People love to write memoirs about their own personal experiments with self-deprivation, and I love to read those memoirs.  ”The guy who took a year to read the entire Oxford English Dictionary.”  ”The woman who went a year without buying consumer goods.”  ”The guy who lived his most literal interpretation of the Bible for a year.”  The list goes on and on, and the one thing that links these entertaining exercises in self-denial and ensuing reflection is the theme of the “one year mission.”  An even calendar year seems to be the unanimous time period for such a endurance challenge- perhaps it’s the shortest amount of time needed to bring some level of individual struggle to the mission while simultaneously covering a sufficient human growth period upon which to personally reflect.  I don’t really know, but I’m certainly willing to accept the proffered one-year standard, no questions asked.  It just makes sense- do something weird for a year, then write about how it changed the rest of your life.  No one’s here to rock the boat.

I never actually planned to throw my hat into the ring with regards to my own story of personal endurance until the second annual 24-hour Velo Vulture bike race was publicized.  Less of an alleycat than a scavenger hunt, the race would take place all over Portland over the course of an August weekend, and I was absolutely stoked to be back in town in time to participate.  Yeah, I realize that “24 hours” isn’t exactly in keeping with the one-year theme of previously published self-deprivation best-sellers, but anyone who knows me knows that the insurmountable feat of my body maintaining a vertical position for one consecutive day and night is wholly tantamount to someone else maintaining any other possible challenging human condition for a full calendar year.  Sleeping is what my people do best, wherever and whenever we’ve been called upon to do so, and we have never before felt the need to experiment with the nature of our existence in the absence of a satisfying nightly 8 hours.  That is, until the staggering cash prizes were announced.  $666 for a mere 24 hours of biking, exploring, and friends?  It started to sound like the perfect job for me.  In fact, the more and more I thought about a 24 hour bike scavenger hunt, the more attractive it sounded.  I’ve spent the last 4 months building up my cycling stamina throughout 14 states, and now I would have the chance to put that endurance to the test.  I could totally stay up all night in the service of a scavenging cause!  Think of all the opportunity for self-growth and reflection I could pack into a mere 24 hours!  Consider the ensuing memoir!

Things started off on the right foot when I secured the greatest living alleycat partner of our times, Jason Joinerson.  Together we would be an unstoppable team, combining our congenial forces into a tag-team of ridiculously good-looking destruction.  Joino expressed a legitimate fear that I would drop off into a standing nap somewhere around 9pm, but I soothingly assured him that I was up to the task.  I would do it.  I would stay awake for the full 24 hours, solving any mental puzzles that came my way, and scavenging the hell out of the greater Portland metropolitan area.  We started to plan our strategy with excitement, certain that our vastly superior nerd intellects were all that was needed to nose out the fierce competition.  Odds-makers declared us a “team to watch”, although I believe their exact words were “you guys are a shoo-in if there’s a prize for most Swedish lesbians impregnated”.  Unstoppable!  

All that remained was to come up with a decent team name which would, at the very least, tie in the themes of S’mores, Sean Connery, narcolepsy, good puns, and 24-hour bike scavenging.  I felt tired just thinking about it, and the race hadn’t even started.  It certainly didn’t help that the Velo Vulture time block started at 4pm and I had been nursing a hangover since 8am that same morning.  Tires pumped and bag packed, I was in my kitchen pounding thyroid energy pills when Joino showed up at the last minute with the name “World of S’morecraft”, and we were off, ready to bask in the warm glow of post-race victory.  World!  Of!  S’morecraft!

The race started in Oregon Park in typical Portland alleycat style, ie. everyone else lounged around chatting, playing it cool, and/or riding their fixed gears around in a circle, while I roamed around hyperactively, trash-talking the other teams’ chances and generally making a bad first impression on all the kids I’ve never seen before.  I frequently come across as drunk in situations like this, but Team WoS’s secret weapon would be the fact that we would be the only sober team, politely abstaining from ubiquitous PBR offerings and maintaining a laserlike focus on the task at hand.  After pounding two kombuchas, pumping triumphant fists in the air, and grabbing our hefty manifests, we were off like a shot towards the first time-check in Ladd’s Addition.  This was the fun part of the ride, tearing across town in a blitz, wondering what the evening’s tasks would hold, and mentally forming a grid of the city in order to best plan our 24-hour attack.  Damien and his cohorts did an amazing job planning such a complicated endeavor- the entire race was set up with a million and one clues to objects all over the city that needed to be collected or photographed, with the added challenge that none of the items could be easily googled for those lazy armchair racers who hoped to knock out most of the tasks from the comfort of the nearest bar with wifi. After our initial flurry, Joino and I retired to Grass Hut to lay out our battle plan, which involved a complicated map of the city dotted with stickered numbers referencing each of the 140 or so questions on the manifest.  I felt like Napoleon in his war room, dramatically using a poker to shuffle around small representatives of his troops on an elaborate map of France, or maybe just one of the nerds at Bridgetown Game & Hobby endlessly re-arranging miniature Warhammer 40K figurines with a look of pure, raptured intensity.  Actually, I felt like there was a future for me in dispatch, which is a scary thought for any disgruntled bike messenger.  How could we fail?

