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July 13, 2006
The Road Not Taken...
...is freakin' hot.
I drove across the entirety of Kansas today. The terrain in the east was rolling prarie, followed by flatter prarie, then some real flat prarie, with the occasional bit of flat prarie thrown in for variety. At the exit for a town called Sylvan Grove, I got off of Interstate 70 and drove a short distance north, just to get an idea of what it would've been like to ride along the endless, straight roads of the heartland. I parked the van and got out.
One of the unexpected disadvantages of the trike is that, in addition to the heat from the sun, you also catch heat coming up from the road surface, baking you on all sides. It was about 12:30 in the afternoon when I stood looking down that road, with the full heat of the day about two hours away, and I could feel it squeezing me. That's now, in mid-July. In August, when I would've hit the plains, my sunblock would've been the oil in which I fried. Any remaining wistfulness evaporated right then and there.
After some uncertainty yesterday, I'm feeling good about the decision I made...there's nothing stopping me from making another cross-country attempt, after all. One that starts at the proper time, and after proper conditioning. But now, what's in front of me is a speedy drive through the country I would've traversed, and then a long, epic ride along its western shore. I'm looking forward to the drive and the ride.
Right now, I'm in a motel in Limon, Colorado, about ninety miles from Denver. I'll reach my dad's place early tomorrow, and I'll stay there on Saturday. I have a few practical things to take care of: a package of my mail will meet me there, I've got some equipment to shed and mail off, I need to grease my pedals, and I'll set up the solar panels to charge the big battery in the Black Box. But mostly, I'll just be visiting.
One of the ways I can tell that I've made the right move is that I'm actually excited about what's next. It's as though I used Virginia and Kentucky to train up for my ride down the west coast, so it's like I'm starting another trip. This time, I'm in better shape and a bit more experienced.
I'm still on the road! It just looks a little different.
July 14, 2006
The Map...
...is now updated.
Of course, the 500-mile minivan leaps sort of throw off the symmetry of the whole thing.
July 15, 2006
Into and Out Of Denver
Meaning, I'm in Denver now, this evening, and that I was here yesterday, and that tomorrow, I'll be leaving. Driving very fast and for quite a few hours until I reach Boise, or someplace very much like Boise, where I'll sleep, and then get up, drive to Astoria Oregon, dump my trike, trailer and gear in a motel, drive the van back to Portland, pick up another rental car, and drive back to Astoria, where I will sleep, then get up, saddle up, and pedal away.
Too complicated. And too expensive. But this is what happens when no one will rent you a one-way minivan from Portland to Astoria.
More later!
July 16, 2006
Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho!
That's fourteen hours driving, just shy of 900 miles covered.
After Colorado (which was, it seemed, mostly made up of Denver and its suburbs), Wyoming started out like this:
That endless landscape soon gave way to the bluffs and buttes of the desert.
Eastern Utah pushed it just a little too hard with the whole desert thing. Then came Bear Lake (it's that bit of blue in the background on the right):
The contrast was stark: east of Bear Lake was the hard, pale-hued stone and sand of the desert. The landscape west of Bear Lake displayed much of the same underlying geology, with sharp-cliffed buttes and heavily weathered rock, but cloaked in green vegetation.
Utah continued to redeem itself with stuff like this, taken just before I drove through the gorgeous gorges of Logan Canyon:
And Idaho? In a word: sprinklers!
Apologies for the sparse account, but after 14 hours watching the road roll under the hood I'm a bit fashed.
And, doing the old picture-to-word conversion, you've got 5,000 words to look at.
Tomorrow I will be in Astoria, Oregon and, most likely, will be back on the trike on Tuesday, headed south.
July 18, 2006
I Demand Joy
 I have arrived in Astoria, although certainly not in the way I intended. Phase II of the New And Improved Revised Journey (that is, the bits in the minivan) is complete. I can now drive from Portland to Astoria without a map. With my eyes closed.
I have sand between my toes.
On one of what seemed to be eight or nine trips between the two Oregon destinations, I came to the unexpectedly moving realization that I don't really know what joy is. I'm not sure how many people do. In this age of anti-depressants, therapists, and instant gratification, it almost seems quaint...a holdover from less distracted times.
What I do know is that what I've set out for myself now...cycling through a temperate clime along the coast, with ready access to the ocean...is a journey that seems as though it ought to produce a good measure of that there joy-type stuff.
