The End and The Plains

The big adventure is at an end now. You’ve probably noticed the blogging has died off, this is because I’m mostly just looking for work and brushing up on my engineering skills ready for a job. I’ve got just over 2 weeks left in Toronto then I’m back, and keen to start work asap as funds are running low and I really need to apply myself again.

I’m reading exactly the wrong book for this phase though: On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. I last read this 10 years ago when I finished my degree in Cardiff and was staying on Bert’s sofa in Nottingham waiting to move to Edinburgh, and it inspired me, showing the endless possibilities present in life, you just have to reach out and go for it. Reading it again now is even more powerful, I had a lot of similar experiences crossing the states, and went to some of the same places, when he talks about the prairies it takes me straight back there.

The plains were always the heart of the trip. When I was planning it the main motivation was not to ride coast to coast, the part I was obsessed with was crossing the plains. Coming from the UK, a land of rolling hills, valleys and crowded towns, it is almost impossible to imagine the limitless space, it is like a sea of land, rolling from horizon to horizon forever. The moment I dreamed of wasn’t reaching the pacific, this seemed too far off to think about somehow. Instead I dreamed of seeing the rockies looming out of the prairie after crossing the plains, following the pioneer footsteps, seeing and experiencing the geography of a continent.

Imagine that you are in the middle of nowhere, looking at the landscape ahead with no deadlines, no rush, no constraints, your only choice to decide which valley to follow, which mountain pass to cross, which hills to skirt or climb, which river to follow, not knowing where it will take you apart from west, north, or somewhere in-between. Will the road be flat or steep, will you ride to the edge of an escarpment to see the land drop steeply and become a plain reaching as far as you can see? Will the broad river valley gradually narrow, start to twist and turn and climb, become a canyon with gushing white water, funneling the wind so that it is difficult to even walk, the wind changing somehow towards the summit so that you know you are reaching the top, threading the pass to find a high plain, a long curving descent, the shock of a snow filled valley after plains heat behind, a tourist town, a two-horse dying town, a forest wilderness?

Will you see snakes, moose, bison, bear, alligators, chipmunks, bobcats, mountain lions, college kids, rednecks, road workers grinning and giving the peace sign, waving you through the roadworks and downing tools to wish you luck, snakes, a crowd of vultures flapping noisily into the air from a carcass, lovers parked in out of the way places, animals hanging from the neck by the roadside, armadillos hollowed out on the shoulder, wishing their armour was car proof, skid marks ending in a hole in the fence, deer running along the road clearly having fun with you, a wolf crossing, a herd of horses galloping out of the endless plains to run alongside the fence, joyous in their freedom, a mile-long freight train giving you a mournful double-blast of the whistle to acknowledge another human being in the near desert.

It is little known that long-term solo cyclists have their own religion. You may be godless in real life but on the road you will pray to the road gods, the weather gods, and the various gods of crazy and disturbed people. The idea of not tempting fate, something of a background concern in modern society, takes its rightful place in the mind of someone for whom almost all modern society has been almost stripped away, now like a threadbare carpet barely concealing the deeper, more basic urges underlying being human. You start to understand exactly where pagan gods and worship comes from, exactly why you don’t tempt fate, exactly why the wind and weather and rivers and mountains and animals were sentient and treated with respect.

The modern concerns disappear. No bills, no deadlines, no work, no tv, no possessions, no trying to impress people, or keep your place in society, no concerns apart from the seasons and the road and the wind and the possibility of dangerous people and animals. No cares about production, or documentation, or getting on with people you may not particularly like for a large part of the day.

It becomes so that you will not tempt fate under any circumstances. Most people, perhaps sane people, think of the landscape and road as fixed. They know that the weather will change but not because of anything they do. But on the road this changes. If you disrespect the road gods by saying or thinking things like ‘this road is easy, I should be there in a couple of hours’, then the road gods will hear and punish you by throwing in a big hill, or a rough surface, or 30 miles of roadworks. The weather gods are the same, feel smug about the nice warm weather and tail wind and you will soon find yourself fighting a headwind and cowering in terror from a thunderstorm that appeared from nowhere. When Bert came out he did not follow these rules, and I would look at him wide eyed and in horror, seeing the weather change and the road rise up in my mind to punish us. Modern life is a thin veneer indeed.

In the vast landscapes of the continental US you quickly realize the incredible power of nature and very quickly respect it. In cities and towns you are divorced from the underlying reality, until your town is wiped out by avalanche or flood, or the food trucks are blocked and you quickly revert to seeking food and shelter and that’s it. You start to see the way the road is barely scratched onto the surface of the land. You see the links to the outside world that keep towns alive, the food trucks, the power lines, the water pipes. In the UK these links are not obvious, absorbed or hidden by the busy landscape and the closeness of the towns and villages. When you visit the end of the world, like the Shetland or Orkney islands, these links become clear, but not usually on the mainland. In the US it is laid bare. There is an old saying that civilisation is only 3 meals away from disaster, and when you see the infrastructure that modern living is based on etched clear upon the landscape this becomes worryingly clear.

I camped rough in the middle of a city once and for the first time felt true fear when I heard someone creeping around outside the tent. I woke on full alert, heart hammering, eyes and ears wide, breathing silent, feeling trapped in the tent, straining my senses to determine the danger level. Just like cavemen must have felt hearing claws skitter in the darkness outside, back in the days when there was no real safety apart from what you could provide by defending yourself. At that point I realized that humans were more dangerous than animals, and that I would rather be on the plains listening to the buzz of a rattlesnake than hearing a human stealthily moving outside the false security of my tent.