I’ll tell you exactly how we could fail.  Once the planning stage was complete, the sun had set, and we split up to conquer different sectors of the city in the dark.  I felt really… tired.  And lonely.  Suddenly, four hours into the race, the idea of a 24-hour scavenger hunt sounded like more of an insurmountable challenge than I had predicted.  The questions were also much harder than I had predicted, so I spent hours searching aimlessly for specific plaques and buildings that never quite materialized, before riding to a different quadrant of the city and starting the process all over again.  Staying awake past 10pm proved to be much more difficult than I would have suspected too, even with the help of various energy supplements and caffeinated beverages.  Was I learning anything about myself by pushing my abilities to the limit?  No, I was actually having the least amount of fun I’ve had in years, and that was only 8 hours into the ride.  At 2:30 am I had a breakdown in the Rose City Cemetery, abruptly coming to the realization that I’m neither an endurance athlete, nor a particularly fun person.  I just wanted my old life back- a life that didn’t involve riding all over Portland gathering crap alone in the dark while trying to solve enigmatic riddles and stay focused for hours past a reasonable bedtime.  Even finding a secret hideout to catch up with a momentary snooze wouldn’t be enough, knowing that I would sleep fitfully with the stress of having to get up a few hours later and do it all over again.  The frustrating part was that everyone else seemed to be having the time of their lives- cracking jokes, drinking beers, and generally being goofy and fun together.  Soooooooo, I quit.  I dropped out and went home to sleep, feeling awful about my total abandonment of my amazing scavenging partner, who claimed to have only enlisted in World of S’morecraft so that we could spend some quality time together.  I’ve never so thoroughly abandoned a personal mission before, except for perhaps when I quit sugar for Lent and then immediately started eating it again after three days of torturous struggle.  Taking three months to ride your bike across the country is WAY easier than staying awake, alert, and on your feet for 24 hours straight.  Just so you know,  I won’t be writing a best-seller anytime soon and I won’t be reading the entire dictionary next year.  I’m sorry I let you down, Joino!

Oregon was a whirlwind of stokage, culminating in the Crushers’ triumphant arrival in Florence, right on the coast.  It still hasn’t hit me that we actually rode our bikes all the way across the country- I expected to feel this gripping sense of triumph once we looked out onto the mighty Pacific, like at any time our powers were strong enough to come together and form one Voltron of unstoppable human achievement.  Instead I just felt sort of dazed and vaguely sleepy.  I also felt really proud of the Crushers in a way that I somehow couldn’t extend to myself, as if I hadn’t actually participated in the collective cross-country domination, but had merely enabled my Crushers to realize their own individual goals of surviving the coast-to-coast journey from the sidelines.  I’m not really sure what that’s all about, or if it’ll ever sink in that my personal accomplishment had its own significance.  All I can say at this point is that I feel good- I rode over 6,000 miles in the last four months, met so many amazing people, and saw so many incredible parts of the United States.  Most importantly, the Crushers came back safe and sound with stories that we’ll be telling for the rest of our lives.  It was definitely hard to say goodbye, but after being shuttled back to Eugene from the coast in a van, the tour officially ended.  I’m sure we all shared the same jumble of mixed feelings: sadness that the journey had ended combined with excitement at getting home and seeing loved ones.  I couldn’t have been more ready to get back to Portland!

After eating a vegan power breakfast at the Keystone Cafe, I rolled out of Eugene towards Salem.  It had been a long time since I’ve toured solo- I certainly missed the company of my crew, but it was nice to move at my own pace, stopping when and where I chose to.  The 45-mile stretch between Eugene and Corvallis was on mostly quiet back roads with an unfortunate headwind that seemed to thwart my every attempt to take advantage of the flatness of the route and really kick it into high gear.  Luckily the second half of the day was a little less challenging, and I was able to enjoy an easy ride into Salem alone with a lot of events to reflect on from the last four months.  When I got to Salem I was forced to confront the unfortunate reality that I should have actually done some sort of research of accommodations before I left town.  All of the motels recommended to me by the only friendly Salemite I could find, a babbling, incoherent homeless man, were either already booked up or no longer in existence, so I rode around town for awhile in no particular direction until none other than a retired ADVENTURE CYCLING LEADER spotted me and intervened with an actual map of the city.  See?  Even when you’re not on the clock, being an Adventure Cycling leader is akin to being a certain winged vigilante patrolling around the streets of Gotham City- basically you have to be ready to swoop in and help people at all times while brooding and looking really cool.  (I need to work on my brooding.  Also, yes, I just saw Dark Knight and would like to confirm that it’s the greatest movie I’ve ever seen in my life.)  Anyway, I found a motel and two of my best buds, Dawn and Erin, showed up late for snacks, beer, and some laid-back good times.  We arose the next morning at a sensible hour, got wired on some non-instant coffee, then rolled out of town on a confusing series of back roads that I couldn’t possible hope to relocate in the future.  D and E were kind enough to ride slowly so that I could keep up, but being super-fast racer types on carbon-fiber road bikes, I’m not sure they had any idea what “riding slow” really means to the rest of us.  Thus, I wore myself out within the first twenty miles, desperately trying to ride fast enough to prove to them that four months of bike touring had hopefully left me in better shape than when I left in March.  Unbelievably, I don’t think it did.  

