the hill I turned on my “Drum n bass classics” playlist, put my head down, and 1800 vertical feet later stumbled across the gravel to the rest stop, where Joel had laid out our picnic blanket. We snacked on apples and oranges (thank you Joel and Katherine for getting fruit!) and forced down some nuts for protein, and half an hour later we were back on the road. By this time Parth’s bike was fixed (I’m learning that “fixed” is a temporary state of grace, and not a permanent condition), so they, Sophia, and I took off together while Vincent and Aja wrapped up their breaks.
a majestic mountain view. photo courtesy of Parth
Leg 2 was much easier. 1300 feet of climbing, but still mostly downhill. And the scenery was beautiful. Green in every direction, streams cutting through the grass, rows of impossibly narrow pines, a family of cows that stared at us as we biked by (if only the GoPro could have captured it). We wrapped up Leg 2 at 12:30, feeling optimistic for the rest of the day.
If there’s one thing this journey has taught me, it’s that something can always go wrong. Today, that something was the weather. Our third stop was in a town called Kremmling, at a coffee shop / ice cream bar. 20 minutes out, and I felt a couple drops of water on my face. 10 minutes later, and the rain was pelting down in dime-sized globs. By the time I arrived at the coffee shop, we were in the middle of a thunderstorm which was expected to last until 7. Another cyclist, who was trapped inside the shop for the same reason, warned us that lightning storms in Colorado are “pretty deadly.” So we heeded his advice, drove to pick up the remaining Spokes on the road, and then hunkered down. A half-hour break turned into an hour, and then an hour and a half. After a while it became clear that our prospects would not improve any time soon.
The remaining Spokes (Aja not pictured) wait out the storm by playing cards. Photo courtesy Parth.
Being the kind soul that she is, Katherine offered to shuttle the Spokes the remaining two legs in the car to our Frisco hosts’ house. I was lucky enough to be in the car for the first trip. She, Vincent, and I arrived forty five minutes later and unloaded the car in the pouring rain. Then Katherine rushed off to pick up the others, and Vincent and I took showers and chatted with our hosts, who were generous enough to cook us a lasagna dinner. After a delicious, energy-dense communal meal, I peeled off from the group to write this.
That’s about all from me for today. Tomorrow is more climbing, but then we’re out of the Rockies (supposedly).
Till next time,
Timothy
i take a lot of pictures. not just on this trip, my dwindling phone storage and grainy google photos albums dating back to 2013 can attest.
i’ve thought a lot about time since we left campus in mid-june. the time it takes to complete each twenty-mile leg joel carefully calculates, the time we’ll arrive in each new city and whether that’s early enough to cook dinner together as a team. the time it takes seven sleepyheads to roll-up-sleeping-bags-eat-change-pack-car-get-on-the-road each morning. rotations per minute and miles per hour and only 24 hours in a day and how has it been almost a month on the road already?
time flies when you’re having fun (and i think it also flies regardless).
some part of me panics at the thought of missing moments, the thought of thinking back to spokes in five or ten or twenty years and only remembering that it was fun and tiring and sometimes stressful but a “super cool” experience nonetheless.
i hope i remember today when sophia found a giant dandelion and almost ate all of the fluff, when vincent showcased his pro(fficient/fessional) ice skating abilities at the local rink, when joel and sophia foam rolled with such vigor that i almost cried laughing, when katherine talked to me about feminism and ancient art over watered-down lattes and used books. when i found a fantastic nutella swirl muffin at a little coffee shop in downtown steamboat springs. when the wells fargo employee i crossed paths with this morning was also named aja and was also named after a steely dan album from the 70s.
i’m afraid of losing these moments, getting so lost in the frantic shuffle of… everything… that i take for granted these 70 short days and 3500 *short* miles. part of why i love working with young kids is because they force you to slow down, to hold moments a little bit closer and question the (seemingly-innate-at-this-point) desire to produce stress from thin air. they force you to pace yourself, to look for roly polies in the dirt after teacher joel’s rocket lesson because why not?
it’s really difficult to maintain sight of this. when it’s past midnight and we have a 5:45am alarm set and it's simply impractical. when we have miles to cover and places to be. when the only thoughts in my mind on that steep steep MOUNTAIN are one two three four…twenty *downshift* one two three four…twenty *downshift*...*downshift…*downshift*... *barely survive* ...
i try not to forget to pace myself, breathe, soak in the view and (at times excessive) sunlight.
i try not to forget to stop and take pictures.
here are a few from today :)
aja
the dandelion to beat all dandelions
intimidating foam roll joel
bookstore coffeeshop = happy
teacher joel in his element
we may not be made for water, but we sure are made for ice!
craig, co → steamboat springs, co
it’s no secret that, out of the seven of us, my bike causes the most problems. i’ve had four flats, one tire replacement, and pretty much every moving part on the bike has failed or broken.
timothy likes to joke that, every morning, my bike spins a wheel (it’s cursed back wheel, perhaps) to randomly determine which part will break that day. it’s gotten so bad that joel even asked me, “at what point would you consider just buying a new bike?”
the thing is, i love my 2015 blue Specialized aluminum bike [side note: english adjective order is complicated] — i’ve learned so much about bike repair and maintenance from having to fix it on the side of the road. i know that if your deraileur isn’t indexing properly, it’s probably an issue with the cable tension; or, if your wheel is shaking back and forth, the hub might be loose (fixing that involves removing the cassette and carefully tightening a big screw in the middle of the back wheel — i royally screwed it up [no pun intended], resulting in a trip to the bike shop).
