Almost there.

While planning this trip, I imagined it would be a little like my previous cycle tours in Tasmania, New Zealand, Britain and Ireland.  There would be lots of time off the bike - hiking,  swimming, kayaking perhaps, visiting various attractions - so I'd need a decent range of off-bike clothes and accessories.  In fact, I've carried these things, almost unused, right across the country.  The tour has somehow turned into a whirlwind ride across America, in which the pleasure of covering the distance - of actually cycling across a continent - has been as important as visiting significant places.  On reflection I think this has happened because I'm on a designated cycle route - the TransAmerica Trail - that has maps and specific destinations, while my earlier tours have been improvised using general maps and information, and my own curiosity to plot the route.  I had intended to deviate from the Trail and visit the Grand Canyon and Glacier National Park but I've come to realise that these are part of another trip.  This one is about seeing America from the saddle of my bike and I'm loving it.  Believe me there's plenty to see.

Rolling through the wide glacial valleys and over the mountain passes of Montana has been one of the most enjoyable parts of the trip.  I share Steinbeck's enjoyment of this vast, empty place, and I even concur with its fairly corny tourist hook of "Big Sky Country".  Although the the geography is radically different - the fourteen thousand foot snow-capped mountains for a start - there's something reminiscent of Australia here.  There's a sense of of space, of uncrowdedness that definitely speaks to my little outback soul. 

If Montana was about sweeping vistas and soaring peaks, Idaho was all wild rivers and pine forests.  After our lovely, hedonistic rest day in Missoula we climbed the Lolo Pass (nine thousand and something feet), crossed the state line at the summit, and rolled gently downhill along the Lochsa River for what became the easiet ninety mile day ever.  After the pass, we hardly pedalled for the rest of the day: we just coasted and admired the scenery. 

The pay-off, two days later, was a tough day that included three mountain passes and a headwind.  The Cycling Gods never let you get away with an easy day: there's always retribution. 

Gain a Belgian, lose a Belgian.

Just before we crossed the pass, I glanced in my rear-vision mirror and saw another cyclist overhauling us.  He greeted us in what I thought was Dutch, but was in fact Flemish.  Sieman had been in touch with our Belgian contingent, Stefaan and Wim, via their blogs and email, for weeks. Being tired of riding alone, he had put in a 150 mile day to catch up with us.  Two days later, Stefaan left us to chart his own course to Portland, Oregon.  We had swapped a generous, funny, compulsive organiser (labelled the Belgian Bullet because of his strange evening headwear in Yellowstone), for a delightfully disorganised and whimsical 20- year-old political science student with some surprising capabilities of his own - including bicycle spoke replacement.

Ryan the "spokesman".

Despite a day of coasting downhill in the Lochsa Valley, Ryan still managed to break a spoke.  His response to these mishaps is to improvise with string (actually FibreFix emergency spokes) and to resolutely refuse to carry the necessary tools to remove his rear derailleur cassette which must be done to insert a new spoke on the drive side - the side where they nearly always break.  Geordie logic?  We all appreciate the entertainment of watching his rear wheel wobble precariously as he descends steep and dangerous mountain passes. 

The long-awaited return of the Religion Report.

As we've moved west, the number of churches per per town has diminished, as have the weirder religious billboards, the Ten Commandments signs in front gardens, and the American flags flying outside private houses.  I can only conclude that the average western American is much less pious and patriotic than his eastern compatriots - a poor moral specimen altogether.  Just when I was becoming despondent though, there it was, right by the side of the highway in rural Idaho: the Yahweh 666 Warning Assembly!  I noticed that this august group had also joined the Adopt a Highway program, commiting them to cleaning up the litter along a two-mile stretch of road.  It seemed just a little incongruous to me.  I mean, if their warnings about the imminent apocalypse are accurate, who cares about about a few McDonalds wrappers and beer cans on the roadside!

Nearing the end of the trail.

