New York City – Wait a minute, that’s not how the song goes, I’m supposed to be in Texas right now! It’s true, I’m all the way back on the east coast, different time zone, different weather patterns, and traveling in a different way – on foot! I flew into the Newark International Airport on Thursday, July 7 and met up with a bunch of good friends from all over Canada and the UK to celebrate one of my good friend m@’s last few weeks as a single man. We’d call it a stag party in Canada, but most of you would understand it as a bachelor party. We’re all in fine form, I’ve already had a taxi run over my foot, have been running literally on energy fumes and taking in the city right headquartered right beside Times Square. I’m here for a few days more as I have some other business I need to deal with concurrently before I head back south and continue the riding. The rest is greatly appreciated as I’m a wee bit burned out, need to let the swelling from the hundreds of bug bites go down, and repair some parts of my body which have started making noises from over exertion. So far we’re dealing with a big chunk of my right hand missing, and my left knee not being able to take full pressure when standing. My right hand (unrelated) is also suffering numbness issues, so there is likely a 1-2cm adjustment on both the Ergon Handlebar grips and some altering of the saddle position.
I also managed to celebrate my 33rd birthday on the day I flew in – I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting over the past year of my life, where my head was at, what the goals were and a general mental check and balance. I’m 13,000km further than where I was at the same time, and in a completely different country heading towards a certainly different short term plan in terms of what is to come next – no biggie, and still having a great time doing this, no plans on stopping whatsoever. Like I’ve explained to some of my buddies that are here this weekend – I’ll reevaluate it when the good/bad experiences are at an even 50% but so far we’re at something a bit more close to 97/3.
My riding in Texas started becoming quite desolate paired with the heat riding on the old route 290. I’d have to say it was uneventful to say the least, my mind focused on other upcoming projects I need to deal with. After waking up from behind the firehall in Navasota from one of the worst sleeps I’ve ever encountered (there was a sodium ballast light which turned off and on every 3 minutes due to malfunctions, considerable amount of noises of the air conditioning switching on, and the mornings rude awakening of dew dripping from the eavestroughs right onto my face had me scowling for the first 3 hours until I made it to Brenham, Texas stopping at Mobius Coffee for a brief stop. ‘Brief’ turned into 4 hours and I took the opportunity to catch up on some uploading of content and planning for upcoming routes. Every once in a while I find myself sitting at a blank search engine page typing in something random, and that day I typed “site:craigslist.org hilleberg” – something that lists all the results from popular classified ads site Craigslist related to the Swedish tent maker Hilleberg. I do this every once in a while as in the back of my head I’m completely frustrated with my existing MSR Hubba Hubba tent and regret the day I sold my Hilleberg Nallo GT 2. I’ll be writing a proper review of the Hubba Hubba – it won’t be pleasant, but who says I have to be nice about the products all the time! Anyways, this search occurs every few weeks or when I remember and it just so happened that it brought up a result for Austin, TX with someone selling a Hilleberg Atko tent, their lightest 4 season tent that can pitch fast. The ad was clear and concise and the price was right and I jumped on the chance to respond to see if it was still available – even sending another message less than 30 seconds later realizing that it was on my route into the city. It didn’t take too long before getting a reply from the owner that it was still available, he was able to meet up with me and wanted to sell it to someone like myself who would actually use it. He coincidentally ‘Liked’ my Facebook Page and noticed one of the posts where I had asked readers for any crash space in the upcoming days in Austin so I could grab some rest and offered up his place in Bastrop a short 20 miles from the capital city of Texas.
