http://gregie.com/gallery/neil/20090425/

72.41mi / 5:01:29 time / 14.4 mph avg. / 31.5 mph max. / 2014 ft. climbing
Staying at Hittle Bottom BLM Campground

It turns out that the rain last night wasn’t just rain. Waking up at dawn, I discovered our tents were frozen stiff with a layer of icy snow. Actually snow is better than rain, because it has a harder time leaking through my tent!

We took an early-morning hike along some of the canyon ledges, where our internal instincts kept us from going right up to the edge, despite the fact that the photos wouldn’t turn out as nearly as badassedly if we’re timidly shying away rather than standing there confidently. Nice that instinct takes over when the conscious brain starts being stupid.

Then it was an awesome roll down off the cliff, giving back the altitude that we climbed yesterday. I think the western set of switchbacks were even more impressive than the eastern ones we climbed, but that might have been because it’s easier to gawk when you aren’t breathing so hard.

In camp in the morning, I plugged my phone into my solar panel and it started charging in a hurry, even though the sun wasn’t very high at all. Great news. (and thanks for the birthday voice message, Mom & Dad, I finally got to listen to it!) But then, after I added my 3 liter bag of water under the solar panel, it seemed to stop working (we would have no water sources until the next morning, so we needed to carry a lot with us). I couldn’t figure out why it broke; my best guess was that it got so much sun that it blew the fuse in the 12VDC-to-USB adapter. Oh well, nothing to do with it then, but it would suck to have the panel fail on the second day of the trip, since we were really counting on using it.

When we got into the town of Fruita after leaving the Monument, I noticed a Napa Auto Parts right across the street from the grocery store we were stocking up at. I went in and they checked the fuse and it was fine. I guess that would have been too easy of a solution. So then we jiggled the wire around where it connects to the solar panel and discovered we could get an intermittent connection. Must be a broken wire there. So after a bit of hemming and hawing, I gave Dennis to the go-ahead to hack off the connector box on the panel. Then connecting bare wires directly to the newly exposed terminals, we still had no voltage! How is that possible?! Finally, after Dennis did some more poking and prodding where he got a voltage, he realized that it was the bag of water under the panal that was bending it just enough to make it fail. Removed that, and it worked just fine! Argh!!!

So that was nearly two hours of work that we could have avoided if I had been thinking. Much thanks to the Frutia Napa Auto Parts who loaned us a voltmeter and a soldering iron to help us get everything back together again. And thanks to Dennis who reminded me to chill out and avoid crashing into things.

We finally got rolling for real around noon, on Interstate 70. It was the only good route into Utah, and as usual for an Interstate, it was pretty nice riding in the big shoulder, and not even that loud because it wasn’t very busy. Around the time we got off and headed to through the ghost town of Cisco, I really started flagging, partly due to my right knee/quad that was acting up again. A cleat adjustment on my shoe might have fixed it, but by then my rhythm was shot for the rest of the day and I struggled along while Dennis was nice enough to coast and let me go at the pace I could manage.

Eventually we turned into the majestic Colorado River canyon along SR 128, sort of replicating the views of the Colorado National Monument, except this time we were at the bottom of the canyon instead of on top of it. Red-rock cliffs and towers everywhere, with the blazing white snow-covered peaks of the La Sal Mountains providing the backdrop. Beautiful. When a campground appeared right off the road and along the river, I said to go for it, even though we were a bit short of our planned destination. I was useless in camp for the first hour or so, but at least we got everything set up and even finished dinner (Mexican, yum!) before dark, which is a first for us! The food helped a lot, so hopefully I’ll be a bit more normal tomorrow. Either way, it’s great to know that Dennis has plenty of ability of this sort of thing. The cool laid-back campground host here set us up with some free firewood, so we even had a fire, which Dennis expertly started using only his flint thingy. So, another successful day, even though it didn’t always feel like that to me.

