100 Days on the Road

Days stack up and we move south. As we push towards Guatemala, visions of Mexico bounce around in our heads. Farmers on the side of the road swinging machetes through the long brush, dozens of people crammed into the beds of every pickup truck that zooms by. Skinny, tall palm trees stretching towards the sky, exploding into a canopy of lush green leaves and coconuts. Visions of picturesque beaches and azure water, and sinous roads through coastal jungle mountains. Tour busses and semis brushing our left shoulders as we guide our front wheels as close to the white line as we can get without falling into the high grass blowing in the wind from the traffic. The whistling of birds in the trees and the barking of homeless dogs, the sound of the crashing waves in the distance. Locals on bicycles with rusty chains riding from town to town carrying supplies for their work and their lives. Luscious fruit cut fresh by ladies on the side of the road. Its all beautiful and falling into our memories forever.

I'm enjoying a little alone time away from the team right now, walking around the city by myself, eating, drinking, soaking it all up. A day without my bike is cherished now. We don't get many and they are well deserved. We just finished an 8 day push from Puerto Vallarta to here in Acupolco, and we are gearing up for two four day pushes to reach Guatemala around October 1. Acapulco is pretty cool, but just another tourist trap. The city wraps around the coast of a really cool bay, looks spectacular all lit up at night, lights stectching up into the hills.

I'm very grateful to have made it this far now; we are nearing 7000 miles now, almost halfway done. Sometimes I get lost in the biking and the pace and so much happening so fast; I have to take a step back to realize what we're dong and how well we are sticking to our plans. The crazy thing is that we can´'t plan for anything ever, because so many unexpected things happen every day. It´s a little scary sometimes when I wake up. I pray nothing bad will happen, but I always know it could. We do a good job of looking out for each other and we're always on it out on the roads. As soon as I clip into my pedals, I am ready for action. I've come to look at it more and more as a job. Sometimes my job is easy, sometimes the pace is great and I feel like I'm barely expending effort. Other times the clock clicks by so slow I can't believe it. Its a mental game, a very serious one. During the hard times I just realize that I have no choice but to get through it, put in the hours and deal with whatever, because eventually I'll be able to stop pedaling and relax for a little while. It only hurts while its happening. Once its over, its over, and I can focus on the next day. I feel like I will be so strong mentally after this, nothing will ever seem hard, which is a major advantage in life. I would never recommend this trip to anyone. It takes a certain sort of personality I guess.

Some more tidbits about Mexico. On a typical day we'll ride a two lane coastal road, plants and grass growing right up to the white line and sometimes nearly eight feet high. Our right shoulder is in the grass, our left is getting buzzed by trucks and busses trying to get around us without killing us. Most cars beep at us and wave out the window or give a thumbs up, and pickup trucks full of Mexicans wave out the back. People whistle and look, and ask questions. Occasionally we'll pass some guys with machetes, chopping down brush on the side of the road. Farmers ride their horses along the sides of the road, fruit stands with fresh papaya, watermelon, mango are little havens for us. All of a sudden a view of the beautiful Pacific will appear, and I'll listen to the waves break for a minute before getting back to pedaling. Cold drinks are hard to pass up. At 90 degrees and jungle humidity, we sweat copious amounts. We are soaked out the gates. We drink hot water out of our bottles and lots of it. I can drink a whole Gatorade in three seconds now. Sometimes I think about how much liquid I drank during the day and I am astonished. There's so much to tell. I am seeing so much, and experiencing such a unique thing. The dogs are a crazy phenomenon here. There are dead ones all over the roads, and they don't get cleaned up. I've come close to throwing up by some of them. I have to look away, but for some reason I always look for too long. I could never stomach it long enough to take a picture. The dogs chase us sometimes, and we have to pick up the pace to get away. A few times I've gotten a good laugh watching one of the guys get harassed by a couple, clicking out and kicking at their heads with our hard shoes.

Every day is an adventure. In Zihuatenejo the other morning, I miscalculated a metal grate in the street, just rolling at about 3 mph. The spaces were big enough for my wheels to fall through and I went down hard. My rear derailleur was bent to shit, and the dropout it screws into was even bent, part of the frame...not good. We had to wrench the deraileur to bend the frame enough to get the rear wheel off, and then we had to strighten it, and replace the derailleur with our backup one. It was a serious mechanical procedure before 9 am. Spoon is great with that stuff and hes teaching me a lot. Right now we are having major problems with our rear wheels. The rims are cracking at the spoke eyelets (defective product), and we need to replace the wheels as they go. We had a Mexican guy take off a hub and the spokes of our worst wheel and build a new one. Can´t get wheels warranteed from Trek in the middle of Mexico, so we found ourselves riding in taxis with messed up wheels trying to talk to guys at a shop in broken Spanish about what we need. The new wheel will get us further down the road, but we will have more problems later. We'll deal with it when it happens, just as we deal with every day. We continue south...