And yet, this morning, for the god-knows-how-many'th time, I started awake with a ball of panic in my gut, as though a thunderclap had tossed me out of bed. No reason at all, it was just there, looming and full of dread, ready as always to take control of my entire day and turn it into a senseless trial.
And I'm just sick of it. Enough's enough. No more. I don't care if I've inherited a ridiculously hair-triggered fight-or-flight mechanism. Whatever patterns were softwired into my postnatal plastic brain can damn well unfold themselves. I've known for several years that my inner emotional life often had little connection to my outward circumstances, or was disproportionately intense...but at no time in my life has this been more evident than the past few days. Speeding through the landscapes of America on my way to what had been the best part of my grand plan - skipping to the dessert, essentially - I still couldn't shake out of the funk. No question: I do have some real-life Stuff going on. But until that water rolled over my bare feet, and I looked under the towering route 101 bridge out towards the widening Pacific, I didn't fully realize that I can choose whether to be overwhelmed or not.
I made it here. Not on my trike, but I'm here, and I'm ready to move on.
Tomorrow, I'll be heading off route a bit to Fort Stevens State Park, a little south and west of here. $4 camping for bikers, near the beach. It's not far, but my plan is to get into the rhythm I never achieved in Virginia and Kentucky by triking every day, even if it's not very far.
I'm not sure what the cell reception will be like out there, so posting may be sporadic. Hopefully, the Black Box will prove itself worth its weight.
July 19, 2006
Water Movement
 Through the magic of my Black Box, I am able to write to you from my tent here at Fort Stevens State Park. It's after dark now, and the campsite is mostly quiet...distant voices from the RV side of town, and the buzzing of rattle-winged insects against my tent's nylon, desperate to become intimate with my headlamp. In keeping with the Way of Relaxed Touring, I'm staying up later to do this, because I'm not planning on going very far tomorrow, and won't be getting up very early. No more waking up at 6 AM, rushing around under pressure of the impending heat of the day. That's how I like it.
Once I arrived at the park and set up camp, I unhitched the trailer and rode the unencumbered trike less than a mile to the shore of the Pacific. After finding a place to lock up, I wandered down to the beach with bare feet, there to soak them, and to take pictures of the Peter Iredale, a four-masted steel vessel that wrecked there in 1906. A century of water and wind have reduced the 2000-ton ship to a small assemblage of rusted-through steel plates clinging to encrusted iron bones.
 After awhile, it seemed like the best thing to do was to unlock the trike, drag it to the top of the high dune at the edge of the parking lot, and sit in it there, watching the ocean. I got a book out, but only the wind turned its pages. At the far edge of the view to the north and south, rocky crags projected seaward, reminding me of the beach in Zipolite, Mexico, on a much more massive scale. There were kites flying, making me regret that I hadn't brought one of my parafoils...but only for a little while. The endless white curls of surf did their thing, filling the air with a white noise that drew my fear from me. I buried my feet in the warm sand beneath the fairing, finally content.
Back at the campsite, I met Josh, a dude from Michigan who's making his own way up the coast, travelling cheap and light. He'll end up in Portland, crashing with some friends of his while he looks for work in the building trades. At one point later on in the evening, during a boisterous exchange of road stories, he burst out: "You and I have smoked way too much pot in our lives!" "Yes!" I agreed. "We don't need it anymore!" We were carrying on and exchanging tales and images in that high-energy way that happens with good stoned friends, even though we had just met and were quite sober.
There are no fewer than seven touring cyclists staying here tonight, not including myself. The Oregon State Park system sets aside $4 Hiker/Biker campsites, and I'll be able to stay at such parks all the way down the coast, which should help make up for my Motel Tour of Virginia and Kentucky. For the first time, I've become aware of the community aspect of this thing I'm doing...until now, I've been fairly isolated, both by accident and by design. But the west coast is already feeling different, and I suspect I'll meet up with more and more people as I head south. It turns out that this really is the prime touring season, so the route will be well-populated. A few folks came over to chat, drawn by the trike...among them Jason Perry, a mellow Texas cyclist who's doing a summer tour along the coast and elsewhere.
Seeing the ocean - the full-on, horizon-filling ocean, as opposed to the ocean beyond the mouth of the Columbia River - has done good things to me. I believe that my goal on this journey will be to keep it in sight as often as possible.
Tomorrow, another short ride, to another state park, where I'll find a place with an ocean view, and sit there until it's time to not sit there anymore.
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