The twisted, flattened, decayed road kill that I encountered became like gloomy, half-lit milestones, counting down to my death on the road, their clear and twisted agony like freeze-frame illustrations of all the different ways I could die on the road if I wasn’t careful. In the heat and the isolation I imagined them being placed there for me personally as reminders of the respect the road demanded, after I passed perhaps they shuffled back into the bush, their poor bodies being borrowed for the purpose by the road gods, who are surely on familiar terms with death. On the more dangerous roads the road kill milestones were more frequent, showing that my life was counting down more rapidly. I would try to avoid them but sometimes my wheels would crunch over a bone-white skull sticking out of a paste of baked skin and blood, this feeling disturbed me greatly. But I felt truly alive on the road, and if my life was to end in a smear of blood and skin on the road leading to a fused tangle of bone and blood and aluminium under the body of a truck, the driver looking on in horror and disbelief, then so be it, I will die happy.

In my pagan state things took on more significance, became more real. The road became a companion with its own personality, able to cheer me up with a downhill, or punish me with an uphill, the wind too. In Spain I found that the road murmurs to itself, and as I sweated and worked my way over it like the stylus on a record player I was privileged to be able to listen. It spoke about the way that it always followed the lowest energy route over the landscape, painfully obvious when you are on a bike but not apparent in a car, telling me about its origins of following the slow feet of mules and people, the straight parts muttering about romans and their arrogant disrespect of the landscape, the ultra modern curves winding their way through mountain valleys alongside the dismembered narrow old route rejoicing in recent resources and techniques.

In the USA the road had a different character, much harder to hear, and for a long time I despaired of ever hearing it. But gradually I came to realise that the road was much younger here and spoke a different language. In most places it hadn’t evolved from stone age tracks, or from ancient empires, it was recently born in the age of the car. It often paid little heed to low energy routes, instead paying more respect to property boundaries and geometry, cutting across the landscape almost as if it wasn’t there. If there was a swamp the road would be on stilts, if the landscape was rippled the highs would be cut off and used to fill the lows. For all the power and resources this spoke of the rawness of the country spoke of how the road was tolerated by nature, the swamp waiting at the side of the road, a rise of only a few inches would reclaim the road, an avalanche or landslide would wipe it away.

The road is the voice of civilisation, where there is no civilisation there is no road. The road spoke of the state of civilisation. Where there was poverty the road was tortured and broken, blighted by potholes, reflecting the state of the shanties that were nurtured by it. Where there was wealth the road was fresh and clear, dapper in its painted markings, wide and smooth and smug. Where there was isolation the road barely existed, stretching and attenuating itself between places, hoarding its maintenance for where it was necessary, doing what it could to keep itself alive. Along the gulf coast the road spoke of the annual battle of civilisation against nature, the hurricanes sweeping in several times a year to destroy what they can, the road broken, cracked and twisted, barely a road in places, the houses on 30 foot stilts. If the road is the voice of civilisation then in New Orleans it must scream in anguish, a modern city torn apart by flood and incompetence, the city decimated and dying, the precious light of civilisation sputtering once links to the outside world were snuffed out. 3 meals away.

The plains were like a primer in economics. Money is simply a form of converting resources from one form to another, one stage up from a barter society. It lets you store abstract things like manpower and convert them at a later stage for things you need. You do this every time you work for a month, then go spend your paycheck at the store. On the plains there is almost no food available, it is a near desert, recently converted to a farming monoculture. If you moved there as a pioneer you would be lucky not to starve, you could not live off the land. It is clear that unless you can buy food from somewhere else, you are going to starve. You have to convert your skills, guts, work, resources, into food from somewhere else. No link to civilisation, or no resources, then no food.

This was painfully obvious in Wyoming, where we drove through a ghost town. It was born and died with the cold war, a mining town wrenching uranium out of the semi-arid Wyoming plains for nuclear warheads until the arms limitation treaties in the early 80’s reduced demand to a point where mining wasn’t viable. Originally a town of many thousand people it was now a town of a few tens, with buildings, apartment blocks, shops, boarded over and decaying in the sun and wind.

The town, 60 miles from the nearest settlement, coincided with our need for food. The thought of eating in a uranium mining town was a little unsettling but we pushed through that thought. You must understand that in Wyoming, and in the plains in general, you will pass through a tiny settlement of a few people and, if you are lucky, a gas station and shop. You will then travel through 50 or 60 miles of wilderness and ranches with barely a tree, just rocks and dry river beds and scattered cattle ranches. A food or gas stop is not to be treated lightly.

We rolled gently into the town, a village really, but they don’t use that word out here, it sounds laughably quaint. It is clear that the town is not thriving, there is no life, everywhere is dust and scrub, the boarded up windows and doors obvious from a distance. A single beat up diner/café sits by the road with a couple of dusty utility company pickups outside. There is nowhere else and we are hungry so we decide to risk it. As usual in situations like these I am the one who is prepared to walk in first, bert and james hanging back like shy schoolgirls. Inside it is gloomy, a wooden floor and walls, an empty bar, 3 utility workers sitting at a table with some food. I say hi and am greeted cheerfully. I am used to these situations by now and walk unselfconsciously to the empty bar and sit down. Bert and James follow nervously. We talk in low voices whilst we wait for the bar staff to show. Eventually a hunched, one-eyed woman appears out of the gloom at the back of the bar and shuffles slowly towards the utility workers. They obviously know each other, she haltingly asks them if the food is good and they reply good naturedly that it is fine. At this point I have no idea if she is staff, or lives here, or is just visiting. Silence falls as she shuffles towards and then behind the bar, at which we are sitting. I can feel the tension from Bert and James. She reaches our position and stands facing us, the one-eye birth defect obvious, the slowness apparent.