Getting accustomed to it.

Walk a mile in my shoes and your feet may never touch the ground. Although I doubt that you would want to. I wouldn´t imply apathy it´s just this body needs catatonic exhaustion from worthy means to feel free and pure. Last night I stood looking out at the infinity of the Pacific ocean listening to the mute THC muse in the cooling afternoon light. Something was different and this sunset was somehow now a dateline. Tomorrow life would begin again and our truce will have been broken. I failed to read the fine print. I thought I was guaranteed months of a low-glycogen, high-lactic state of dispassionate unconcern were my whole body hurt like a single pulled muscle with no point superior to any other. A sensory clarity devoid of mental or phallic cathexis, a body transfigured. But when the light of day becomes no more common than the light of day it is something that has changed inside of me not the light itself. It was subtle with abrupt realization: It doesn´t hurt anymore. My body has rebelled against my infernal plot to live in my martyrdomal bliss by reversing the aftereffect. It is strange to have become a double agent in my own destiny. I´ve been craving being here for a long time now, had spent so many nights dreaming it, and tonight it is undeniably sad. I don´t know what I´m going to do. For now the road ahead seams just a planet sized prow cleaving its way though time. There is no way to stop it now, no time to make like seaward rats. I haven´t known what to expect from one day to the next for four months now and tomorrow will be no different.
When night finally fell, the stars were dazzling and profligate. I dreamt my first dream in a week. It was of white couches in exotic sun flooded rooms with billowing curtains and fresh guacamole. The next morning the skies were so clear that the world seamed for once a manageable universe where my simplest pleasures could be achieved. Given the world, I put my head down to imagine the possibilities and watched the drops of sweat drip for my nose and other protrubances and fall glistening in the sun to their many different splatter points. The longer fall passing by the frame of my bike to decamp into the blur of the pavement rapidly passing beneath my thin slicks. I saw clearly the white fog line painted on the surface of the road that I´d always known was there but had needed this day of constant scrutiny and the spaciness of this complete yang deficit to truly appreciate; scatterings of black pebbles bonded together by tar and pasted whitewash, the billions of little parts making up the whole, the whole maybe, just maybe, big enough to actually count. I can see myself standing at the end of this black taffy route looking back at myself now and smiling. No matter what happened between us I will always be looking back smiling. I consul myself with this thought for now but again tomorrow the sun will rise again with concealed affirmation. I can´t wait.

Down Mexico way...

I write now from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where our legs and minds are enjoying a day off from the job. It's been almost three weeks now since we crossed the border into the new country. There we had visions of the future whirling about in our brains, excititement, anxiety and resolve all mixed up in the bag of emotions we carried into the desert. But we could never really know what lay ahead.

Such is the nature of this trip, and it is something we have all come to understand and even love. Its become a sort of joke for us now, how unpredictable our lives can be from one moment to the next. Spoon's stepfather told him before he left, on a very serious note, "You have no idea what you're getting yourself into, John," as if to tell him he was making a bad decision. Spoon (aka Juanito cuchara) mentioned this to us in Alaska, and we laughed. "Of course we have no idea!" we'd shout with excitement. That is the beauty of it. That's what its all about. I'll ask Duncan in the morning. "Hey, Dunc...Where you sleepin' tonight?" I have no ideeeeaaaar!, he'll say, and we'll all laugh. Or Spoon while we're riding. "Yo Spoon...What's up around that turn?" We have no ideeeeaaar!" And we'll charge up the hill to find out.

Miles tick by before our eyes. We know what we're supposed to do. We know our job and we love it, even when its hard. But its everything that happens because of the biking that is always unknown, and we have to embrace each moment before it disappears. All the people and faces, all the sights and places. They are there and then they are gone. And this goes on day after day as we move south. It is a practice in the art of living in the moment, a sort of existential challenge, and we are learning how valuable the present can be. This trip is teaching us how precious life is, how important it is to appreciate being alive every day. We are out here. We've let go. Only time will tell how it all unfolds. A story, if you will...

Last week, while still on our push to La Paz through the desolate, mountainous Baja desert, we found ourselves with the maps out on the side of the road, trying to figure out where the next place to get water might be. We were nearing the end of our day at nearly 85 miles, but figured we would push on down the road to get as close to La Paz as possible, knowing we had to catch the ferry to the mainland in the afternoon. Any miles we added on in the evening would make tomorrow easier.