Twenty miles in, we stopped in this small town called Mount Angel, which mysteriously has a city-wide German/Austrian theme involving strictly Bavarian architecture, a “Brathaus” on every corner, and the main tourist draw- larger-than-life-sized plaster Aryan children swinging in a mechanical chair to the eerie tune of Edelweiss being piped periodically down Main Street.  What??  We also had to visit the Mount Angel Abbey, which featured an exciting museum of various taxidermied animals fighting each other and several taxidermied animal oddities, like a calf with six legs and a deer with mutated, folding limbs.  Naturally, we were there until late in the afternoon, wisely returning to the road for the remaining 55 miles only when the temperature had reached 95 degrees at around 3pm.  I had a panicky emotional freak-out late in the day from the crushing sensation that I would never actually get to my house, but eventually I arrived at my doorstep at around 9pm Monday night ready to sleep in a comfortable bed with my lovable sidekick Pirate, the world’s sweetest kitten-faced kitten.  Finally, an official end to the journey!

It’s unbelievable to be home after traveling so long and rarely sleeping in the same place twice.  I’m still overcome by various emotions I can’t categorize, and it’s really hard not to feel an anti-climactic sense of disappointment that it’s all finally come to an end.  I miss the adventure, the excitement, and the Crushers, most of all!  It’s hard to resist the urge to pick up and start traveling again, but I’ve got to figure out how to stay still in Portland for the time being.  I guess this blog entry seems pretty emo, which isn’t necessarily the impression that I want to give off, it’s just that the re-entry is somewhat harder than I expected.  I’m actually really happy to return to all my amazing Portland friends and everything else that makes this city so great.  You really can’t believe how unique it is until you leave for awhile.  Thanks to everyone who sent their support on the road!  Call me and let’s ride bikes! xo

After boldly resisting Missoula’s siren song of relocation, we tore ourselves away from Montana and ventured back into Idaho for one more go with the rugged canyons and baffling time zone boundaries of our penultimate state. The first time I traveled this route, I was absolutely blown away by the beauty and wonder of a vast, sweeping land unsullied by visible human residents. Is anyone even from Idaho? It flies so far under the radar that I’m sure a lot of you haven’t even heard of it. Well, I took the time to do some research and it turns out that it’s an official state, alright, and not just an illogically-shaped, poor man’s version of Oregon. Believe it or not, Idaho has people, places, and things all its own, many of which are of absolutely no relation to the potato. Mountains, for example. Idaho has a great deal of mountains- more than its fair share, some might even argue. Also, conservative people. Idaho is the natural habitat of a lot of our nation’s conservative people, including a healthy sprinkling of that hide-in-the-woods-in-a-bunker-with-an-arsenal-of-homemade-weapons-until-the-apocalypse variety. This volatile subspecies is one of nature’s most exciting varieties of right-wing conservative, and many are likely proud to call the scenic gorges and rustic mountains of the Idaho panhandle “home”.

Unfortunately for this blog, very little happened this time around in Idaho. Many UNO thrashings were soundly dealt by yours truly, and the ensuing trash-talk reached all new levels of profanity and verbal abuse. Rivers were crossed. Mountains were climbed. Canyons were traversed. The highlight of the entire state was coming down off the Whitebird Pass at 40 mph without even tapping the brakes- long, winding switchbacks with steeply banked sides that brought out the racecar drivers in all of us. Absolutely amazing- it felt like we were coasting for days before we hit the 100 degree wake-up call at the foot of the hill and had to crawl up out of the canyon. Rolling into Riggins, I was vaguely disconcerted to find myself campaigning in a vicious battle for re-election as the county sheriff. There were signs everywhere advertising my platform: Integrity in Government and Freedom to Bear Arms. Proud, American Patriotism and Traditional Family Values. Hmm. Well, it certainly SOUNDS like me…. although I had no idea I was a lifetime member of the Republican Party and NRA, not to mention the proud grandparent of seven lovable imps. There it was, though, in red, white, and blue on every signpost and window display: “Giddings for Idaho County Sheriff”. I’ve never met anyone else with my last name that wasn’t my mom, dad, or grandpa, so after reluctantly parting with fleeting fantasies of dragging around Riggins in a sweet patrol car with a flashy badge and some shiny shit-kicking boots striking fear into the hearts of law-shirking locals, I rustled up as much information as I possibly could about this Giddings character. “Oh yeah, ‘Giddings’. He’s an ok guy,” was pretty much all I could get out of anyone- no one would even confess which way they planned to vote on the matter. Well, if nothin’ else, it’s nice to know that there are some “traditional” families out there keeping our name alive and well in the heart of Idaho whitewater country.