It took us just four days to track across Idaho in a southwesterly direction before entering Oregon - the last state on the TransAm for an East-West rider.  Again we were coasting down a river valley - this time the Snake River.  I was out ahead of the group, having made an early start.  The road was quiet; the morning sunny and still.  As I quietly glided around a bend, there in front of me was a bear.  It was a young Black Bear, about the size of a very large dog, and it was preoccupied with the ripe blackberries at the side of the road.  I'd read that the colour of Black Bears could actually vary quite a lot, and this one was a beautiful gingery brown with a large tuft of blond-tipped hair between its shoulder blades.  Just been to the hairdresser (beardresser?) I guess.  I gently coasted to a stop and reached for my camera, which unfortunately was in my rear pannier and not easy to get to.  I must have made a noise, because it looked up, nearly jumped out of its skin, and scrambled straight up an almost sheer rocky bank, huffing and puffing with effort and fright.  It got to the top, took one horrified look back at me, and disappeared into the pine forest.  The whole episode took less than ten seconds I suppose, and I got nowhere near my camera, but it put a smile on my face for the rest of the day.

An encounter made in heaven.

Last night (July 29th) we camped in the park at Mitchell, Oregon, a tiny town in the dry prairie country that covers most of the centre and east of the state.  It had been a hot day's riding with a fairly serious mountain pass in the middle of it, and we settled down in the town's only cafe / bar for a few cold beers and a hamburger before setting up camp by the creek just across the road.  A group of four cyclists, all men in their 50s, arrived from the east, followed by their support crew - their wives - who were carrying their gear in a car.  They were a sort of semi-official club, complete with matching cycle shirts which identified them as The Clydesdales, and indeed, they were all hefty specimens.  We soon discovered something else about them: they were all California winemakers and vineyard owners from the Napa Valley, and the support vehicle contained about 200 bottles of theire own produce, some of which they generously shared with us.  The wine was excellent, the company exceedingly friendly, and the night became quite a long one.  As we finally staggered off to bathe in the freezing creek and set up camp, we were all invited to visit and stay with them in Napa should we ever be passing that way, and guess what!  In a couple of weeks, I will.

The last pass.

Today (July 30th), carrying our hangovers with us, we climbed over the Ochoco Pass (four thousand and something feet) and coasted down to Prineville, where I'm sitting in the excellent public library writing this before riding the last 20 miles to Redmond where we'll stay tonight.  Tomorrow, we cross the last mountain pass (although certainly not the last big hill) of the TransAm: McKenzie Pass, which will take us over the Cascade Range and down to the cool, damp, foggy Pacific Northwest coast.  In two days time I will have cycled across a continent, but that's not the end for me.  Another 10 days or so of riding will take me down the Pacific Coast Trail to San Francisco.

Yellowstone and Montana

You might remember that my appetite for taking an epic trip across America was first stimulated, when I was about 15, by reading John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley.  The chapter on Montana in that book is titled, "A Love Affair".  Steinbeck was entranced by Montana, and I am too, but first we have to get that north-west corner of Wyoming out of the way.

Yellowstone is one of those "best and worst" experiences.  The physical environment is spectacular and ever-changing; the the riding is challenging and satisfying, with serious mountain passes to climb, sweeping descents and good road surfaces; there's wildlife in abundance; and the geothermal wonders of geysers and boiling pools are truly amazing.  BUT; half the population of America is here in the summer months, and they're all driving massive motor homes and SUVs or towing caravans the size of small apartment buildings.  The traffic is relentless and very scary.  I watched in horror from the back of our file of five riders as the jutting mirror of a swaying motor home missed Ryan's head by about two inches.  Everyone here talks about the danger of meeting a Grizzly out on the road, but if you're going to be killed or injured in Yellowstone, the odds are it'll be a motorised monster that gets you: not a furry one.

None of this stopped us from thoroughly enjoying the three day ride through the world's oldest (and probably its most spectacular) National Park.  We camped at night in crowded campgrounds, but were able to sit around a campfire with a bottle (or two) of wine and retail and enhance the stories of our cycling heroism, to everyone's satisfaction.  We dutifully locked our food supplies in the bear box before going to sleep, but none of us saw or heard the Grizzly that is reputed to visit the campsite every night.  Why we slept so soundly, I'm not sure.

