Book rant

Since arriving in Denver I've been reading all the books, articles and news that I normally don't have time for, because, normally, I'm reading books, articles and news for classes. I've been lucky at Metro, most of the reading I've done for classes has been enjoyable, because many of the professors I've had care about the students.

Metro isn't a "money" school, it's affordable higher education (say what?!). Yes, it's true, affordable higher education actually exists, it's not just an oxy moron. Many of the professors teach, because they love learning and they want to teach so they can repay the gift of their knowledge. Sure, I've taken some classes with professors that teach from textbooks, but hey, teaching (like most things) is an art that requires practice to perfect.

Spending time amidst so much information is incredible, sometimes I wish I could take the knowledge intraveinously so that I'd have the opportunity to learn constantly. I admit it, I'm a total nerd. I love the smell of book binding glue and freshly sharpened pencils. Judge me if you will, but education and experience are two things no one (except in distopian sci-fi stories) can ever take from you and believe me, knowledge is far sexier than a large bank account.

So it goes...

8 days ago, my cycling partner and I left her family's home in Columbus, to jumpstart our adventure. Cognizant of my ankle pain, we decided to take it easy. As it turns out taking it easy was utterly impossible. We biked about 65 miles and for much of the latter half of the ride I sprinted. I couldn't help myself, it felt so good to be back on my bike with the wind in my face going deliciously fast through rolling country side and yet another Springfield.

During this ride, about one hour before sunset, my cycling partner got the first flat of the trip so we stopped on the edge of town so she could fix her flat and I could get ice for my ankles. After we hit the road again, we found a state preserve about 10 miles later where we could camp.

7 days ago, we woke up, geared up, stretched and took off. Not even 5 miles into the ride, my ankles hurt bad enough that I had to stop. I realized that I could endure the pain and if I was lucky, we could make it to Missouri knowing that I may never be able to ride again, let alone walk. Or, I could make the wisest decision for my body and I could return home.

Realizing this and communicating it to my concerned, yet hopeful, cycling partner are on two utterly different levels of difficulty. We finally stopped about 5 miles later at a gas station & my cycling partner's dad generously offered to come pick us up.

I packed my box and was on a bus within a few hours of arriving in Columbus while my cycling partner decided to stay a few more days with her family.

Since arriving in Denver I've been staying in a house built in the late 1800's with yellow walls, two cats, too many plants to count, a shower knob that you have to turn the wrong way to receive hot water and my good friend.

I'm jobless, homeless (although I do have a place to stay for the moment) and recuperating. I've had the opportunity to make art, read books, think and write (four of my favorite hobbies). Being back in Denver because of an injury, is not where I expected to be in late June, but it's been a good opportunity to do all the things I rarely have time to do.

R + R

For the past year and a half of my life, I haven't stopped. Not even for a second. I've secretly feared that if I slowed down for even one moment, that I would lose momentum and life would leave me behind. Sometimes, over the past year and some change, I've tried wishing some of my load away, always cognizant of the fact that I'd be disappointed without the rush of constant chaos. Occasionally, out of necessity, I would take breaks from everything and sleep for a good 20 hours, because I tend towards insanity without sleep. Never, though, have I considered giving up everything to just "chill," sleep is for when you're dead.

However, for the past week and a half I've been getting a taste of the other side. The ankle injury I've incurred has turned out to be a little more serious than a 'break for 48 hours and bike tough again' sort of injury. My instinct tells me it's tendinitis, and it's not just in one ankle, it's in both (although the left one is worse than the right).

(Just to catch you up) After day five of rest in New Paltz, once we had sufficiently over-stayed our welcome, we hopped on our bikes and started riding towards Mohonk Mountain. Mountains, I hear, are not always the best warm-up for a cycling injury. For the first eight miles or so, I had myself convinced that I had never felt better, but by the tenth, once we were about half-way up the mountain, I began doubting the fairy tale I had been repeating to myself.

We pulled off in a parking lot for a trail head so that I could readjust my ankle bandages. About midway between peeling the bandage off my left ankle and rewrapping it, I began to shudder and tears welled up in my eyes to slide down my cheeks. Mariah waited patiently a couple of minutes before asking what I was thinking, to which I replied "I don't think I can continue right now." Immediately, we devised a plan to grab a bus out of New Paltz, to Columbus, OH to stay with Mariah's parents while my ankles healed.

While we were considering our options to get back to New Paltz, an older hippy-looking gentleman with a thick New York accent strolled up to us (sitting in the middle of the parking lot) and asked what was wrong. He offered us a ride back to New Paltz, if we wanted to see some waterfalls first. While we rode and hiked with him, he told us about the area's history and culture and was careful to walk slowly for me, the crippled one. At the end of our hike, a political discussion and a long soak in an ice cold stream near the base of a water fall, our new friend drove us to a bike shop in New Paltz (so we could get bike boxes) after stopping at an eatery to buy us lunch.

We packaged our bikes in boxes and started walking the 4 blocks to the bus stop. We hadn't even gotten to the sidewalk before someone offered us a free ride in his taxi. The taxi driver dropped us off a half block from the station and I hobbled to the ticket booth as quickly as possible with an akward 90 pound bike box, and injured ankles. We purchased our tickets and caught our bus just as the sun began to meander towards the horizon.

Our first stop was in New York City and my cycling partner had to run between baggage claim and the ticket vender (which was upstairs and across the station) several times, once with bikes in tow, while I was commanded to rest and guard our gear and our position in line. An hour and a half into the process, there was no sign of my cycling partner and our bus began boarding. While I scrambled to grab all of our gear (4 panniers, 1 grocery bag, 4 wheels, 1 backpack and 1 handlebar bag) only to discover I couldn't board until my cycling partner returned, people, like a hungry herd of cattle, began to scramble towards me, essentially running me over. Between the injury, the fear that we were about to miss our bus and the inhumanity of my fellow passengers, I lost it. "Where's your humanity?!" I screamed at them, before noticing that my cycling partner had just filed behind the long baggage claim line. Dejectedly, I shoved our gear to the wall and collapsed on the floor.