It is clear that I am going to have to do the talking. “Do you do food?”. Blank look. Several seconds of silence. Maybe she isn’t the barkeep after all. I can feel the utility workers watching closely, perhaps defensively. Eventually a nod. “What sort of food do you do?”. Blank look. Silence. Uncomfortable seconds. I realise that Bert and James have no intention of helping me out. “Do you do burgers? Sandwiches?” A disdainful shrug, as if to say what the hell do you think we have, out of towner. Suddenly the utility guys take pity and shout “the chili burgers are good!”. There is sudden and unanimous consensus among us that 3 chili burgers would be great. The barkeep shuffles off into the gloom at the back, presumably to give our order to the chef. We desperately think of other things to talk about.

Eventually more shuffling gains us some cokes, and more shuffling after that delivers our food. An old lady comes out for the bill, we praise the food but she doesn’t seem bothered. We finish our cokes and make a break for it after a brief chat to the utility guys, who obviously feel for us a little, as well as being amused by the out of town British guys. As soon as we get out of the door Bert and James burst out laughing, I feel this is a little unfair as the one-eyed lady was clearly a little slow, they don’t agree that she was, this question is never resolved. We create dust getting out of there, all of us thinking that this is the sort of experience you see in movies but rarely in real life.

Crossing Wyoming by car came straight after crossing the great plains, the high plains, the prairie, by bike. This was the heart of the trip and was one of the hardest experiences of my life, yet at the same time one of the most interesting and enjoyable.

I had crossed from North-east Texas into Oklahoma a week or two ago, entering the plains as I did so. The plains are not clearly defined, some people count them as starting at the gulf coast others in northern Louisiana. For me they started in North-East Texas when I came out of a range of rolling hills and could suddenly see a grassy sea of forest extending for miles. They started out as beautiful lush rolling grassland and meadows and became more and more arid, ending with dried-up river beds and tumbleweed rolling through dusty deserted towns, with dust devils scouring the landscape, the moisture being sucked out of you, the heat and sun beating you every minute of daylight, the wind fighting you for every mile, the isolation battering against your mind, the incredible distances weighing heavily.

North Texas was where it was brought home to me that the tornado belt was not just a statistical artifact shown on the evening news but a grinding, roaring fearful reality that resulted in me spending every second of each days ride scanning the landscape for possible shelter and endlessly planning survival strategies. Do I hide in that culvert and risk drowning, the wind-tunnel effect and burial alive, or lie in that gentle depression and go with the wind. Do I chain myself to that telegraph pole with the bike lock? If I survive how will I find my bike again? Will I continue or go home? These thoughts were my constant and necessary companions on the endless, exposed plains, crawling along the vast landscape, feeling insignificant, trying to avoid attracting the attention of the vengeful, jealous storm gods.

Gradually I realized that the strong headwinds I was encountering, where you would struggle to walk upright, were not just an occasional event but a daily reality. Almost everyone I met would talk to me about the wind, about how they saw me on the highway and thought ‘that poor guy!”, about how it is like this all the time. I started to notice the way the landscape was shaped by the wind, how all the houses had a single hedge on the upwind side of the house, how all the trees and shrubs leaned the same way. I learnt how much influence a single vertical object can have on this vast flatland, feeling the wind change as I approached a tree or bush or house even if I was a hundred metres or more away.

The sound of wind howling through the arms of my glasses, which I have never heard before, became constant. My ears, tuned to determine the subtleties of approaching traffic without looking around, became useless, filled with the endless roaring of global weather systems undisturbed by terrain. My cruising speed halved, dealing me a cruel mental blow, taking several days to adapt to the new circumstances. The altitude gradually increased, with it the vegetation changed, the air became thinner and much drier, the sun stronger, the settlements more isolated. I began planning in busier roads just so that there would be an occasional car or ranch in case of trouble.

I wore a bandit mask, mostly to cut out the mental effects of the wind, isolating myself behind the blue walmart bandana and my wraparound sunglasses, sitting there in my own little world, cruising along slowly. When there was even slight shelter from the wind I would stop: a berm, a cutting, trees bordering a cemetery, a barn, a slight depression. I would ride for many miles, looking forwards to a corner just to feel a difference in the wind in my face. The mask helped to trap a little moisture as I breathed out, otherwise my mouth would dry completely on each breath. I suddenly understood why cowboys in the movies wear these masks and started watching closely to see if they were wearing them properly, plains style: cover ears for the noise and dust, nose for the dust and to trap moisture, mouth for the same reasons but it must be shaped in such a way so as not to vacuum-form itself over your nose and mouth when you breathe in. Subtleties that, I have to say, John Wayne seemed to be familiar with. John Wayne also appears to be the patron saint of the mid-west, every bar and restaurant having pictures of him.

