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The Final Lap

9/12/2014

3 Comments

 
Kellen Smetana
This was it: our final state; our last bouts with the wind; our final mountain barrier; our concluding revolutions to the Pacific.  We were ready to write the last chapter of another great story in our lives.  The goal across the continent had always been simple, just ride west until we hit the other ocean.  Early in the trip its grandness seemed at times unfathomable, but by now it had shrunk to a small, attainable, final stage.  Energized legs and clear mind, we checked to see if after three months we were still having fun.  Yes.  Good.  Ride on.
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Still having fun? Yes!
Saturday morning, we awoke drowsily after a fun, late night of partying.  Kate, our host in Spokane, happened to host a birthday party for one of her friends the same night we were passing through; so, we were treated to some rousing fun with forty of her friends.  We had a great time sharing travel stories with our new friends.  Alas, Spokane offered no rest for our hungover eyes and weary legs, we were on a mission.  Four days remained of our fourteen day final sprint to the Pacific.  By noon, we were on the road west again, only a bit lighter as Cory had lost his phone on the street sometime on our ride in to the city the previous day.  After a brief, fruitless search for the phone on our previous path, we cut our losses and rode on.
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Heading west again
I had read before that few states are as divided into two polar-opposite halves as Washington.  It was evident as soon as we climbed out of Spokane.  The Pacific rains that soak green Seattle and create a temperate rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula are completely shadowed by the steep Cascade Range across the middle of the state.  The east is as dry as the badlands and slopes slow and flat up to the foot of the mountains.  Much of eastern Washington was eroded away in the last ice age from a series of massive floods originating in Montana’s glacial lakes.  Even the Microsofts and Amazons of tech-rich, trading hub Seattle are countered by endless golden wheat farms in the east.  As we rode through this barren landscape, the wind gods descended to provide us one more challenge crossing the state.  We took turns breaking headwind at the front of the peloton, taking strength in the fact that we were able to power through wind strong enough to create mini-cyclones in the fields surrounding us.
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Truly open road
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Not much out here
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Peloton at sunset
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It's a twister!
Our stealth camping prowess led us to sports fields for our first two nights out of Spokane.  The first evening, we set up in a baseball dugout, proud of our ability to find shelter and dinner benches in a single location.  The only problem, we discovered while eating, was that the sprinkler system had not been calibrated to water only the field.  While we frantically tried to cover our stuff, the water jet worked its way across the dugout like a laser from a James Bond film, until Cory sacrificed his dinner bowl and dry clothes to cover the source.  It was a hilarious wet mess, but that bought us enough time to devise a shield of trashcans and high-school desks that lasted until morning.
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Using ingenuity (and old desks) to build a sprinkler shield
We repeated the episode the next night as we camped on the edge of a set of soccer fields in Wenatchee, Washington.  Wenatchee sits along the Columbia River, marking the stark eastern foot of the Cascade Mountains.  Because of the abundant water source and cool, dry climate, every inch of the thin valley around the city is covered with orchards: peaches, apples, pears, nectarines, and more.  While the city boldly claims itself as the Apple Capital of the World, it seems they grow just about every non-tropical fruit tree.  Even the economics of this are evidenced through the mass of Mexican restaurants and Spanish signs in the city, as many of the workers here come from south of the border.  On the soccer fields, we locked down the rainflies on our tents, preparing for another sprinkler onslaught.  Unfortunately, this only came as we were packing up the next morning, and so we had to take turns manually turning the sprinklers to buy time to pack up the tents.  This morning dance must have alarmed someone with an extremely uninteresting job at one of the local businesses, because soon security came screaming across the fields to let us know the park closed at 10pm.  We politely promised to not camp there again that evening.
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Apple Capital of the World
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Orchards along the Columbia
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Drying our tents on the goal posts
From Wenatchee, we faced our final test of the tour: the Cascades.  A few miles into our climb of Stevens Pass, we refilled water at a gas station.  Normally, most people we meet actually have very little idea about local geography and road distances, and so when we ask about the road we usually just take an average of all input.  (You might be skeptical of this last assertion, but do a quick test: Specifically, how many miles is it to the next city?  And is it uphill or downhill?... Probably kind of tough).  Every once in a while, however, we meet someone like the gas station attendant who told us exact distances, road grade, and the number of sharp turns up and down Stevens Pass.  Any more questions?  No.  In that case, you only need to ask one person.  Full of knowledge, we climbed on.  After a sweaty Labor Day afternoon, we found ourselves atop the 4,061 foot Stevens Pass, our route across the Cascades.  A celebratory beer was in order at the Stevens Pass ski lodge; immediately after, we cruised down the steep western slopes to a park in the town of Gold Bar, our final campsite on the trip.