The thousands of acres of dead trees are the legacy of a catastrophic forest fire that ripped through the Park in 2000.

Yellowstone, of course, sits on top of a massive, subterranean super-volcano.  WHEN (not if) this thing erupts, it won't simply devastate this particular part of the planet: it's very likely to precipitate a "nuclear winter" over the entire earth for many years - possibly exterminating all life.  Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn't it.  The prospect of Tony Abbott as PM, or even petrol at $2:00 a litre, doesn't seem quite as scary in that context.

Finally, in Yellowstone, there's evidence of a desire amongst Americans to recycle and conserve.  For more than two months, riding accross this country, I've had little choice but to buy over-packaged food and drink and to throw the packaging into a general refuse bin.  It seemed to me that world's biggest effluent society had little or no consciousness of its environmental perfidy, much less any motivation to do anything about it.  The Rocky Mountain states, though, are definitely more progressive, and I suppose the pristine surrounds of Yellowstone, and the reverence of many Americans for this place, have a consciousness-raising effect.  In any event, it was a great relief to be able to put my food containers into a recycling bin at last.

As we left Yellowstone, we entered the eighth state of the Transamerica Trail: Montana.  Like Steinbeck, I'm besotted by this place.  It's vast and imposing and uncrowded, and the locals are open, friendly and almost terminally relaxed.  Although we've descended from around 8000 to 4500 feet, the weather is still sunny, dry and cool.  We're having a rest day in Missoula - a pretty university town surrounded by steep hills and bisected by a wide, shallow river that seems to contain numerous groups of smiling people floating along in truck inner tubes drinking wine - an attractive local ritual.  The place has book shops, coffee shops and all the other requirements of a civilised existence, and a layoff here is going to be pleasant.  In about 10 days time I'll be on the Oregon coast, having cycled four and a half thousand miles across a continent.  More of Montana soon, but I'll finish with some images of the hot, bubbly part of Yellowstone.

Rolling across the wide open spaces of Wyoming, I resurrected my little FM radio and tuned in to the voices of the local culture of America's least populated state.  I found I had lots of choice: three religious stations and four country and western stations.   I chose one of the country and western stations and almost immediately underwent a country music epiphany.  Now, I've said a lot of negative things about C & W in the past - even retailed the old joke - "What do you get when you play a country and western record backwards?  You get you girlfriend back, you get your car back, you get your dog back ...."  But now I'm a convert.  (Rashida Khan, are you hearing this?)  The astounding intellectual and creative content of what I heard right here in Wyoming has turned me around.

The first song to impress me was rich in literary reference and allusion.

"I've followed you to Timbuctoo.

Like Scarlett followed Rhett;

But this here lonesome Romeo

Ain't got no Juliet."

I've read Gone with the Wind, and seen the film, but I don't remember the Timbuctoo sequence.   But you can't argue with the Shakespeare, now can you?

The next one was a revelation.

" Rain makes corn,

Corn makes whiskey;

Whiskey makes my baby

Feel a little frisky.

 Rain is a good thing."

The  syllogistic, Aristotelian purity of that logic sends shivers down my spine.

Number three was a gritty and perceptive comment on the social reality of women's lives in modern (rural) America.

"No more lovin' like crazy;

No more chicken and gravy;

I ain't gonna have your baby,

Till you take me down to the little white church."

And if the songs bore you, you can always play "Count the guitar cliches."  All hail C & W.

Ghost town

Everyone we met said, "Don't stay in Jeffrey City".  So we decided to do just that.  JC used to be a uranium mining centre with upwards of 7,000 people, but since the mine closed, it's become a field full of crumbling buildings and a cafe / bar full of crumbling people.  The locals in the bar were all playing online gambling games on their laptops, and no-one was interested in talking to a couple of fascinating Transam cyclists, so we had a couple of beers and talked to each other.  It turned out that one of the barmaids was, in fact, an intelligent life form, and she told us we could camp in the derelict building across the road, which we did.  It was a bit smelly but gave good shelter from the howling wind, and we had a reasonable night.