Somewhere in Idaho I decided to construct a quiz for the Crushers, after being repeatedly blown away by how little they remember about our last three months of travel together. The quiz involved five questions about each rider from information I’ve collected over a summer’s worth of conversations, and about thirty questions about the towns in which we’ve overnighted throughout the last eight states. It ended up being really fun, although the Crushers’ final scores were certainly nothing to write home about- especially Pete, about whom we were all left with some serious questions as to whether or not he was on the same trip as the rest of us. NO ONE got any of the questions about me right, including such lob balls as “what is the name of Cait’s cat (that she never shuts up about)?” and “True or False: Cait is the greatest UNO player this nation has ever known”. Man, was *I* even on this trip? Maybe that’s the better question. The winner (Chad) will be getting an eventual care package of miscellaneous Portland items, not to mention ownership rights to the one group camp stove that wasn’t completely engulfed in flames in an ironic fuel-leak tragedy while we were sleeping in the Utica, KY fire station. See- I would have totally aced the hell out of that quiz even if I hadn’t written it myself. I know the Trans-Am like I know my own mom at this point.

With only a little more than a week left on the trip, it was around the Oregon border that I started to worry that everything will be different when I get back from this epic journey. I’ve been traveling in the company of the same five men for so long- will any of my friends still recognize me now that I’m a long-haired, sage-like road warrior with freakish tan lines and the mouth of a 60-year-old naval captain? Will I be able to casually reintegrate myself into the upper echelons of Portland feminist society, or will I continue to let slip such rowdy zingers as “I wanna break her like a shotgun and load her from the rear” once I’m back in mixed company? Will I need months of decompression time or perhaps even post-traumatic stress therapy? How long before I learn to talk about my feelings and emotions again? In preparation for my re-immersion into mixed-gender society, I’ve been studying back issues of O! Magazine and I think I’m now pretty well-versed in all the issues that face the modern woman in this day and age. Get ready, Portland, ’cause I’ll be back in action on August 4th and I’ve got hours and hours of talking to do!

I’ve gotten into the habit of updating once per state, which didn’t seem like an overly difficult pace to keep up with until I suddenly found myself three states behind.  Man, at the microscopic snail rate we’re sliming our ways across the country, one would think I would be able to stay on top of that laughably simple task, but here I am in Oregon trying to remember what the hell happened in Montana.  Montana, Montana.  Hmm.  Montaaaaaana.  “The treasure state.”  800,000 people, 41st state in the Union.  Named after the Spanish word for “mountain”; first visited by Lewis and Clark in 1805.  Yeeeah, it was a pretty good ride.  That’s pretty much all I got.
But wait! Isn’t the capital in Helena?  And isn’t the state flower the Bitterroot??  And for the love of all that’s glorious, isn’t the state bird the WESTERN MEADOWLARK???  Why, yes!  Obviously there’s more to this Montana than meets the eye!

Well, I guess I’ve stalled long enough to remember a few things about our journey through this spectacular, award-winning “land of shining mountains”. First of all, there’s our dramatic entrance- we snuck in the side of Montana from Idaho to hunker down at West Yellowstone for a couple days, proving once again that our cross-country route is the MOST circuitous, LEAST efficient way to bike from one coast to the other EVER.  In fact, if you even hazard a quick glance at a map of our dear United States it’s pretty obvious that Adventure Cycling tricked us into entering Montana at ALL just to visit their headquarters up in Missoula.  Well, welly, wellerton.  What have we here?  ACA thought they could pull one over on ol’ Detective Giddings, but once again she breezily unlocked the key to their presumably sinister map-routing motives.  I sure would hate to see her blow the lid off this unexpected scandal with a force strong enough to shut down the whole cartography department… an unfortunate action preventable only through a certain women’s medium Trans Am jersey mysteriously showing up at an Oregon mail drop!  General delivery to Eugene would work.  Ahem.
Anyway, my point is that the Trans Am route is more screwed up than one of those Family Circus cartoons where Jeffy treads a dashed-line all over the neighborhood to find the family cat or Grandpa’s ghost or whatever, and that’s even BEFORE we made our big loop around Yellowstone just so that we could experience riding vertically up one of the Tetons.  Down the street, over the trampoline, up a tree- we set up camp in Idaho for a night before doubling back east to experience a little thing I like to call “Big Sky Country”.  Montana.  Land of the Ponderosa Pine.  A majestic beauty of a state with a sweet bike network that just won’t quit.  This is the third time I’ve ridden across Montana and I can now say with certainty that it’s in hot contention for the title of “Greatest Living State of our Times”.  No other state better combines the jagged peaks of the Colorado Rockies with the lovable Western old-timey-ness of Wyoming, sprinkling in a dash of Idaho’s underdog charisma and Oregon’s go-getter attitude.  Riding a dusty Montana highway means getting stuck for twenty minutes in the middle of a cattle drive, the bovine equivalent of a big-city Critical Mass, then barreling down the side of a mountain at 40 mph into a perfect historical replication of an outlaw ghost town.  We knocked out steady 75-mile days through tiny towns with double digit populations, learned more than we ever wanted to know about the US government’s atrocities against the Nez Perce, and destroyed the Chief Joseph and Lost Trail passes on our way into Missoula.  With all those long, hard days of climbing, out of everything, honestly I’ve been the MOST impressed with the downright uncanny stamina of my pot belly.  Jesus, the thing will not go away.  It’s almost admirable to see such resistance in the face of persistant adversity- I can be down ten pounds, back up ten pounds, crawling through a barren Sahara desert for months on my elbows, jaw wired shut in a county that won’t sell High Life, and yet it STILL hangs proudly against all odds, fighting the good fight in a world that denies its very right to exist.  You have to just pause for a moment and admire the courage. The real all-American courage.  I can’t even IMAGINE the extreme conditions required to deflate this incredible seventh wonder of the stomach universe, and if that ain’t another example of the kind of true against-all-odds grit that makes this country so great, then you tell me what is.  I’m waiting to hear it.
Oh man, I’m full of tangents here.  I better wrap this up.  Missoula was great- bike lanes, book shops, microbreweries, suspicious-looking ACA cartographers- everything you could want in a non-Portland town.  In fact, I could even settle down there one day once Pirate gets tired of the hustle and bustle of big-city living.  Someone better talk me out of it ’cause Missoula is lookin’ better and better.  Let’s all move there together!