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Back into the mountains
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Our final hurdle
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Lighting the way down
The next day we rose early, eager for our final 45 miles to Seattle.  As the culmination of a grand adventure for all of us, the day had an air of excitement.  It showed in our rapid cadence on the morning ride.  Following highways of increasing traffic, we were finally tipped off to the Burke-Gilman Bike Trail, which parallels the Sammamish River into the city.  Our first destination on this ultimate day was Golden Gardens Park, a peaceful beach that juts out into Puget Sound and opens to the Pacific.  Convinced by a fellow rider to follow the scenic bike trail route, we passed stately Lake Washington, bustling Lake Union, University of Washington, the Lake Washington Canal, and impressive views of Seattle skyline before opening out to the Sound.  Only one mile to go to Golden Gardens, we jumped in a store to buy our celebratory champagne and asked directions from a couple girls who pointed our way to the park.
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So much better than the highway
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Welcome to Seattle!
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Our first view of the city
One mile later – or 5,015.4 miles from Boston – we finally made it!  On the afternoon of September 2, ninety-three days after leaving Boston, we rolled our bikes up to the shore, popped the champagne, took our celebratory photos, and baptized ourselves in the frigid water – it was cold.  To top it all off, the same girls we asked directions (and who heard we rode from Boston) were so excited that they bought beer and came to find us on the beach to celebrate.  The Pacific rain held out long enough for us to enjoy our moment of triumph and relish the end to sore butts, headwinds, and tired legs.  It was a great day at the beach.
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Just a short bike ride from Boston
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Let the celebration begin!
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We made it!
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In spite of the temperature, we had to go for a swim
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Thanks for the beer!
After our celebration, we rode our way into Seattle and to my friend Josh’s, who had given us an invitation to crash on his couch indefinitely (bold move).  The next day we celebrated yet again with a big dinner with a few of our friends in the city.  It’s always fun to recount stories from early in the trip – simultaneously diverting beard jokes – and to see old friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in over five years.
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Celebrating with old friends
The next day, Theo flew back to England.  His three week vacation was full of climbing, battling, rolling, and willing up, down, and over mountain to reach the Pacific.  And it was nice to have him touring with us again.  Over the next week, Cory and I visited friends, acted tourists in Seattle, hiked in Olympic National Park, took in a Mariners game, and drank copious amounts of Starbucks (which, I discovered after listening to Moby Dick on audiobook on this trip, takes its name from the first mate in the great American novel).  In that time, a good Samaritan back in Spokane found Cory’s phone on the street and brought it to a store, where we were able to locate it and get it shipped to Seattle – just another example of the good people found everywhere.  At the end of the week, we boxed the bikes, packed one final time, and departed on a flight back home to Detroit.  Our adventure was over.
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Heading back across the pond again
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Hiking the coast of the Olympic Peninsula
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Rainforest in Olympic National Park
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Replenishing our sugar
When I dreamed back in Boston of the end of our tour, I envisioned an exhausted crew speeding to a glorious, triumphant finish in Seattle.  Sure, we jumped in the water and celebrated with champagne, but otherwise the final stretch and final day just seemed like another fun day out on the bike.  And I liked it.  We’ve done so much cycling it’s almost become second nature – a part of me, and I know I will be back in the saddle in the future.  For now, though, we’re all in for another very, very long break.
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Back home. Time for a long break
It was quite a trip.  I, for one, am amazed how much I learned of the geography, history, zoology, sociology, geology, and economy from exploring what I had previously overconfidently labelled my own backyard.  The US is a grand country, and I enjoyed every minute of the pulse of the environment as we crossed.  The ride was a great test of wits and character that we learned to mold into laughs and more laughs along the way.
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Plenty of laughs along the way
The tour is over, but once again, this is not the end of the website!  In the next couple weeks we will post hundreds of photos, GPS tracks, videos, stats, and other materials – oh my!  Plus, we have plenty more to write about our favorite cities and characters along the way.  Stay tuned.