After a few days of this I realized that I couldn’t just take a short day when the wind or weather was bad, I was going to have to keep going to meet Bert and James on time. The day I realized this was a bad day, and I emailed them to let them know I was struggling and set up fallback plans. By this time I was already exhausted, fatigued by what seemed like an endless journey across a vast landscape. I was driven by the conflicting desires of having a rest as soon as possible, and having a rest with my friends in a cool place rather than a dusty plains town.

Time was very non-linear on this journey. Last year I had ridden 1000 miles across Spain in 14 riding days, spread over 6 weeks, which was the easiest trip I’d ever done (don’t get me wrong, it had hard patches). When I reached the 1000 mile point after a couple of weeks in the USA I was on the Gulf coast, Mississippi I think, and I was a little unhappy because I was a quarter of the way through the trip already. The 2000 mile point was in Kansas, and it seemed a lifetime away from that happy point in the Gulf. The first 1000 miles went quickly, the next took forever. Time slowed and nearly stopped on the plains, more than this has ever happened before in my life. When I say that it took a lifetime to cross the plains, even though in reality it was about 3 weeks, I’m not joking or exaggerating. It went on forever! I could barely remember the start of the trip, it seemed like some distant dream world. I think this is part of the mental defense mechanisms needed to push yourself mentally and physically like this, especially when solo.

I adapted to the wind and temperature and altitude and dryness, I guess I had no choice. I no longer struggled with the heat, it was just another thing that sucked energy out of me, and it became planned in with the mileage. Most roadworks I was expected to ride through, they looked at me funny when I stopped, it took me a while to adapt to not being shouted at when I rode through. I’ve said before the road crews were usually the most friendly and enthusiastic people on the trip, the road boss usually giving me a shy wave, the workers whooping and hollering, stopping their trucks and diggers to let me through, giving me priority over all traffic. Felt good. One day, towards the end of the plains crossing, my body screaming at me when I woke up to stay in bed all day, me patiently explaining that it had to be done, just hang in there, I reached some road works and slowed as usual as I reached the stop-sign wielding worker. She waved to me frantically to stop, I slowed further, she seemed very uncomfortable even after I stopped, Turned out they got about a cyclist a day, and the one yesterday had been drunk and refused to stop, ruining their freshly poured concrete, eventually they had to get the police, it wasn’t pretty. I assured her I wasn’t that kind of cyclist. She couldn’t let me through anyway as it was too dangerous, a pickup would come get me.

I sat by the side of the road in the wind and dust and heat. The endless stream of construction trucks stirred up the dust real bad, it was midday, hot as hell, but I could sit by the side of the road without problem. The pickup truck eventually came and we chucked my bike on top of the precarious stack of construction stuff in the back. I was long past obsessing over my bike and figured even if it fell off it would just bounce a couple of times and be ok, the guy promised to drive slowly through the roadworks. He turned out to be the boss of the project, a cool guy, and he gave me a lift a few miles up the road to do one of his chores and save me some miles.

At this point I was doing about 120 miles a day to get to the Rockies on time to get a few days vital rest then meet Bert from the airport. I should explain what this is like. You’ve already done about 2000 miles, with about 500 to go to meet your friends, and 1500 to go after that. After the first 1000 in incredible heat you had 2 days off at your friends house and were like a walking zombie. 250 miles after this you had 3 days rest in North Louisiana. Since then you’ve been slogging along in an unbelievable headwind, up a never-ending staircase that reaches all the way to the Rockies, fighting the isolation of a near desert where it is usually 60 miles between anything, an isolation that goes on for well over a thousand miles. London to Edinburgh is only 400. As a sort of athlete you are used to listening to your body, when it tells you to eat you eat, when it tells you to slack off you slack off, when it tells you to rest or take it easy that is exactly what you do. But now you break this pact. You wake in the morning and your body tells you clearly ‘no way’. It tells you that it is exhausted, that it needs rest, that you would be crazy to push it. You ignore this, fight it out of bed, shovel some food down your neck. By this time eating is as pleasant as filling your car at the gas station, it’s just something you have to do.

You leave the motel room with 120 miles of hot, dry, windy miles to go. If you are very lucky you will average 15 mph, but it is more likely that you will average 8 to 10mph traveling west on the plains. By the end you will be probably racing the sunset. There is no guarantee of a motel room, you may have to sleep rough in your tent. The map shows a tiny settlement after 60 miles and that’s it. You have no idea if there will be hills, roadworks, storms, tornadoes, mechanical problems. But this is your life now and you roll out of the town. With luck you got up early to avoid the heat of the sun and give yourself some daylight margin, but as you get more fatigued it perversely becomes more difficult to get to sleep, so you probably got to sleep around 2am after being up for 19 or 20 hours, at 6 0r 7am waking as if you had not slept at all, faced with the choice of grabbing a few more hours vital sleep and battling the sun all day, or accepting the gritty dry eyed feeling and starting early.

So you start out, 120 miles to go, already fatigued as hell, wanting nothing more than to rest. By now you’re used to slogging along, pushing through things that you would normally abort a ride over - bad stomach, little water, general fatigue, mechanical problems. The first 30 or 40 miles pass in a bit of a daze as you look at the scenery and the front wheel, daydreaming about the finish, wondering what food you might have, scanning for shelter, dodging pot holes, scanning the horizon for signs of the water tower belonging to the next settlement, listening to any odd noises to see if the bike is going ok. After the first 40 it starts to get a bit tougher, you need to eat but are sick of it, you force it down. You start to get a little stiff and sore, you use your little stretching and shifting strategies to get around this. The most important thing is not to lose the mental state that lets you keep churning on mile after mile. By now you don’t even have to consciously manage your legs and stomach and lungs, you just naturally ride at the right pace without stressing any of them. You think of your body as ‘the team’, made up of discrete components, just another machine like the bike.