so today, when i got my fourth flat, joel and i removed the wheel in two minutes, inspected and replaced the wheel in five, and simultaneously re-inflated the tire and adjusted the brake alignment in eight minutes — a 15 minute pit stop that would have taken me more than 30 minutes at the beginning of the trip (and a considerable amount of youtube-ing).
we’ve gotten better at a lot of things since the beginning of this trip: today started with a fairly swift pack-up operation at the church we were staying at in craig. joel stretched, giving his knee some much-needed tlc. timothy was riding in the car, so his day began with some carefree dancing.
vincent hopped in the car for the first leg too. the rest of us did a random assortment of things: sophia stretched, aja moved boxes into the car, katherine downloaded maps and prepared for the drive, and i inflated everyone’s tires.
today was a 43-mile day, which many of us now consider to be fairly light (another sign of progress, i think).
first, we stopped in a playground, where a group of kids were playing. we grabbed some tables on the side and prepared lunch for ourselves. in a surprising twist, sophia managed to crack an egg without utterly demolishing it (remember the last time she tried?).
sophia’s concentrating face
aja cradles a head of lettuce (for some strange reason)
at the rate we were biking, we were going to make it to our destination before our hosts got off work so, sitting in the park, we looked through a bunch of activities that we could do in steamboat springs.
in the end, we visited a pharmacy, candy store, and bookstore before finishing the bike ride to our host’s house. during that time, vincent visited the library and the botanical gardens — both of which he later described as so amazing that he wants to go back.
six spokes in a candy store (only three pictured here)
a quote from one of my favorite authors, outside the bookstore
we ended the day at our host’s house — they have a flock of chickens and a dog! as timothy and joel walked closer to the chicken pen, they noticed one of the chickens lying in an “unnatural” position that “no chicken should be in.” sadly, one of the chickens had died :( but it remains unclear how that happened. (murder mystery?)
ps: the namesake of this post is a book called zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, which i’ve never read. but, from skimming the wikipedia page, it seems like the book recounts a motorcycle trip while musing on philosophy, the nature of truth, and human relationships.
so, i suppose i owe you a few philosophical musings. i don’t have much profound to say, but here’s what i was thinking about on the ride today:
the relationship between american christianity and white supremacy, as described in this book, which was recommended by the pastor at the church we stayed at last night
is it cheating to make art by taking pictures and tracing them? i don’t think so; photography was once considered ‘cheating’ by artists, but now it’s widely accepted as its own art form
a bunch of people are showing up to the minions movie wearing (formal) suits; separately, where can i acquire a minion suit?
in a field of wind turbines, how come some of them don’t move and others do? (answer: it’s hard to store energy so companies will sometimes turn turbines off during low demand rather than run them and store the energy they generate)
why does white move before black in chess? is that related to race? (answer: unclear; i was only able to find unverified blog posts)
having more time to think while biking is another sign of improvement — early on, i couldn’t focus on anything other than biking
43.28mi, 2:55:04 moving time
—parth
TLDR: What I (we) did during our lovely rest day in Craig, Colorado, told in pictures from my camera roll.
9:30 AM: Woke up. Mostly because Sophia barged into the room where we were all sleeping and roused us with her lumbering footsteps and grand plans for a morning coffee outing to the “Mudd Shack”??
10:13 AM: Obtained coffee from said Mudd Shack. I got an iced latte with coconut milk. The others (Timothy, Aja, and Sophia) deliberately chose to exclude me, all ordering iced ~London Fogs~ with ~a shot~ of ~espresso~. Lame.
10:25 AM: On the leisurely walk back to the church where we’ve been staying, stumbled upon a laundromat x soda fountain/snack bar. Set an objective to return with our communal laundry bag (it’s EFFICIENT, NOT gross) and feast on grilled macs and cheeses and mystery soup while doing laundry.
11:40 AM: Secured laundry bag.
11:51 AM: Laundry time! What a place. Aja cheesin and lookin cute. Timothy pocketing leftover quarters. And now we wait.
12:22 PM: Joel and Parth join us for lunch break at the laundromat/Bear Coal Soda Fountain. Treated ourselves to paninis with chips and pickles and, later, Italian sodas and ice creams. I dropped some of my savings on a Bear Coal Soda Fountain shirt, which I am currently wearing with great pride.
3:15 PM: Walmart run with Aja for groceries and toiletries and all the other necessit-ies. We have truly become a well-oiled machine when it comes to knocking out the shopping list (divide and conquer -> coalesce and cross-check). On the way out, were intrigued by the concept of Cajun Quarts (GumGo!©)
4:26 PM: Aja insists that we bring all of our grocery bags into the church in one go, resulting in ^this awful mess.
7:40 PM: Sunset from inside the sanctuary.
~8:30 PM, not pictured: We all had dinner (chili with quinoa) together and it was just so darn good that I forgot to take a picture. Thanks Timothy for being head cook.
11:21 PM: Vincent vincenting. It’s hard to describe what’s going on, but it’s happening.
Honorary meme (source: Timothy) to cap off the day, summarizing how it feels to describe life on this trip to my friends and family whenever we catch up, and how it feels to blog when the brain is goo.
Katherine