Wyoming is just as spectacular as Colorado, but more barren and forbidding.  Most of the riding was flat or gently undulating, but the mountains - many with remnant patches of snow -  always framed the horizon.  The "badlands" areas were positively spooky, with weird, heavily weathered landforms and stark, red rocks.

For two days, from Lander to Dubois (pronounced, in the innimitable American way, Dooboyz), and beyond, we battled the worst headwinds either of us had ever experienced.  It was physically and psychologically punishing, and the relief when the gale finally abated was profound. We were, after all, riding through the Wind River Indian Reservation, along the Wind River itself, past Windy Mountain and over Windy bridge. 

And then, we climbed over a pass and there they were: the Grand Tetons.

For the next two days, it was impossible not to keep photographing these fantastic, ethereal peaks, jutting up out of the plain and dominating the landscape.

And then there were three, then, momentarily, six - then five.

One of the great things about riding the Transam is the way groups of riders team up, disperse and re-form.  I've been riding with Ryan Anderson since Damascus, Virginia, and for a while we were a team of four with Cooper Hanning and Joe Meyer.  Cooper left us in Carbondale, Illinois, to fly home to Minnesota for a cousin's wedding.  He's back on the trail, but about a week behind us, and I hope to catch him in San Francisco before I leave the country.  Joe left the Transam after Pueblo, Colorado, to ride the Western Express route through the deserts of Utah and Nevada.  We're following his adventures on his blog and by email.  (When we accused Joe of deserting the team, he said, "I am the team: you guys are the ones deserting".  Healthy ego Joe has.) 

As Ryan and I headed into Northern Wyoming, we fell in with Eli, a 20 year-old free spirit from Upper New York State, and rode with him for a few days.  Then we joined another team of three - Wim and Stefaan from Belgium, and Jessica - a 27 year-old teacher / graduate student from Florida.  She started the tour with a partner, but he gave up and she continued. The six of us had only one night together, in Dubois, before Eli detoured to Jackson, south of Yellowstone, to visit friends.  We plan to meet again in Oregon.

Yes; it's true: I've committed another crime.

My criminal career continues to blossom.  Eli, being 20, is old enough to vote, sign a contract, be tried in an adult court and sentenced to an adult prison, and to fight and die for his country in Afghanistan, but not, in America, old enough to buy a beer.  After a gruelling day battling the headwind from Hell, we struggled into Dubois at 10 pm.  The only place open to get food was a bar, and they wouldn't allow Eli inside, even if he wasn't drinking alcohol.  We bought pizza and beer to take away and checked into a motel, where I supplied liquor to an underage person - an offence punishable by a prison sentence in Wyoming. 

Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone deserve a blog post of their own., so I'll finish this one with a few images of the spectacular approaches to this amazing corner of the amazing state of Wyoming.  In about two weeks, I'll be on the Pacific coast in Oregon, after 4,500 miles of riding across this vast and diverse continent.  Then I plan to ride down the coast to San Francisco - another 600 miles.  It seems impossible that this journey is actually going to end in a few weeks.

Go west, old man.

I love the west. It's all of those corny things they say it is - big, wild, friendly, rugged (feel free to add your own wild west cliches here). There's no doubting the spectacular beauty of Colorado.

The trail through Colorado took us through the ski resort area around Breckenridge and Silverthorne, where we gatecrashed a fourth of July party at the Riverside Lodge Hostel. For the small price of watching the very cheesy July 4 celebrations on wide screen TV, we scored free beer and wine and a sensational barbecue dinner. That morning's patriotic breakfast at the "Historic Hand Hotel" in Fairplay was sumptuous too, which set us up for the climb over the Hoosier Pass.

You might remember my comments about the seamless integration of religion and patriotism in Virginia and Kentucky. Well, here in Colorado there seems to be a seamless integration of religion and fast food too.

