In 36 hours we hit the road for another round of work-camp at the house in New Mexico. Say a prayer for my knees and lower back. More floors, counter-top, appliance setup, door hanging, light fixture installation, and much much more. At least I’m flying this time, and be warned Southwest Airlines, I come armed with copious drink tickets.

A weekend away does you good, even if it’s only a 30-minute drive south. Discovering the world’d greatest Reuben doesn’t hurt either.

I’ve spending a lot of my summer traversing the Texas Panhandle. In two days, we’ll be initiating battle plan “dumbshit,” which involves driving for 24 hours plus in order to spend about 48 hours in New Mexico, culminating in a planned South Boundary ride (see above awesomeness) on Sunday. Fingers crossed that we’re still young enough to pull something this stupid off.

Two weeks, 2700 miles later we’ve landed back in Texas. I can safely say that Colorado is much further away than it looks and has significantly less oxygen than Austin. The first day out in Crested Butte after a supremely awesomely greasy breakfast and sleeping in the drivers seat the night before, jumping into interstate traffic would’ve been preferable to continuing the climb I was following Jeremy and Annie up. But here’s the deal with riding in real mountains – the suffering is directly tied to the reward. So that while i felt like i was about to vomit up both lungs (and my kidneys just for kicks), the reward side of the equation – where you get to scream down hill though beautiful groves of aspens at distinctly unsafe speeds is very much worth the pain and suffering.

Staying with Annie was fairly awesome – I hadn’t seen her in about a million years, and she now has a beautiful family, but still found time to rage with us on the bikes. And rage we did. Strand Hill, Snodgrass, and of course the 401. What the 401 lacks in the flowy aspen groves of the South Boundary, it makes up for in sphincter-clenching exposure. This is where the Garmin unit really comes in handy, because I don’t really want to know how fast I was going until its all over with. Even the smaller rides on the lower and upper loops we did with Annie’s son (who incidentally rode down some stuff that I would not), were that pleasant mix of gut-busting difficulty, incredibly beauty and fantastic adrenaline rush that make it worth spending obscene amounts of money on a bicycle. I can safely say I didn’t really understand mountain biking until going to CB – it was one of those things like understanding sex for the first time – “oh so that’s how it’s supposed to work….hey this is pretty fun.”

It sounds stupid, but Colorado is so different from New Mexico, where I normally spend my days out west. I know, duh, but I always find it striking. Aside from the distinct lack of turquoise and adobe it’s so different from the old world Spanish colony vibe that New Mexico gives off. It’s like they took all the people who like exercise way to much, but didn’t dig California, and shoved them into this square little state. It’s wonderful up there and I can’t wait to go back, but in the same way that overly swanky homes really freak me out, I’m not sure it’s for me. I need a little more grease and Type-II Diabetes on the periphery, otherwise my spidey-sense starts tingling.

Plus, I about froze to death on a couple of occasions. That is something I’m very much not cool with (heh). Breckenridge was fun though – we got to see Mayor Brad’s house and roll in town with him while he glad-handed and kissed babies. Seriously, this man owns this town – nothing happens in greater Summit County without the say-so of Mr. Larochele. Stoplights turn green for him as he rolls through town, and if for some reason they don’t, the police spring into action to redirect traffic, uttering, “We’re sorry Mr. Larochelle…won’t happen again,” while he waves beneficently. Even the waitress at the bar didn’t want to buy a laptop she’d been considering without asking him first. We also went on a small bike ride. Our GPS differ on this, but it was somewhere in the range of 3K and 12K feet of climbing, over the course of somewhere between 16 and 300 miles, all with the busted ass linkage that I’ve mentioned previously. Gorgeous, gorgeous country though and riding with the head-honcho of a city is always a good time (rumor has it the forest service pre-rides the trails for him, and clears out anything like logs, trash or Texans, that aren’t supposed to be there).