23.9 mi / 2:22:20 time / 10.0 mph avg. / 32.5 mph max. / 2372 ft. climbing
Staying at Saddlehorn Campground

I slept remarkably well on the train, to the point where I didn’t hear Dennis arrive back from the lounge car, or many other noises throughout the night. Not to say that I didn’t put some serious kinks into my knees and various other body parts. We stopped for a bit at Denver around 7am, and that’s when things got awesome, with the train rising up the Front Range through a lot of tunnels and switchbacks. Then we crossed the Continental Divide through the 6.2 miles Moffat Tunnel, and soon after picked up the Colorado River, which will be the main touchstone of our ride. We follwed it through some steep narrow canyons, where it was eventually joined by I-70 (which has a really sweet bike path running under it for quite a distance), and by 3:30 we were in Grand Junction.

The plan for the first few days of our trip hinged on a timely arrival in Grand Junction. I’d been tracking the on-time arrival of our train, and within the last week it had been as much as 646 minutes late, so that fact that ours arrived 30 minutes early was very good fortune. Even more, the conductor announced the train would be delayed at least an hour *leaving* Grand Junction, so we just made it. Our trip was off to an auspicious start.

The Amtrak shipping worked beautifully, and we had our bikes reassembled and loaded up in 30 minutes. A quick stop for groceries, and then we headed towards the Colorado National Monument, hoping to make the 1600 foot climb and 23 miles to the campground at the top before nightfall.

Somehow my climbing juices kicked right in, and I was able to power up the 8% switchbacks as if I’d been doing it for months. And I tried to take advantage of one feature of two-man touring, which is being able to get cool pictures of Dennis riding on switchbacks above or below me, with a backdrop of steep canyon walls and the town far below and behind us.

Once we crested the peak at ~6600 feet, it we enjoyed the downhill descent the rest of the way to the campground. The Monument is incredible. We rode along many sheer-walled canyons, seeing courses of tall spires and fins of rock that would stretch on for miles. I hadn’t even heard of the place until I started planning the trip, and it’s not very well-known. That implies that many of the other places we’re seeing may be even *better*, which is sort of hard to believe.

So it was a beautiful way to spend my birthday, especially since all of our plans worked out perfectly. That’s why I got unreasonably angry when, just as we were turning in for the night, it started to rain amid extremely gusty winds. After having rain for the whole first week of my last tour, this was supposed to be my “dry tour”, and here it goes ruining our plans by raining?!? Ugh.

Since this is the first time that I’m starting a bike tour from somewhere besides my driveway, that means there’s no actual riding, but hey, I’ll write about it anyway.

Dennis and Swati showed up at my house a little after 11am, which gave me plenty of time to wake the lawnmower from its winter slumber and make a futile attempt to beat back the impending dandelion plantation which will likely thrive shamelessly in my yard for the next four weeks. We packed our two bikes and all of our gear in the back of Dennis’s Xterra, leaving about 3 inches of space in the back for Swati to squeeze in next to my rear wheel. It’s actually the second time we’ve tried this packing configuration. The first was a few weeks ago when we attempted a training ride to Shabbona, IL and back, and sort of failed on the “back” part of it. The brutal winds made us give a call to Swati to bring the Xterra and bail us out before the snow came. So now we can say “no, we didn’t give up that day, that was just practice to make sure we’d be able to fit all our gear in one vehicle!”

We drove down to Union Station in downtown Chicago, spent some time reassembling our bikes, and then rolled them into the station. We were led down to the bowels of the station where a couple of very relaxed and helpful Amtrak employees built up some bike boxes and rolled our bikes inside, and also let us toss various other miscellany in with them. The only disassembly required is to remove the pedals and turn the handlebars sideways, and the fee for taking a bike is a mere $20 ($15 of it simply for the box). I don’t think there is an easier or more economical way to travel with bicycles, so thanks Amtrak for being so cool to us! Of course, this all assumes that our bicycles are actually on that baggage car connected to this train…

Once aboard the California Zephyr, we secured the best seats on the train (in the coach section, at least!) They’re at the very end of the last car, so very few people come wandering by, and there is extra space everywhere. We got “reservations” for the 7:30 dinner, shared a table with a couple other engineers (civil and mechanical, not “train”) and enjoyed some pork tenderloin on a plastic plate.