For my own personal amusement and in the interest of recommending books/gathering new book recommendations, I’m going to list out the various books I’ve read over the last 3.5 months of bike touring. The rating system is on a scale of 1-10 and should give you some idea about my tastes, so if you want to throw out a few book suggestions, then I’d be much obliged (note: “10″ is the best, and “1″ is something by Jane Austen, et al).

Smile if You’re Lying
Chuck Thompson
8
Funny stories and advice from a jaded travel author who’s tired of holding back all of his best material because the industry values vacation-package sales over good writing.

Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
10
Sweeping and epic! I didn’t think I would like a Western this much, but it really sucked me right in. Excellent characters and story-telling- this book left me excited to have McMurtry’s entire canon to explore.

Mystic River
Dennis Lehane
9
I also didn’t think I’d like a crime noir novel that much, but I really enjoyed this. I can’t wait to see the movie…

Streets of Laredo
Larry McMurtry
8
Not as good as Lonesome Dove, but still hard to put down. Claire and I biked through a lot of the West Texas locations that comprise the setting of this sequel, which was pretty exciting. Who would have thought Judge Roy Bean would come up more than once in a lifetime?

Dead Man’s Walk
Larry McMurtry
4
The prequel to Lonesome Dove. Total disappointment- I just couldn’t get into it. Eventually I managed to slog through it solely out of respect to McMurtry’s characters, but I remained resentful throughout.

Water for Elephants
Sarah Gruen
9
Trains, hoboes, old-timey circuses, freaks, sassy senior citizens, wronged animals seeking vengeance, good ol’ nostalgia- all this book needs is a bike or a lesbian and it would be a Cait Ultimate Summer Read.

The Ruins
Scott Smith
1
Reading this horror novel while hot, sticky, and hungry in a tent on a bike tour must be analogous to watching the movie Hostel while backpacking around Eastern Europe. It just hits a little too close to home. Totally unenjoyable, relentlessly bleak, but of course I had to finish it. Ugh. I wish the memory of reading this would go away.

Gone Baby Gone
Dennis Lehane
8
Another movie I can’t wait to see when I get back! I like Lehane’s writing style and I like his favorite subject matter- organized crime and Boston lowlifes. I think I read somewhere that he wrote a few episodes of The Wire, which seems like a match made in heaven.

American Pastoral
Phillip Roth
10
Holy crap!!! I got this for a quarter at a library sale in Colorado ’cause I’d vaguely heard of the author and it had won the Pulitzer Prize. Amazingly well-written, with the kind of genius phrasing that sticks with you for weeks. I passed it on to one of the Crushers and he claimed it was “too high-brow”, although I found it to be immensely readable. Actually it’s the best book I’ve read so far this year.

Comanche Moon
Larry McMurtry
7
The second prequel in the Lonesome Dove series isn’t as good as the two latter books, but it’s still pretty hard to put down. It’s amazing how easy it is to find McMurtry books at library sales. This book seems sadder than the others because it deals with more Native American points of view in an era when entire tribes and nations were being wiped out or corralled onto reservations. Famous Shoes is the best character ever, but I really want to see how ALL of the characters are represented in the TV miniseries. I guess I have a lot of stuff to watch when I get back…

Kill the Messenger
Tami Hoag
?
Yeah, yeah, I know, but it was a QUARTER and I was hard up for a new paperback. How could I resist an action-crime novel about a bike messenger (named Jace Damon!) who gets framed for a brutal murder after one fatal super-rush goes awry? Jace, buddy, for the love of God, tell me you get the sig in the end!
I just started this book and so far I don’t have very high hopes…

Anyway, that’s my list so far. The amount of time I have to devote to reading vacillates pretty widely, but I would appreciate any new recommendations and/or discussions of the previously-mentioned classic titles. I’ve often wondered (ok, actually this is the first time) what I would do if forced to choose exclusively between the ability to read or the ability to ride a bike…. and I just don’t know, man, I just don’t know. Two great ways to escape- what a bummer they’re so hard to pull off at the same time.