At Hot Sulphur Springs we free - camped by the Colorado River, and took an invigorating (ie: freezing) dip before spending a pleasant evening by a campfire with a six- pack of Newcastle Brown. We declined the pleasure of bathing in the springs themselves because of the $18.00 charge for doing so. You can buy a lot of Newcastle Brown for $18:00. The next day was to be both difficult and eventful.

My criminal career continues.

Yes; it's true: I've had another run-in with the law. No doubt you'll remember, fondly, Officer Bumfluff of Eureka, Kansas. Well, I've discovered that he has a close cousin: Officer Smugsmirk of the Colorado State Police.

My version of events.

A couple of miles out of Hot Sulphur Springs, we were crossing a bridge over the railway (railroad), riding in the roadway rather than on the shoulder because of a scattering of debris, including broken glass, at the road's edge,when a large, fast- moving Dodge pickup roared past us, horn blaring. We didn't think much of this - it was the 147th such incident since Virginia. Just another impatient driver outraged that cyclists should presume to be on the road at all, much less require him to actually slow down.

A mile up the road, the pickup was stopped by the roadside.  We rode by, half expecting a roadrage outburst from the driver, but he was sitting, immobile, in his cab - talking on his mobile phone.  A mile further on, we were pulled over by a police patrol car, lights flashing and siren whooping.  It was followed by the Dodge pickup.  What followed is best conveyed via Officer Smugsmirk's official report, obtained surreptitiously through channels only known to members of the criminal class like myself.

Incident Report.  July 6th.  900 hrs.

I received a telephone call from Citizen Blunderbuss concerning the criminal obstruction of his Dodge Ram 4500 Double Overhead Cam Fuel Injected Supercharged Diesel Pickup by a pair of bicycle-riding vagrant types on State Route (rowt) 126.  I proceeded at speed to the scene and intercepted the suspects who were apparently attempting to flee the scene of the crime by proceeding at approximately 10 miles per hour in a westerly direction.

Alternately calming Citizen Blunderbuss in his righteous rage and interrogating the suspects, I informed the latter that I would issue a citation for dangerous and negligent riding which they could defend, if they wished, in court.

Both suspects were aliens.  One, apparently an Australian, expressed disbelief that I would issue a citation based on the unsupported accusation of one person with no supporting evidence or witnesses.  I assured the suspect that I would indeed do so - especially if he continued to ask impertinent questions.  The second suspect, apparently of British nationality, offered to apologise to Citizen Blunderbuss if he would drop the complaint, and made attempts to calm down his partner in crime who was muttering about counter accusations and natural justice or some such foreign nonsense.

I adopted the standard police chastisement stance - hands on hips, head inclined slightly to one side and angled to ensure the opacity of police-issue mirror sunglasses, and delivered an extended lecture concerning the numerous dismembered cyclists I had retrieved from this very highway, and the likelihood that I would be retrieving their body parts from said highway if they persisted in riding irresponsibly.  I then invited Citizen Blunderbuss to accept their humble apologies and deliver his own chastisement.

The suspects, suitably humble and apologetic, if not downright abject, were subsequently allowed to proceed.

Report ends: 1030 hours.


Me again.


Yes; the whole sorry episode took an hour and a half.  In my view though, everyone was a winner: Citizen Blunderbuss satisfied his righteous indignation; Officer Smugsmirk got his boots thoroughly licked; and Ryan and I got priceless blog material.

The remainder of July 6th was equally trying.  After detouring off-route (rowt) for supplies to Granby, we took a wrong turn and rode an unnecessary 8 miles, then battled headwinds for the rest of what became an 80 mile day.  Slogging across the Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge, a vast, high-altitude wetland of lakes and moorland fenced in by snow-capped mountains, we started to succumb to exhaustion.  The headwind was relentless.  The emblem of the ANWR is a wild duck in flight, but a more appropriate one would be a swarm of mosquitoes devouring a helpless human.  We couldn't even stop for a rest or a drink without being savaged.  All we could do was press on.

As we breasted the final hill and saw the town of Walden spread out on the plain below, my companion, Ryan, uttered that quaint and lyrical Geordie expression: "Thank fuck for that!"