As we were about to leave, Dennis pointed out some “King’s Hawaiian Bread” sitting at another table. He actually had no idea what it was, but unbeknownst to him, I’ve had a strange fascination with the stuff for a few months now. Ok, really, I had no idea what it was either; all I knew was that one day about six months ago, it suddenly started appearing in the circulars for every single grocery store in my area. That avalanche onset allowed me to concoct the belief that there is a cultish devotion to this King’s Hawaiian Bread, though I knew no members of thi cult. But now, I do! Dennis asked the waitress about it, and it turns out it was her own personal stash, and she was quick to offer us a taste (is this how they grow the cult?) It looks like white dinner rolls, but the trick is that it’s sweetened somehow. Though I didn’t feel any cultish fervor welling up inside me while eating it, I can see how it would have some fans. And maybe when my internal “FEED ME BREAD PRODUCTS!!” monster takes over as it always does a week or so into the tour, I’ll be really angry that there is no King’s Hawaiian Bread to be found in Hanksville, Utah.

Anyhow, whole point of this story is to say that if I had been doing this trip alone, I would have never known the taste of King’s Hawaiian Bread. So even before the riding starts, it’s good to have Dennis along.

Ok, I’m about to start a bike ride tomorrow. I know what you’re thinking, “blah blah blah, Neil’s off on another tour, I heard that story before.” And in fact, you probably have. This will be my fourth multi-week tour in the last 5 or 6 years, and although it’s still pretty darn exciting for me, it’s probably less exciting for you, because now when you hear about a bike tour, you no longer say “WTF? He’s going to do WHAT?!” like the first time you heard about such a thing.

But wait, this one is different!

For the first time, I’ll have a partner! (*crowd rises in anticipation…*) Sorry, it’s not a new girlfriend. (*crowd sinks in disappointment*) Instead it’s my good friend Dennis. Having someone else along will definitely change the dynamics of touring, and perhaps I’ll even write a little less because I’ll have someone else to talk to besides my computer.

Also for the first time, I’ll be neither starting from nor finishing at my front door. Instead, we’ll be boarding an Amtrak train in Chicago, and riding it out to the western edge of Colorado. Then we hop on our bikes and spend four weeks weaving a drunken path through Utah and a slightly more sober-looking path through Arizona, ending in Tucson, where we fly home. In between, we’ll be hitting something like 9 National Parks/Monuments and a whole bunch of other interesting piles of rock.

So another difference is that this trip will hopefully be a bit more relaxed, with hiking and camping being at least as important as the biking part of it. That’ll make it a bit more like my tour in northern Wisconsin. We only need to average something like 60 miles per day, and we’ll be stopping for a couple days at a few places like Bryce Canyon, Zion Canyon, and a Canyon They Call Grand.

So what’s the same? Well, I’ll still be taking my computer along, writing journal entries and posting pictures as we go (and so will Dennis, if you want a different perspective). I’ve got the same bike and most of the same equipment, though I still somehow managed to collect a bunch of new gear; due to the high altitude, we’ll face a bigger temperature range than I have before. I planned the route out myself, so I’ll only have myself to blame if it sucks (but I’m pretty confident that it will do just the opposite). And finally, we’ll be finishing at my cousin’s wedding, which is the second time I’ve done that. Well, it’s her first wedding, but I ended my Wisconsin trip at another cousin’s wedding. This will be my third vacation that I built around a cousin’s wedding (the first led to a vacation through Europe), which made Swati ask “what are you going to do once all your cousins are married? You’ll never go anywhere!!” She may be right!

Ok, time to finish packing!

The photo that made me say “I’m doing this!”


The route