I’m sitting on the bank of the Lochsa River in Idaho as I write this, having a hard time recollecting all the events of the last two states. It’s incredibly peaceful here, but the lack of human distractions is a distraction in of itself- impossible not to stare into the swirling rapids and get caught up in the Oregon-like beauty of tall, wooded slopes lined with endless Ponderosa and Lodgepole pines. What a strange place to try to catch up on blogging. Anyway, yesterday was our first day out of Montana, zigzagging us down from Missoula over the Lolo Pass into the panhandle of Idaho. Eight states down, two to go. The last time I rode this route I absolutely despised Wyoming, associating it only with brutal headwinds, chaotic evil mosquitoes in perpetual melee, long strips of dusty, shadeless desolation, and the killing of Matt Shephard. This time around I was surprised to actually enjoy the state, having gotten the desolated wasteland/uranium mining ghost town stretch out of the way first so that I could actually enjoy the colorful beauty of Northwestern Wyoming free from dread.
Highlights from the Cowboy State:
-weird, indescribable geological phenomena that rules
-lots of cowboys, Western stuff, and old timey nostalgia
-beautiful, snow-topped Togwotee Pass, which was a total cakewalk for the Crushers- we coasted up with our eyes closed, popped triumphant wheelies at the top, and rolled down out of the clouds like gods descending to Earth.
-the Grand Tetons! Mountains named after giant boobs!
-Lander, the greatest small town of all time- 10,000 friendly people that all know each other, an outdoor leadership school, two bike shops, the best coffeeshop on the Trans-Am, free camping in a beautiful city park, a vibrant downtown bereft of chain stores, and a great local brewpub where I unfortunately discovered that exceeding the official Crushers limit of two beers each means that conversation will stall on prostate problems and colonoscopies for the better part of three hours.
Now, I could mention a few of the lowlights too, but I’d rather let go of my old hurts with Wyoming so we can both take the time to bury our dead and move on together towards a brighter future. I think I’m ready to love again. In fact, really all I wanted from the state this time around was to see a Grizzly in Yellowstone, and I more than got my wish when we spotted a mama Grizzly and cub engaged in a loving Discovery Channel moment about 200 yards from where I stood safely cooing behind a set of binoculars. It all brought to mind my favorite piece of advice: “if you’re gonna be a bear, be a Grizzly!” which should go down in the annals of Crusherdom as our official motto and inspiration as we strive towards cross-country greatness. And as long as I’m speaking of good advice, I might as well say “Go see the IMAX movie on bears!”

Over the course of the last week I’ve been undergoing a dramatic spiritual transformation. Ever since we crossed the border from hot, hilly Missouri into hot, windy Southeast Kansas, we’ve been experiencing ever-intensifying weather conditions, dramatically forcing us out of the city parks in search of life-saving indoor accommodations. This epic battle with the destructive forces of Midwestern nature has driven us straight into the loving, waiting arms of our savior Jesus- or more specifically, the loving, waiting arms of the Episcopalian church. My dad, a powerful arch-deacon in the church, with a formidable reign that sweeps far across the Plains, managed to pull a string or two with some of his Episco-pals (or his “dawgs”, as he put it to me via text) so that we could roll out our sleeping bags in church basements all across the heartland. The Crushers (or “Crunchers”, as we’ve been called by polite society) paradoxically hate being forced to sleep in tents on a cross-country camping trip, so we’ve all been slowly warming to the idea of converting to Episcopalianism, with the alternative being braving God’s tornado-ridden wrath in hot, unbearable city parks.

Cool things about Episcopalians:
1. They ordain female priests.
2. They ordain openly gay priests.
3. They are warm, loving, and have beautiful, air-conditioned basements.
4. They’re like Catholics, except with more emphasis on being stoked than feeling guilty about stuff.
5. They let you bring beer into the church premises, provided you are an openly gay female priest (named C. Giddings?).

I invite any of the powerful overlords of Episcopalianism (the aforementioned “dawgs”) to smite me if I’m wrong about these hastily-researched fun facts, however, if they do check out, I’m willing to allow various churches to use the list in their welcoming pamphlets.

In Pittsburg, KS, my family came down to visit me just as I was going through some difficulties with group dynamics that resulted in one of our seven leaving the tour. The story is too long and complicated to go into here, but let me just say that it was great to see my parents, sister, and one of her four tiny minions and take a much-needed break from leadership duties. I hadn’t realized how eager I was to interact with outside parties until they showed up and I nearly talked their ears off with a bunch of hectic stories about all the bizarre phenomena surrounding our recently-ejected ex-Crusher. Our rest day in Pittsburg wasn’t nearly long enough! Rolling across the rest of Kansas, the slightly reduced gang of Crushers battled through epic thunderstorms, 10-inch flood waters, gripping head colds, and dry, dusty sidewinds strong enough to blow fresh tar across the road onto our passing heroes. I haven’t been firing on all cylinders lately due to the aforementioned gripping head cold, but I was still able to enjoy the western half of Kansas- especially the overwhelming friendliness of small-town hospitality and occasional miraculous tailwind. At this point I’m starting to retrace the steps of my Portland to Kansas City bike tour, which has been an interesting experience. Moving through the same small towns from a different direction in a completely different context, with the benefit of 3 additional years of bike touring experience, has given me a lot to reflect on. It’s recently occurred to me how unexpectedly exciting my life has become in the last ten years. I always wanted a life like this, but never imagined that things would necesarrily turn out this way, assuming that I would never have the courage or determination to set the wheels in motion. Occasionally I can envision another reality- the life I might be living if I had gone down a different path after graduating high school: married, with kids, living in Kansas City, working at an unfulfilling desk job? That life seems like a dream come true for a lot of amazing people, but obviously for me it would never work out. I don’t know how I ended up on a bike in the middle of nowhere, racing alone towards an endless horizon of blue sky and waving seas of wheat, but for now I’m happy I’m here.