Thankfully the bus was overbooked, and we waited only an hour for a spare bus to arrive. After much needed sleep we arrived in OH 15 hours later where my cycling partner's dad and brother picked us up, before taking us out to a vegetarian restaurant.

We have been in OH now for almost a week. My cycling partner's family has been wonderful, we've been well cared for since we've arrived, but we're becoming antsy. There's only so much crafting, vegan cooking/baking, writing and reading I can do to distract myself from the bike trip my heart longs to be on. On Wed (today is Mon) I'm going to check out a free clinic to see if a doctor has any recommendations or warnings before we ride. My ankles still feel a bit tender, but definitely better and our goal is to leave Thurs. morning.

Beds, showers and bug screens, oh my!

Waking late in the state forest, Mariah and I began our day's journey. We biked through rolling hills, small towns and eventually suburbs, before the highway we were taking turned, without warning, into an interstate. With white knuckle grip we biked (illegally?) on the interstate for a good five miles before our route diverged from the interstate. Of course, as Murphey would have predicted, our route forked to the left, which meant that we had to cross three lanes of fast moving traffic in order to grab our route.

After crossing the southern border of Mass into Connecticut, we were picked up in a mini-van by a couple of burners (people who attend Burning Man) from Hartford, CN - who demanded our company and compliance with a plan to put us up. At this point, I was so tuckered out and sweaty and itchy from the black diamond ski moguls the mosquitos had chowed on my legs, that I lacked the gusto to decline their offer of a shower and a bed. Paul and Jeff were their names, and they drove us to a podunk motel where they bought us a room with BEDS and a SHOWER and then they took us out for a hot meal (Like whoa! I was pretty sure by this point that these things were nothing more than a figment of my imagination).

Heck yes, I slept like a rock and we woke up early like. Now, this is where the story turns a little sour. (sorry) My ankles had been bothering me now for about 200 miles and that morning was no exception, so we biked about ten miles into a little town called Bakerville where I scored some cardboard at the "Package" store (what the liquor vending establishments in New England are called) and made a sign to hitch into New York. We stood (well, Mariah stood, I sprawled - with ice on my elevated ankles) on the side of the road for about 45 minutes until we scored a ride in a van with an older musician who had hitchhiked across the country in the 70's. He drove us past two waterfalls, over several rivers and into New York state where he dropped us off in Lagrange at a gas station about 20 miles from our destination.

Here we made a new sign and scored a ride (without even using the sign) with a kid headed to the skate park in Poughkeepsie, just east of New Paltz (where we were headed), who ended up giving us a ride all the way into New Paltz.

The house where we've been staying in New Paltz, welcomed us with bikes, a skee pole, and a pink mailbox littering the front yard and heap tons of rad people inside.

Last night we had a fried dough party and took a few tours through town by foot and today a lot of us went swimming at a gorgeous lake that was surrounded by ice caves. Even when it's 100 degrees outside, the caves feel icy when you walk past them. By the time we got to the water, the rain broke and we took turns launching ourselves off a cliff (or a tree on the cliff) into the water in the rain, before swimming to an "island."

Mishap in Massachusettes

The whir of cars and the infectious bleeping of an alarm clock, ripped me from my sleep in a conservation area before setting off on our fourth day of biking. We started off on our new route which led us to Route 20. It seemed like a nice, scenic route to take through Massachusetts until it turned into a state highway that weaved in and out of the suburbs of Worcester (pronounced "Woo-ah-stah").

Before we hit the suburbs we ended up in a small town decorated with American flags for Memorial day. Once we got to the top of the last hill before the end of town, we ran smack into a parade. We were forced to dismount (and for reasons of style) we trotted through a crowd of people until we could get back on and ride away.

I almost felt guilty, because it seemed like we garnished more attention than the parade. I guess that's because we look pretty hot in our spandex (and by hot I mean that we look like aliens). In fact, we look pretty much out of place everywhere we go, even on bike paths and in bike shops. Even the weekend warriors stare gape-eyed and slack-jawed as we wheel by. It must be because our asses look so sweet in spandex that they fear they'll never behold a more stunning sight if they turn their eyes away from us for even a short moment (yes, I just said the words "sweet" and "spandex" in the same sentence - oh yes).

When we were finally ready to call it a day, my cycling partner and I set off down a long (really long) winding road, to get to a state forest. Not wanting to bike too far down a mountain just to find a place to camp, we stopped at a heavily wooded area where there were not any "No Trespassing" signs. We carried our bikes loaded with gear down a small hill and into a patch of leafy green plants towards the subtle sound of a stream and threw our bed rolls down in the dirt. I plopped down and started eating the first meal I had had in days that didn't start with a peanut butter and jelly or an apple, when my cycling partner realized that we had hiked through and were camped in a poison ivy patch.

I yanked all of the poison ivy plants around us out with a ziplock bag and then went to town slapping all the mosquitos that had formed a colony on my legs, when we heard voices on the road above our heads. "There they are," the older one said, when he started yelling at us to get off of his property before he called the cops. I apologized profusely while we frantically packed our things. I explained that we thought we were camped in the state forest (which was, as it turns out, a mere 1/2 mile away) and ran back through the poison ivy patch and up the hill to the road. We eventually found a camping spot after the sun set - in the dark, in the actual state forest, a half mile up the road and we quickly fell asleep.