At 60 miles, as the tiny, isolated settlement rolls in to view, you are more than ready for a break. Before you started this trip 60 miles was one of the longest rides you’d done, it was a serious distance. Now it is barely half way. Dinner is joyless, just more fuel, you vary it was much as you can, get as much nutrition and fresh food as you can, but this is rare on the plains, subway is the best all-round place. Luckily this gas station, set in a tiny town with tumbleweeds rolling through the streets, a big dust devil whirling round and round the forecourt, the police car giving you ‘the nod’, has a subway clone and you load up on onions, peppers, spinach and anything else you can. You fill the bike bottles with water, and take some extra water and lemonade along - anything to relieve the tedium of drinking water all day every day. The attendant lady is initially concerned but relieved when she sees you stocking up, she asks you what your plans are and its clear you are prepared for the 60 miles of dusty wilderness until the next gas station. She tells you a story of a college girl that came through on her bike heading the same way, barely able to stand, not making much sense, she had to give her water and check with her relatives and stuff. Although 60 miles of near-desert wilderness seemed daunting back in the UK it’s what you are used to now, you know your capabilities and limits, and are well prepared for worst-case survival for a few days at least. She unwittingly summarizes the mood of the plains crossing: “if something goes wrong at least there are a couple of ranches, and a car is bound to come past eventually”.

So you are still fatigued, now you have ridden 60 miles, which counts as almost nothing these days. It is hot and dusty and windy. The bike is fuelled and provisioned. It is important to learn how to ‘ping’ your body and understand the honest answer it gives, before it is clouded and overwhelmed by enemies like your ego, and pride, and competitiveness, and peer pressure. I find the way to do this is to ask yourself a question, and the first answer that comes into your head, no matter how unpleasant, is the true one. Try it sometime. Do I fancy so and so? Should I leave my job? Was I nasty to X? The first answer that pings back is real, the rest is ego and baloney. Can I ride another 60 miles. Yes. That’s it then, we go. By now I think of myself as ‘we’, because my body is a team you see? I know it sounds a little nuts.

So it is off into the wind. A small town, even a few buildings, will provide a huge amount of shelter from the wind, and every time you leave town it hits you again as you have slow down and click down the gears. The landscape passes endlessly by. You check the map, every side road is unsurfaced, and most of them travel for a good couple of hundred miles before hitting another surfaced road. Sometimes a freight train will trundle past, some of them stop in the middle of nowhere, huddling behind a line of trees as if hiding from eagles. A massive truck will roar past, usually giving you the whole lane to yourself out of respect. In the distance the far horizon is broken by what looks like ships sailing along, gradually they resolve into a few trucks with cars following, a bolus of traffic, a tentative convoy clotted together on the plains to fight off the isolation. A distant smudge of dust marks where a pickup is bouncing along a dirt track, you automatically take a mental note in case you need help, checking the map to see where they might join the thin scratch of surfaced road.

It’s now about 5pm, sun sets at about 8pm, you’ve done about 90 miles, 30 to go. No idea what’s in the town, whether there is accommodation or not. On a good day you’ll do 15 mph and get there about 7pm, on a bad day about 8pm and get there in the dark. Usually it’s inbetween and you do about 10 or 11 mph. It’s a little tight, you have a small bike headlight but don’t fancy being out in the open with no real light. Animals come out at night for a start, also the big trucks may not see you, and the road surface has plenty of traps to watch out for. Best to ride by day. Big time.

At 90 miles you are usually quite tired, but on the other hand its only another 2 or 3 hours, and that doesn’t sound like so much anymore. You ping your body, as there is always the fallback option of camping rough on the prairie. Having this option has been a massive blessing on this trip, allowing you to ride as far as you want and giving you a great deal of peace of mind. You have no illusions about camping rough though. First of all is to get out of sight of the road, otherwise you will not sleep well at all, every time a passing car’s engine note changes you will wake on ‘alert’ mode in case they are stopping. If they do stop then you must be prepared for the worst. This is what the folding knife is for - false security. The lack of sanitation no longer bothers you, a shower once a week is fine if you are not in ‘polite company’, who needs a toilet when there is the side of the road (a cheery wave is often essential in the endless flatlands). Then there is the howling, awful wind, that will threaten to shred your tent around you as you lie there trying to sleep. Americans are not renowned for being friendly to trespassers either, and the entire trip has been bordered by ‘keep out’ signs. So you weigh the choices and, as usual, opt for a motel near a restaurant. Looking back you will feel a little regret at not camping rough more, but you fully understand the decisions and would almost certainly make the same choices over again.

I recently read 'The Road' by Cormack Macarthy, a superb book, and it will give you a strong taste of the way the solo traveler views camping within sight of the road.