A funny sidenote: when I told my group about the zines I like to write about bike touring, Terry, our British rider, expressed a fear that I’m currently planning to write a lurid tell-all about the current trip that insufficiently disguises everyone’s identity. Actually, his primary anxiety was mysteriously that I would make his character a Lancastrian. MY primary anxiety with this paranoid fantasy is the fact that he breezily selected “Vanilla Beach” as my questionable nom de plume, as if Spokes of Hazard is slowly becoming an indie subsidiary of Penthouse Forum. One can only dream!

It’s been so long since I last updated that I don’t even know where to begin. We’re in Southern Missouri now, cutting a swath through thick layers of humidity as we slowly navigate the roller-coaster climbs and twists of the Ozark Mountain range. After exactly two months of traveling through new states, I feel like I’m finally in some familiar territory, having spent so much time in this region of Missouri as a recreating youngster. I was also born here in the Show-Me-State, which has been a helpful form of name-dropping when relating to curious locals who aren’t impressed by my adopted Oregonianism or assume I need the finer points of thunderstorms explained to me in great detail. We’ve been through a lot of serious weather so far, not limited to the aforementioned severe thunderstorms, extreme heat/humidity, heavy winds, and multiple close-range tornado warnings …all since we crossed the Mississippi into Missouri a few days ago. Illinois and Western Kentucky seem so far away at this point- overnights at Southern Baptist churches and volunteer fire stations have given way to Midwestern city parks and riverside canoeing operations. The familiarity of the Midwest was an unexpected comfort- I felt a sudden surge of warmth after crossing the ferry into Illinois from bone-dry Kentucky and spotting a bright neon Pabst sign over the door of a restaurant. Finally, back to civilization! Before we could beat a retreat out of Kentucky, though, the state had to make one last unexpected attack on our dignity, this time through the abominable scourge of various monstrous, human-eating insects. First, we faced the usual crew of partying mosquitos- all of whom seemed to take a personal shine to yours truly. Then an enormous spider bite emerged mysteriously in the middle of my leg, with all of the accompanying threats of massive infection that seem to be my bike touring calling card. A plague of deer ticks hit the groins of the entire group next, then a smattering of giant cockroaches attacked me during a sleepless night on a YMCA gym floor, followed by a bee which blew into my mouth while riding and almost caused a panic-stricken crash, all leading up the grand finale locust invasion of Bardstown, KY, when the entire locust population of the known universe underwent its 17-year itch at the Old Kentucky Home State Park campsite and emerged out of the ground in the precise coordinates that we had set up our tents. Cicada madness! The tarp covering my tent was almost conpletely black with them in the morning, and I must have had at least 50 invaders lazily hooked to the tires of my bike, exhausted after a long night of shrugging off those stiflingly tight crunchy shells. Time to head west, where the bugs seem to be smaller, meeker, and with less of a sense of entitlement.

Carbondale, IL was the site of our fourth rest day, and after weeks and weeks of staying in one-horse towns (where all directions are given oriented to the sole stop-light in town), it seemed like a glittery wonderland looming on the horizon. So many cars! So many people! A gay bar?!? Nope. That sweet, illusory homosexual promise quickly dissolved with the realization that school at Southern Illinois University is out for the summer, sweeping the assorted gays of Carbondale out with the tide and leaving nothing but the wreckage of empty barstools and one lonely Oregonian’s painstaking wasted internet research. Better luck in… Pueblo? Sheesh. What a long summer. The whole Carbondale experience did have a few nice things going for it, though- old friends! Two of my co-leaders from the big cross-country tour I led in ‘06 came down from Northern Illinois to visit, and it was great to see some familiar faces. My waves of homesickness really come and go, but catching up with old bros really meant a lot in terms of easing that inevitable sense of isolation. Staying in a motel, choosing between 3 bike shops, and drinking a $5 bottle of Kombucha didn’t hurt either- actually it was pretty hard to leave the magical land of Carbondale when it came time to return to the trail. But return, we did- and here we are exactly one week later in the county fairgrounds of sunny Marshfield, MO. It’s hot outside. Damn hot. I’m sure cold, rain-soaked Portlanders don’t have much sympathy for complaints relating to sun and heat, but my group’s spirits seem to be inversely proportionate to the humidity index, so the weather is really starting to get us down. I continue to issue ill-received pep talks, occasionally borrowing heavily from 300, Braveheart, and Goonies, just to see if anyone is paying attention. In two days we roll into Kansas, where my family is coming down to see me in Pittsburg. I’m out of my mind with excitement! Even when times are tough, there always seems to be something on the horizon to look forward to.