The Colorado "Wow" factor

After only a few days in the Rockies, it's hard to remember what those flat, endless, Kansas prairie roads were like.  The photo at left was taken with my iPhone (my camera is broken and I haven't had a chance to replace it yet) as Ryan and I climbed from Fairplay, Colorado to the highest point on the TransAmerica Trail: Hoosier Pass, which at 11,500 + feet forms the Continental Divide.

Forgive me for overworking my inadequate collection of superlatives here. The Rockies are breathtaking - in more ways than one actually: the air is a bit thin at this altitude, and a lightheaded, dizzy feeling and a mild headache often accompany strenuous exercise, like climbing a bloody high mountain pass on a bicycle.

At the top of the pass, we congratulated and photographed each other, as you do, and were slightly contemptuous of people who were doing the same - backslapping and high-fiving and taking photos - because they had made it up there IN A CAR!

The sun is still hot and brilliant at this altitude, but the breeze is chilly, and brief, sudden thunderstorms are common, especially in the afternoons.  We were treated to one of these on our first day in the Rockies, and had to huddle under my tent fly by the side of the road as lightning flashed, thunder roared and horizontal hail peppered us like lead shot.  Fifteen minutes later, the sun was out and a gentle breeze was blowing again.  The only clue to what had just occurred was the torrent of water rushing down the side of the road, flooding our biles to the hubs.

And then there were two.

Just two days before crossing the Continental Divide, we said goodbye to Joe Meyer.  While Ryan and I follow the TransAm north through Wyoming and Montana, then west through Idaho to the Oregon Coast, Joe is riding the Western Express trail through the deserts of Utah and Nevada to San Francisco.  We'll miss Joe's "have a go" attitude and larger than life personality.  This is the man who swam the Ohio River rather than taking the ferry, and almost ended up in the Gulf of Mexico; the man who's travelling across a continent with less gear than most of us need to get to the local shop; the man who blithely rode halfway across Kansas with his front tyre held together with duct tape.  In short, he's an inspiration.  I'd wish him luck, but with energy and willpower like that, you don't need luck.

Before I consign the Kansas experience to history, and concentrate on Colorado, I must make mention of  the two angels of Scott City.  I arrived in town in the early afternoon after one of my 5:00 am starts, and had to grab the sole remaining dingy motel room for the three of us because the harvest crews had booked up everything else.  There was a campground - the only one I've ever encountered that had no toilets or showers whatsoever.  The woman managing the place said that she and her husband had talked about installing them, but hadn't got around to it.  The place was packed with self-contained RVs (recreational vehicles) with their own toilets and showers, so I guess there was no urgency to cater for a few cyclists.

It had been a hot, dusty ride, and I'd been fantasising about cold beer for several hours.  I was delighted to find that the only supermarket had a fridge full of the stuff, so I grabbed a six-pack of Budweiser and headed to the checkout, where the unsmiling young woman at the register informed me, "We don't sell beer on Sundays."  I knew that Kansas didn't have dry counties like Kenfuckingtucky (the official spelling in the |TransAm cyclists' dictionary), but what I didn't know was that it has "moist" counties, where bizarre and illogical restrictions are placed on its sale.  I can only imagine that this assuages the abiding fear of the religious authorities in the county that someone, somewhere, might be having fun.

After gaping, open-mouthed at the checkout operator for a while, refusing to believe the stuff was displayed in the fridge but I couldn't buy it, and making some semi-coherent remarks about her ancestry, I turned and trudged back to the fridge to replace the beer.  Enter, angel number one.  A soft, Mexican voice from behind me said, "I have beer at my place.  Come over for a drink."  I turned to meet Gilberto and his two incredibly beautiful olive skinned, almond-eyed, smiling children.  Over several cans of (believe it or not) Fosters Lager at his kitchen table, I learned that he publishes a Spanish language Yellow Pages in several major centres in western Kansas, and is doing quite nicely because of the growing population of Mexican workers.  I remembered that Tim Flannery in The Eternal Frontier had predicted that America's future would be a Hispanic one.  I fervently hope he's right.