110 miles, one hour to go. You can barely remember starting off this morning. People ask you where you rode from and you can’t remember, you have to reconstruct it: “it is a small place about 60 miles south-east of here, with a nice café”. The morning seems like a lifetime ago, and already blurs into the rest of the trip. Now there are 10 miles to go. You switch in to short-range mode. 10 miles is about my old ride to work. I can do that. Body, can I do that? Yes. Ok. 6 miles is like riding from my sisters house back home. Not far then, half an hour, maybe 35 in this wind. 3 miles is like from Aberhafesp to my house. 20 minutes or so. During this last hour the running commentary in my head will be about how the water tower is getting closer. The last 3 miles usually passes quickly as the towns spread out a little.

Early in the trip I was very confused as to how to spot towns approaching, the European methods just don’t work. Eventually I figured out that there is a very subtle rise in population and traffic density a few miles from a town. It goes from ‘no houses’ to ‘some houses’ and 'hardly any cars' to 'some cars', a couple miles after that you will see school bus stops, then you are at the town limits. You ride into the town, dog-tired. In Spain you learned to head for the bus or train station, there was always decent and cheap accommodation near there. American towns have neither, you learn to head for the grain elevator, a massive steel building around which the town is built. Trucks deliver and collect grain here, so the café and motel will be here too. If there is only one motel it will be run down as hell, very basic, a strip of a few rooms sticking out of the flat plains dust, after the town borderland of junked cars and abandoned houses. If there are a few motels you will look longingly for a franchise, you will know what you are getting then. At this point you just want to get off the bike have a bath, minimum-hassle food and go to sleep. When you have the bath you will leave a thick ring of sun cream, dead flies, dust and road grime. If there are no chain motels you will have to play ‘mom and pop motel’ Russian roulette. This could end up with a pleasant night in clean sheets waking to home-made muffins. Or a single bare light bulb keeping off the hordes of cockroaches and nothing to disguise the slime in the shower.

You make your choice, wheel the bike into the room, ignore the lies about wifi being available and the free breakfast, take your bath, have a quick nap, then head out for food. By this time you are sick of eating, and particularly sick of the 4 food sources available to a plains dweller: burger, steak, Chinese buffet, Mexican. You just want filling hot food with a high calorie content, good quality. Within 3 minutes of finishing your food you will want nothing more, nothing at all, than to be lying down in clean sheets. The walk back to the motel will be a struggle. Fatigue is cruel though, and you will lie awake, exhausted, until 2am.

Eventually you cross into Colorado via Kansas, noting that Colorado is green and lush whereas Kansas is dry and covered in dry riverbeds. It turns out that Colorado uses all the water to irrigate itself leaving nothing to Kansas, the subject of acrimonious state court cases. The Colorado towns are much more prosperous than the Kansas ones only 40 miles away.

On the last day you are cruelly punished by the road gods and given a hilly route, the weather gods gleefully join in and give you a proper headwind. You could do without this to be honest. You slog along longing for a view of the rockies. At the crest of one hill you see what might be mountains, but is probably just cloud. At the next crest, a few miles further on, you check again. You are rewarded with a view you will not forget in your life. At the limits of your vision you can just see white markings high up in the clear blue sky, as if someone has scratched the sky to let the white light of creation shine through. Gradually the Rockies push themselves further into reality, becoming a white wall of mountains tumbling from horizon to horizon from south to north, like the ruined battlements of a conquered heavenly fortress.

A long hot ride later, after sleeping by the roadside for 10 minutes and scaring a middle aged lady who stopped to check if you were dead, you reach a small town on the outskirts of Denver. You are trembling with exhaustion and the altitude, clothes caked white with salt from sweat, your body is screaming at you that it cannot ride another mile, but you have 5 to go, including a nasty out of the saddle climb over a cliff. You blast downhill through the most dangerous part of the entire trip when you have to cross a multilane interstate junction into a retail park. You despair of finding a motel, but spot one across the way. They have a room for a few days. You are thankful. You have crossed the plains, lately averaging 100 miles a day. You get some wine and drink giving a brief writeup on the blog, falling asleep to the happy sound of emails coming in from your friends and family, knowing that unbelievably two of your closest friends will be arriving in a couple of days.

You don’t care about riding coast to coast anymore, you have achieved enough, dug deep enough, more than you thought you would have to. You could die happy. And the journey is only just over half over.

Side Effects

I knew that a last minute rash decision to get out to the States to join Kelv & Bert was going to involve some wallet bashing - what I hadn't realised that it was just the start. Ever since I left them in the Grand Teton National Park, I've been agonising over whether to buy a bike, or if it was just a "phase" that would gradually drift away. I figured that I could just buy a cheap bike and "see how it goes", but then if I didn't get on with it how would I know how much of it was down to cycling, and how much to the bike... All day today I've been trying to justify the vast expense of a tricross, and all the associated gubbins that I, as a non cyclist, would have to buy just to get going - helmet, toolkits, pumps, spare tubes, lights, water bottles, racks, panniers, oils, locks, gloves, glasses, unflattering lycra outfits.

At 16:30 I nipped out of the office early to go and try a Tricross at a local Specialized dealer, who had built one up in my size. One lap around the local park totally sold it - I knew I couldn't go home with out it; negotiations began, loads of cool gear was piled up on the counter, and I finally got away at about 1900 an hour after the shop should have shut.

Unfortunately I couldn't take it for a proper run tonight, as I had guests coming over, but it will get it's first proper outing tomorrow, and I can't wait. Katie already calls it "the bitch", as she says I've been giving it more attention than her this evening - surely competition is healthy??