What a wonderful stop and coincidence that I was in the area to meet Keith and Leia, two early thirty somethings with wanderlust in their blood, and their 3 year old boy named Bo in their little cabin nestled in the Texas Woods near the Columbia River. These 3 have been living in their own private paradise in a cabin using all recovered/recycled materials, refusing to use drinking water for toilet and waste purposes, to the sound of goats, pigs, and chickens doing their thing in the background nearby. From what I understand they had been tossing around an idea of moving down to Mexico to satisfy the continued wanderlust which was the reason of the purge of equipment. In fact, when I was there their house sold and things became real quickly – reminding me of the time that I saw my bed loaded up into the back of a pickup truck realizing that there was little to no chance of turning back on my dreams at that point. I opted to stay for the 4th of July celebrations and met a handful of really great people from the Austin area while breaking the rules entirely and firing off explosives into the Columbia. Highlights was the ’5 minute smoke bomb’ which stood up to its name and covered a rather large patch of land and sent the children and the kids running. I used some of my time off to work on some projects and then said goodbyes wanting to head into Austin, where I had finally lined up a place to stay at the last-minute. Goodbyes turned into about 2.5 hours of delays, as when I was just about to hop on the bike Keith noticed that I had a flat in the rear – darnit! I jinxed myself by telling people the day before it had been a very long time since I’d experienced a puncture and I managed to become greasy and grimy in the hot sun rather quickly. It was a very small piece of wire, not bad for 5000km on these new tires on the new bicycle and it will be interesting to see how far they go on as well. My tolerance level for flats is low, so I’ll be ordering spares shortly after the 2nd time – too bad Schwalbe the tire manufacturer has discontinued the Marathon XR model, and they are becoming quite difficult to find.
The tire eventually turned into a broken chain link, and increased my 3pm frustration not wanting to do the short ride in the hot hot sun (100+ degrees) but finally made it out of Bastrop heading down a small country road (Route 969) into Austin. I’m staying with 3 women (2 of them named Rachael) who are aspiring to become counsellors with one heading over into China to teach english for 2 years. Immediately I became comfortable with their well-being and demeanor as we shared stories, experiences, laughs, food recipes and headed down for a showing at the infamous Alamo Drafthouse, a movie theatre that has the experience figured out – Cheap entry, comfortable seats, a full menu and a fantastic selection of beer on tap. They regularly screen movies for an impressive list of directors, and we made it to ‘Terror Tuesdays’ watching an old 70′s horror flick ‘It’s Alive!’ something I enjoyed greatly not only from the ridiculousness of it, but the camera angles and production value was top notch. They’re strict on the ‘no talking or texting during the movie’ policy, and most people became aware of them from this YouTube Video, which they are using at the beginning of showing their movies to drill the point in further. Not safe for work!
Rachael gave me a ride down to Lake Travis Cyclery in Bee Caves, a small community west of Austin to pick up some mail, that has been collecting for the past month. While not all of it has arrived (I’ll go back for Wave 2 in a few days) I managed to pick up some great pieces of equipment from different parts of the world: New Timberland Hiking Boots, a 32GB SD Card, Rohloff Hub Oil Change Kit, my new Big Sky Bistro Coffee Press (finally – let the caffienation resume!), and a few other small items. One thing I didn’t expect was the huge box of cookies sent from a friend in the east coast for my birthday. They stood up quite well to the US Postal Services rough handling, and were moist and chewy thanks to some creative work done by the baker by placing a few slices of bread into Ziploc bags (something that was learned apparently by reading about how families were sending baked goods to loved ones in Iraq during wartime). The cookies didn’t last long, heading directly into my belly, likely as intended. I have a new sleeping bag coming in the mail and a few other pieces of electronics (new wireless card and a few charging cables) so I’ll have to hang around for a bit.
Other than that I’m taking it easy, wondering about what city I’m going to hit up next, likely Santa Fe, NM – so I’ll be starting the ever so familiar search for crash space fairly shortly. It seems that if I plan too much nothing happens, but the universe does provide randomly as proven with Keith and Leia not to mention many of the other random encounters I’ve written about over the past year and a half. Keep it up humanity, you rule.
Come July 17th, a huge load is off my shoulders, and expect the posts and content to come back a bit more frequent, thanks for hangin’ in there!