Angel number two was a softly-spoken man from South Carolina called Rod - a harvesting contractor who also happened to be a keen cyclist.  As he was planning to buy new tyres for his bike, which he carried across the country in his car in case the opportunity to ride arose, he gave one of his old tyres to Joe.  Later that evening, he brought a case of beer to our motel room to share with us and refused any payment.  

So now we've parted from Joe, as earlier, in Illinois, we parted from Cooper, and Ryan and I are tackling the Colorado Rockies.  Since the Hoosier Pass, we've ridden through wild and spectacular terrain, camped by (and bathed in) the pristine upper reaches of the Colorado River, and met more remarkable people.  Details in the next posting.  And tomorrow, we cross another state line into Wyoming. 

The prairie

profi

Wheatfields, cornfields, more wheatfields, more cornfields - aha! There's a field of some sort of fodder crop.  Now that's variety.  Hmmm, is that combine harvester a John Deere or a Massey Ferguson?  (I actually know that because JDs are always green.)  How many yellow caterpillars have I run over in the last ten miles?  Is the wind blowing from the South West or the South South West?  These are the existential ruminations of the long-distance cyclist as he meanders across the endless prairie, vainly attempting to keep his brain from dissolving into mush.

The music inside the head is another thing.  It just won't bloody well go away, and it's never anything pleasant or interesting - always some neurone-dissolving John Denver song, or a fragment of some 70s pop tune that would insult the intelligence of a gnat.  How did this stuff get in there anyhow, and why is it retained?  Surely there's limited enough room in a normal human brain for all the important and interesting stuff, without storing up all this mindless crap for some future time when you just might be cycling across an endless plain in mind-numbing heat and need some sub-intelligent twaddle to keep yourself occupied.  Why can't my brain retain important stuff, like how to tie really clever fishing knots, or how long you actually boil an egg to get it just right.

The wheat harvest is under way in Western Kansas, and we're dodging convoys of trucks hauling giant combine harvesters and other outsize machines.  Motels and campgrounds are full of contract harvesting teams, and it's often difficult to find a place to stay.  The wind blows hard most of the day, usually from the south, so it's on our left shoulders as we head west, but it regularly swings to the south-west and becomes almost a headwind.  The few stretches of the route (rowt) on which we swing to the north are bliss - the brisk tailwind pushing us along.

A common sight in the Kansas wheatlands is a nodding oil well amongst the grain.  In some areas there are hundreds of them, rocking and grinding away, sucking up the sludge left hundreds of feet below by decaying carboniferous forests that covered this region 200 million years ago.  An interesting irony occurs to me as I ride by.  This being the bible belt, the proportion of Kansans who believe the Earth was created by God in six days a mere 6,000 years ago is probably considerably higher than the America-wide figure of 65%.  This means that a sizeable proportion of the folk who profit from the remains of those forests, don't actually believe they ever existed.  

On one memorable day, the mercury hits 105 Fahrenheit, and we settle in at an airconditioned cafe near Toronto, Kansas, to wait out the heat of the day.  It's impossible to ride.  With the blustery wind, the extreme dryness and the searing heat, I know what Black Saturday in Victoria must have felt like.  The owner of the cafe is a tall, impressive woman of  Cherokee descent, with traditional tattoos on every exposed bit of skin.  She's friendly and hospitable and keeps refilling my "bottomless" coffee cup.

I've taken to getting up at dawn and putting 40 or 50 miles behind me before the wind gets up and the temperature hits the 90s.  I can't prevail upon Ryan and Joe to do likewise.  They sleep in, and catch me by lunchtime.  Cycling through the bible belt at dawn sometimes produces interesting sights.

Finally, after seven days of slogging across Kansas, the Colorado state line appears.  The prairie doesn't end there of course: the terrain stays fairly flat, although wilder and more like outback Australian cattle country, for another 150 miles or so, until, west of Pueblo, the Rocky Mountains begin.  Much more of that later.