"The Bitch" looking for attention
A table full of "necessary" extras - I'm sure they totally saw me coming, but I'm chuffed to bits with all of it, and can't wait to be out there on a ride with you all!

Hopefully next time we all meet up I can do better than the 12 miles I managed in the peak district (on the flat) before putting it into the back of the car, and driving back from the pub!

Brighton, UK

You have 4232 unread emails. Its good to be back. No, really it is. I left Kelv Tuesday in Vancouver and headed out to the airport loaded down with my months purchases. The 9 hour flight gave me plenty of time to mull over the 1500 bike miles and 500 car miles I’d spent with Kelv and James.

After landing at Gatwick I had to pop into work in Crawley to get my house keys which was a rude reality slap in the face. Luckily I’d got the day off so went straight back to Brighton, built up the Swobo and headed straight for the beach. Blue skies, waves rolling in, sun shining… it actually beat the Pacific! Lying there for a while and later cruising around the seafront felt like I was still on the other side the planet. It was time to put the Swobo through its paces. I headed for the biggest hill on the sea front, where the under cliff path links to the upper cliff path just past the marina and about 15% for 150m. That should do. It was tough no doubt but achievable, even in trainers and not SPD’s. Feeling confident I decided to give the bike a trial with panniers on and ride into work.

Yesterday I transferred the rack and pannier from the Tricross over to the Swobo for my first ever ride into work. Myself, Meat and Sammo rode out of Brighton under blue skies headed for Crawley 25 miles away. The true meaning of singlespeed was brought home to me on the climb to Devil’s Dyke, but once I’d warmed up and ate some breakfast everything was going fine. It’s a great tourer setup as long as you aren’t in any hurry. Top speed is about 22-25mph before the pedalling rpm gets too much. It flies uphill and descends pretty decently as well, about 38mph max coming down Devil’s Dyke. Coming home we rode the Downs Link, an old railway line which runs all the way to Shoreham. It performed as well off-road as onroad with the fat Vittoria tyres coping well. I'll be getting some tips from my Dad in Wales next weekend about riding Fixed. He thinks I should probably get a larger chainring as its geared a bit low. We'll see. All in all an awesome purchase for £300!

Probably need to say a little about our tour steed, the Tricross. We were both amazed with the bikes performance. 4000 miles on Kelv’s £700 Sport model and just a new cassette, chain and one tyre. You can’t get better than that. I think I must have helped sell about 5 on the trip when I saw people eyeing them up in bike shops. The custom build I had from Specialized was spot on and the well engineered gradients of the US roads didn’t pose a problem for the 34x27 setup, even with the panniers. No granny action on this trip. In fact I was kind of disappointed by the lack of tough climbs. Bizarrely 6% was the steepest gradient we had to contend with on the whole trip. The toughest climb was probably Flesher Pass in Montana, but that was more to do with the 35 deg C heat.

Kelv is still alive as far as I know, though he’s put his bike aside for a while and put on his new Brook’s running shoes. Last I heard he was headed to Toronto on Tuesday…

No More Bertie

Bert has just left for the airport so it's back to solo mode for me. Already feels funny without him around. Not to worry, cool city to be explored. Not leaving my bike anywhere though!

Vancouver, the city of broken glass

we've made it to vancouver after a day of watching bert go mad in shoe shops, he would fit in well in sex and the city, it can't be long before he starts looking at prada

unfortunately our hire car was broken into within an hour of being parked in downtown vancouver, they only stole one of bert's panniers which contained some clothes, his camera, and some other stuff, luckily they didn't take his other pannier loaded up with new cool stuff, and we both took our passports, documents, wallets and the laptop in my rucksack so that was safe

bummer

we're now crashing on the floor in jo's place, one of heidi's (my little sister) friends in vancouver, and we've been for some beers in Denny's! We are stylish people it is true.

vancouver is awesome though, great big steep snow covered mountains rising up just behind the city and a really strong asian influence, i can't wait to explore, it feels kinda like singapore

do you guys want this blog to continue now i'm not on the bike and bert has gone home? let me know, am happy to keep babbling

thanks for all the end-of-ride comments, it was well cool to read them all the way across

"I Don‘t Think So. Beagle"

So we reached the Pacific, by hire car instead of bike, after saying I was gonna ride across America but getting a lift with James for a few hundred miles across Wyoming. Disappointing huh?

No.

Not at all.

Not for me.

You gotta understand the mindset. It’s not about the end at all, it’s about the journey. I know that’s a bit of a cliché but it’s true.

The point of this trip, riding across america, was not to ride every inch of the way, I don’t care about that, I’m not trying to break a record and I got nothing to prove. The point was to have an interesting and fun journey, to have new experiences, to break out of a stale life orientated around a job.

Man has it succeeded in that.

It feels like it’s been going on forever, looking back to the first few days in Florida, or the Gulf Coast, or Brandon’s, or Oklahoma, or the plains, seeing a tornado, first snake, tumbleweed, reaching the rockies, each one feels a lifetime ago. Then there was a cool and much-needed holiday road-trip week with james and bertie in da truck. Then riding through walls of snow 8 feet high, past bison, wolves, geysers in the prehistoric landscape of Yellowstone. 60 miles of wilderness between a few houses and a gas station became the norm rather than something to be feared. So much has happened I need to sit down for a while and get my head round it, I haven’t really had time to absorb it. I know that sounds a bit mad but life on the bike is quite busy, especially when riding with a crazed fool that enjoys trying to sabotage your line and force you onto the shoulder when you‘re not paying attention.