The woman who had made us lunch told us there was comida y agua at a certain junction on the map. So we went for it. Turns out it doesn't exist. Now we're 95 miles into the day and the sun is starting to look like it wants to go down. And the road starts going up, a lot of up. And it's still hot. We're conserving the water we have in case we have to sleep in the desert without food and cold water. But none of us want to really consider that is a possibility. At a pulloff, a nice guy gives us a 2 liter bottle of water with a chunk of ice in it. It is so good! Our favorite flavor...Cold! The four of us pass it around and its gone so fast. We add some of our warm water to the ice and keep chugging. "That guy says there's something 15 k down the road," Spoon tells us. We all look around at each other. "We gotta do it," I say. Everyone agrees. We need dinner and cold drinks, maybe even a beer. And there's just enough light left. "How many more hills are there?" Duncan asks me. "Five" I say. "So six then, right?" he adds jokingly, preparing for the worst. "Nope. Three big and two little," I say. "All right, let's go for a bicycle ride," Duncan says. And we continue pedaling, looking for the red and white microwave towers in the distance that represent the tops of these meandering, never-ending desert roads through nothingness.

As we near 110 miles we find the joint. It's no more than a shack on the side of the highway, but there's a Tecate beer sign, which means they have a cooler with cold drinks and possibly food. There is garbage strewn about out front, a skinny, tan dog barking at us. Sam and I arrive first. I drop my bike and go in. Two teenage girls and a little boy are looking at me funny. "Tienes agua fria?" I ask, with my pathetic American accent. They grab me a cold gallon and we pass it around. I give it to Duncan and Spoon as they pull in. Everyone is worked, exhausted. We sit and drink water while the kids look at us.

Finally, we are revived enough to ask about dinner. Grandma comes out, a withered fat, old Mexican woman whose sweet smile shows all her missing teeth. "Bistek Ranchero y tortillas. Esta Bien?" "Si, si" we nod." We move inside the little shack and the girls fetch us beers. A cockroach crawls in the back door as we're eating and they kill it with a shoe. We are laughing at the whole situation. There's a big beatle in my soup. I keep laughing at it all until a huge tarantula crawls in the front door and right under the table by our feet. They kill it just the same like its nothing. Then another one crawls in five minutes later, even bigger, and Grandma kills it with a broom. We start talking about tarantulas. I say they'e not poisonous and can't bite. Sam agrees. Duncan and Spoon think otherwise. I'm nervous about the spiders either way. Duncan asks the little girl, "Tarantulas." He makes the motion of a bite on the arm and then says "Muerta?" clutching his neck and laughing. The little girl nods.

The girls tally up our beers and food and we pay them. I go out by my bike and there's another tarantuala creeping along. "Another one!" I exclaim. Duncan kills it. One leg comes off but its still moving. This can't be real, I think.

We roll our bikes down the dirt road into the desert among cacti and bushes behind the place to the spot Sam scoped for us. Sam sees a snake with his headlamp. "Just a small one," he says. Duncan and Spoon set up a tent immediately. I want to set the other one up, but I'm too lazy. So I lay out a tarp and my thermarest and a sleeping bag, and lay down. Sam's set up nearby. "You think the tarantulas will crawl all over me tonight?" I ask Sam. "Oh, definitely," he says. "No, just joking. They won't bother us." I try to fall asleep but can't stop picturing my furry eight-legged friends trying to join me for the night. I lay still, with my headlamp on, and flick it on when I think I hear something or just to quickly survey the grounds. I finally fall asleep. In the mddle of the night, I think I feel something crawling on me. I jump up and grunt, startled. There's nothing. Just my mind playing tricks on me. Everyone heard me do it, so when we wake up in the morning there's lots of joke about me and tarantulas and that's continued of course.

That morning was beautiful. Fog hung among the cacti because we were at such a high elevation. Dew coated our sleeping bags, and there was the smell of the moist desert in the air. We packed up, and rode the thirty-five miles to the ferry port north of La Paz where we would hop a boat to Mazatlan and the mainland. We had finished over 1000 miles in fourteen days through epic desert and heat and across amazingly dangerous, seemingly endless roads. Spanish words rattled through our minds. The truckers had not killed us. The heat we survived. And the tarantulas never bit. That night I slept on the upper deck of the cargo ferry, looking at the stars, rocking back and forth on the waves of the Sea of Cortez. We had closed another chapter of our journey. And no tarantulas could get me there.

Stay Strong and Stick Together

Yo Boys,

This is your Tahoe friends here, sitting on a computer dreaming of what it would be like to be on the road with you guys right now. As we all knew, things would get actually start to get hard once you crossed the border into Mexico, as if riding from the tip of Alaska to the tip of California is not hard enough.

We have received news of some of the unexpected bumps that are jeopardizing your progress. Make sure that you guys treat them as such, just bumps, because you guys need to save your strength and energy for the hills and mountains still to come!!
THERE ARE 4 OF YOU ON THIS TEAM AND YOU MUST ALL REMEMBER THIS. You will undoubtely continue to encounter more differences of all sorts and it will be how you continue to learn to handle these differences that will determine your success.
All four of you guys KICK ASS and are some of the stongest and most gifted people we know.

Please take a deep breath and try to embrace all of the loving energy and thought's that we are all sending your way!!

To all of our "fearless four" supporters, they can now use your support and love more than ever.

Hasta en Argentina,
Your Friends and Family from Tahoe and Beyond