Three years after departing Hong Kong, I can now proudly say I have toured the world on a bicycle.  And it's been one heck of a ride.
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One heck of a ride
3 Comments

Back with the Boys

9/5/2014

0 Comments

 
Theo Brun
Back on the road with the boys!  Last I left them was on a hilltop town in near the Georgia-Azerbaijan border with a bellyful of homemade wine that would have served just as well as gasoline.
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Same as it ever was
Nothing had really changed.  Apart from the length of their beards.  But the howling headwinds were familiar, the aching quads, the seriously questionable diet.  So much for Great Falls and the edge of the great plains of Montana, as Kellen wrote we were soon on to the awesome national parks of Glacier and Waterton (albeit in “unseasonably cold” weather – a phrase we heard a lot and which I came to hate).  Kellen has left you in Whitefish so I will pick up the thread there.

We had a pretty steady ride through the day to a town called Eureka – just pine forests, old rail tracks, and very quiet little hamlets – ending our day at the tiny little village of Rexton on the shores of Lake Koocanusa (possibly the most satisfyingly-named natural feature in North America).  Our “stealth camping” wasn’t so stealthy that night; when we started to set up camp by a school, a teacher ventured out, thinking we were some of his wayward lads from the summer school he was running.  We had a great conversation and he let us stay, but only to the other side of his building.  He didn’t want us scaring the girls when they woke up the next day, opened their curtains and saw three hairy bikers get dressed outside – fair enough, I suppose.
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On the road again
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Peaceful riding through western Montana
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Cooking up couscous at the school
Lake Koocanusa is amazingly long – 50 miles or more of uninhabited blue water, ending in the giant Libby dam.  We were hammering along, GoPro’s ablaze, up and down, up and down, trying to make distance – bonking (not in the rude sense), rehydrating, and sweating it all out again.  Still, now it was hot, I certainly wasn’t complaining.  We found a spot to spend the night, courtesy of a man with, in my opinion, the most wonderfully American name, Harold W. Winslow.  A logger, man and boy, who had lost his wife to some awful toxic mining pollution some years before and lived alone, next to his nephew and his wife.  Bill let us stay in his back yard.  It turns out most of the town went by the name Winslow too, and he had never travelled further than Spokane.  The western woods of Montana are not what you might call a globally-oriented bubbling metropolis.
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Cruisin' along Koocanusa
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Libby Dam, holding it all together
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Not very active geopolitically, but still very pretty
The next day’s ride to Sandpoint was beautiful.  We took our time, but the pesky headwind seemed to find us whether we turned north or west or any bloody direction of the compass.  Just before Clarks Fork we crossed my first stateline – into the panhandle of Idaho.  We celebrated with a huckleberry milkshake.  As Kellen has I think pointed out, huckleberries are a wild fruit that only grow high in the mountains near pine trees (they benefit from the acidic soil), and generally sell for over $30 per gallon.  But, pretty much anything made from huckleberries is going to be the most delicious thing you ever tasted.  The shake was no different.
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New state!
We pulled into Sandpoint with a lot of the day in hand and had time to enjoy the lakeshore beach and have a look at the sailing boats cruising around the windswept waters of beautiful Lake Pend Oreille.  We later found out Sandpoint is both a summer and winter vacation spot, with a massive ski hill overlooking the lakeshore from the west.  We had a beer by the lake – or, as I’m learning Americans often say, “we did a beer by the lake.”  On a scale of “not-at-all-hoppy” to “extremely hoppy,” the beer was of moderate hoppiness.  To an Englishman, the microbrewers’ obsession with how hoppy is any beer on the menu becomes a little ridiculous.  More creativity is required, I feel.  How about malty, grainy, sharp, sweet, tangy, bitter etc. etc.?  I leave that for you guys across the pond to figure out.
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Riding along Lake Pend Oreille
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Looking out over beautiful Lake Pend Oreille from the Sandpoint city beach
Through the Warm Showers network, we stayed with the very hospitable Marks family, who gave us the use of their pool, hot tub and giant TV, on which we watched the Lego Movie.  (At least the others did – I passed out after about 5 minutes).  This provided the theme tune for the next few days which was, very simply:  “Everything is AWESOME!”

By and large, that was true, but there were some moments to come in Eastern Washington when the ghosts of those bad ole western Chinese deserts came back to haunt us.  The ride from Sandpoint to Spokane was pretty forgettable.  The roads got hotter, noisier, more dangerous, until – after pounding away into our now familiar headwind – we came to the twenty miles of urban sprawl out from Spokane’s downtown.  As far as I could tell we could have been anywhere in the States for a while – and very useful if you happen to need a new hot-tub whilst you are out getting your car fixed up and picking up some spicy chicken wings.  As for any urban character – not so much.  Until we did actually reach the city proper and discovered we had 15 blocks of uphill to unwind our tired legs on for the last few pedals of the day.
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Can you feel the serenity of our crossing into Washington?
However, it was certainly worth it.  At the top of our hill was our next host – Kate – the queen of communal living – our inspiring Spokane hostess who has pretty much the ideal set-up for receiving bone weary cyclists in her basement.  She grows a lot of her own food which was the prime digestive antidote to the unending intake of muffins, lunch meat, and granola bars which become the cyclist’s staff of life.  She also brews a mean beer: very hoppy.  But none the worse for that.
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Cheers to new friends!
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