If you’re still focused on the idea of riding every inch of ocean to ocean then I gotta say that reaching the rockies was that moment for me, crossing the plains was by far the hardest part of the trip, they’re quite hilly and man they are windy and isolated, oftentimes my only company whilst riding at 8mph would be a cloud of dust on the horizon showing where a pickup was speeding along a dirt road. I actually started planning in bigger roads just so that there would be a car along once in a while in case something went wrong. The isolation of the plains could be a little unsettling, you don’t need much imagination to start imagining things that could go wrong, empty wide open spaces are an easy place to disappear, or be disappeared, and a couple of times I got a little spooked by someone or something and snuck my big folding knife out of the bar bag and into my pocket, just in case.

After reaching the rockies the character of the trip, and my drive, changed, I no longer needed the ‘ocean to ocean’ motivation, I had achieved more than enough, learned enough about myself, dug deep enough for long enough, to not need it.

So reaching the pacific after nearly 4000 bike miles and a few hundred by car is just another step on the way through this journey, another incredible moment amongst many. The journey is a continuum now, not a point.

It was kinda strange to follow lewis and clark’s footsteps for most of a thousand miles to be greeted by a tacky tourist seaside town, just like a british one, or the costa del sol. The Pacific Coast looks almost exactly like the west coast of Scotland, if you didn’t know where you were I honestly don’t think you could tell the difference for a while.

The dry thin air of the high plains gave me some sinus problems, I had a gentle nosebleed for most of a month, leading to an extreme snoring outbreak that bert has been stoically putting up with. Now that we’re back down low in moist air that really does feel thicker this has cleared up and bert was treated to a silent night. To compensate, I started talking in my sleep, apparently having a conversation with someone, after turning down their offer with a “I don’t think so” I finished with a firm “Beagle.”

I have no idea either.

We’ve hightailed it back to Portland, which was the scene of the real end of the trip. It seems fitting that the trip ended spontaneously in a drunken night of wine, shots and rums wandering round a strange but bike friendly city barely able to talk going in straight bars and gay bars and getting in trouble for accidentally jumping the toilet queue and talking to random strangers and drinking with the rickshaw guy and swapping shirts ‘cos he liked my “we still hang bike thieves in Wyoming’ t-shirt and riding the rickshaw, too drunk to see straight, through an intersection, barely able to steer, the rickshaw guy shouting at me to steer right steer right and just managing to, then neatly parking it next to a police car, we don’t remember how we got back to the hotel but I slept on the bathroom floor in a nest of towels after puking and wondering why there were lots of people in the other room which was bert talking on the phone to his workmates in their office. We were both still puking at 4pm the next day, the hotel staff had to bring a delivery menu up to our room as we couldn’t make it out of the door.

That’s how a trip like this should end, not in a long gritty slog over major hills into the teeth of a wind so strong you can barely walk or talk, along a busy dual carriageway full of trucks and cars with no hard shoulder in the cold grey wet rain.

Seaside, Oregon

We've finally made it to the Pacific, though not on 2 wheels but in the hire car. Neither of us feel any regrets at all for completing the trip in this fashion, we just simply ran out of time. We'd budgeted a day to ride the 110 miles from Portland to Seaside, but driving the route today there was no way we'd have made it in less than 2 days. Bizarrely the road out towards Astoria was one of the hilliest we've encountered in the whole trip. That combined with the headwind, busy main road road and narrow or non-existent hard shoulder would have made it a very gritty end to the trip. Instead, we've taken a leisurely drive after a mammoth shopping spree in Portland this morning.

Portland rocks. Pure and simple, its the best place I've been to on the whole trip. We explored most of the Pearl district today and some of the east side, hunting down bike shops around the city. I bit the bullet and bought a singlespeed. My God its good. A Swobo Del Norte. It's a solid build with a switchable rear hub, fixed one side and freewheel the other. It also will take panniers & mudguards (I'm planning to ride it on the Ireland tour later this year) and it'll take 32mm tires so it can be used offroad. Its a beast, solid and mean looking. It felt great cruising around Portland on it whilst Kelv jogged alongside in his new Brook running shoes.


I could get used to riding it round this super bike friendly city...

Seaside has been a bit of a let down, the weather is overcast, its cold and the main town is like Skegness. Not quite what we expected. The beach however is great with fine white sands and scattered groups huddled around beach fires lighting up the 5 mile seafront. Tomorrow we're going to clean up the Tricross' and take them for a spin out to Fort Clatsop before unfurling the Welsh flag as we hold them aloft standing in the Pacific. If the weather doesn't improve we'll likely head back to Portland. Monday we drive up to Vancouver.

Its strange but the trip doesn't actually feel like its over, even though we've made it to the coast. If anything it feels like a new one is about to start. I'm so motivated by cycling now that I can't wait to get back to the UK to get out on the bike(s). The Tricross will be converted back to offroad use ready for tackling the South Downs, the Swobo is going to be upgraded with new bar tape, toeclips and a single front brake ready for practicing riding fixed on Brighton seafront, and the Trek is going to get a nice new set of racing wheels ready for the Devil Ride. Bring it on.

I've got a big blog brewing (no I don't need the toilet), about all the little things I've forgotten over the last month, but nows not the time. I need booze and tunes. Tonight I need bed :0)