Fun stuff I’ve left out that’s nonetheless happened:
1. Screening of locally filmed gore movie Grizzly Park in Damascus, VA. The bear eats people’s faces! Not just any faces, but the deserving faces of wayward, troubled teens. Absolutely genius!
2. Getting shuttled to a wet county outside of Berea for bowling and pitchers of beer. One can only presume that my score is higher in the dry counties. (By the way, does “wet county” sound creepy to anyone else?)
3. Indiana Jones in Carbondale! Total mental vacation from vacationing!
4. Riding across the Mississippi bridge with a private police escort. Pure prestige class luxury- probably how the celebs cross rivers when they’re not slumming it for one of those “Stars- They’re Just Like Us!” features.
5. Tubing down the Jack’s Fork river for four of the most satisfying hours of my entire life. (The less satisfying side to this is the fiery-hot blaze of a sunburn currently holding an uneven reign of terror across my midsection.)
6. Having a snotty 22-year-old beardo working the door at an acoustic concert in Farmington, MO tell me that I have “The fakest-looking ID he’s ever seen in his life”. Finally gaining access to the show and realizing that I’ve unwittingly stumbled into a nest of devout Christian teens clamoring for a night filled with non-stop acoustic devotionals. Wait- that was one of my lonely memories, not one of the fun-filled good times I was planning to list off. The good times have been too many to recount, but hopefully I’ll be better at recounting them in the upcoming weeks. Also, thanks for the mail, friends! I’m working on responses, but my free time seems to vary as widely as my energy levels. My next mail stop will be:

Hold for arrival on/about June 18
General Delivery
C. Giddings, Adventure Cycling
1200 Maine St/US 287
Eads, CO 81036

If you wanna send something there *coughsnackscough*, it has to be sent by June 15th! Thanks and no pressure! xo

As we crossed the state border into Kentucky, I jokingly pulled my Halt out of my panniers and clipped the spray cannister of mace firmly onto my hip where it would be ready for immediate use against the legendary dogs of the Bluegrass State. Not a quarter mile in, however, the enemy layed siege and the situation instantly turned serious. Dogs, vicious mongrel beasts, lay in wait to greet us to Kentucky with an endless cacophony of angry barking and chomping, gnashing teeth. It was like something out of Jurassic Park- we worked our way through winding Appalachian roads, slowly cranking up steep 18-25% grades through a narrow corridor of fierce barking and clanking chains, running a gauntlet of foam-mouthed predators with the single-minded intention of hunting down cyclist intruders. At one point I let my guard down while peacefully riding alongside a little ridge that ran next to the road at about shoulder level. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of movement to my right- a silent assassin panting towards me at top speed, ready to leap directly off the ridge onto my head and close in for the kill. Reflexively, I swerved violently to the other side of the road and let loose a 200 decibel high-pitched shriek as the animal skidded off the ridge and smashed into the pavement jaw-first, pausing only momentarily for a protesting yelp before returning to the chase. If you haven’t ridden your bike through the Appalachian backroads of Kentucky then YOU CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE IT. Animal right be damned, suddenly I’m Officer Giddings with Deputy Halt, packing some serious heat against any Pit Bull, Retriever or Collie who happens to cross me. Hell, I’ll mace a Pomeranian right in the face just for looking at me funny- it’s K.U.K. from here on out. One of our riders had a huge chunk from his pannier bit clean off by a vicious beast out for blood, straight shredding everything in his path. Believe the hype- these bastards are for real. I actually tried to mace a giant pig that was blocking the road and then began to bite at me and ram my bike when I stopped to take a picture and shoo it out of the road. Once I quickly escaped the two-ton beast and rode away to safety, I got some great photos of it chasing me up the road for nearly a quarter mile before it dropped out of sight to wait for the next hapless biker. It started to feel like I was stuck in some sort of weird, rural, bike touring version of Resident Evil, with malicious zombified farm animals lurching out of every shadow for the attack.
The context behind all of these loose, blood-thirsty monsters is another uncomfortable reality to face- extreme poverty, the kind of burnt-out, trash-strewn shanty situations that most Americans probably associate more with third world countries. Barefoot, mean-faced kids lurk in the streets throwing rocks at us as we pass, rotting houses sit engulfed in a sea of rusting, broken appliances, and even the bigger grocery stores don’t carry anything beyond packaged junk food. It’s pretty shocking and disheartening. Despite all this, the people around here are extremely friendly and generous, although I’ve occasionally needed a series of interpreters to narrow the communication gap across accents. Terry, our resident British rider, had pretty much given up trying to interact with any of the locals at all due to repeated communication mishaps, until he decided to ask one toothless old-timer for directions and received only a “Yeeeeee-aaaaap” punctuated by a rapid-fire projectile release of chew shot right past his face in response. Terry was also almost arrested for public urination, but that’s a completely different story- I think this trip has been a real eye-opener for him, having previously only visited American ski resorts.
If I sound really critical of Kentucky, I don’t entirely mean it. It really is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in the U.S. My mom’s family lives on a farm outside of Louisville, so before this trip I had only visited that particular region of the state and not the beautiful lush mountains of the Eastern regions. The 72-mile day to Hindman and the 66-mile day to Booneville are considered two of the harshest tokes along the Trans-Am, but Caitlin’s Crushers (as they’ve dubbed themselves) totally shredded the terrain and defied my leader notes’ descriptions of the rides as “more of a brutal death march than a bike tour”. We’re taking a well-deserved rest day in Berea today, which is unfortunately located in one of the many dry counties along the route, so the celebratory beer situation is looking pretty grim until about Illinois or so. We’ve been through quite a few serious thunderstorms so far, though, so right now this bright, sunshiny rest day is all I really need for relaxing.