Week two found me back at the cabin homestead for some quality time with a hammer and a ladder. Retrofitting track-lights to a ceiling with no crawl-space, while trying to be at least cognizant of building codes from this century is no small accomplishment. I pretty proud I only had one incident of arcing, and one small shock (as our electrician up there says, “no big deal man, it’s only 110 volts…”)

Also of note, was one of the most pleasant conference call I’ve ever had, talking to a new freelance client while sitting under a cottonwood tree just off the square in Santa Fe. This is how all business meetings in the future will be conducted if I can mange it. My ideal life would be something along the lines of Jack Kerouac for the three hottest months of the year in Austin, except with better internet access. Do a call, get a client committed, then drive up to Embudo Station for some lunch under the cottonwoods next to the Rio Grande. Spend the morning working on a site, then head out for a hike up to middle fork lake in the afternoon, then make a few calls down in town, and follow up on email at the Dairy Bar, green chili cheese burger in hand. Finish up work, and then take your girl dancing at the Motherlode Saloon?  This is a lifestyle i can get behind.

As with all good things though, there’s an expiration date, and our trip’s was August 23, as we rolled out of the driveway at 4:15 in the morning, in my always-futile race to beat the sunrise out of New Mexico (seriously, staring into a sunrise for three hours is brutal). Two weeks gone was a long time – maybe I’m not as vagabond traveler worthy as I’d like to think. I love our place, I love coming home to a clean, cool apartment, cracking open a glass of wine, and letting Jeremy kick my ass in Halo for three hours. Making dinner and watching a movie with Liz? Pretty much my favorite evening. At the same time, waking up to the sunrise, huddled under my sleeping bag in the driver seat of my car in a canyon near Gunnison….well that’s oddly awesome as well. Maybe there’s a balance, maybe one day we’ll find it.

Germs Photos | Rob’s Photos | My Photos

Recently-returned-from-roadtrip-wade found this to be fairly awesome.

It never happened before, and it’s not likely to happen again.

Wednesday before dusk, rangers at Zion National Park, in southern Utah, blocked all traffic on the highway that crosses the park so that 300 people holding rare and precious tickets could walk through the historic, pitch-black and narrow Zion Tunnel.

More…

So I’ve manged not to get eaten by a bear (yet), to only fall off my bike a few times and to go on some pretty amazing rides with some fantastic people. Traveling like this is a weird mix of enjoying the time away and simultaneously missing what you have at home. That and wondering how the hell people actually tamed the west in wagons with no GPS. Earlier this week, we camped over a mine shaft that was about 4′ tall – imagine hacking your living out of the earth in dark, continually flooding hole in the ground that could crush you instantly. Makes designing websites seem fairly simple by comparison.

All told, the rides have been a sucess, in the sense that nothing was broken, and no one got to badly hurt. The trails were tough but not impossible.  Today though, got interesting. The high point of the day was putting my bike’s rear suspension back together with a radiator hose clamp, a peice of a pump gasket and a hammer gel wrapper while sitting in the middle of the woods (yes, we had all these items with us) MacGuyver would be proud. It is apparently mayor brad’s training program  that we will be drinking lots’o Pabst this evening in to counteract the effects of today’s  five hour hammer fest. We’ll see how it goes.

Sidenote – Germ has some pictures up from their trip which nicely overlapped with mine.

To borrow a turn-of-phrase from Badowski, you have to to wake up and make a commitment to excellence to get out of Texas under 10 hours. Maintaing  an average trip speed of 65 mph requires dedication, a strong bladder, an extremely long playlist, and the willingness to risk renal failure from the mix of coffee and Redbull. If I could find a way to refuel the wagon with out stopping in craphole towns like Vega, i would in fact pay double for my gas for some kind of mid-flight refueling solution.

All told, my  drive out to Red River is about twelve and a half hours, with very little interstate. Back roads mostly – two-lane state highways, some (especially in New Mexico) with only one lane-width of actual pavement (interesting at 80mph), and not a soul in sight to the horizon. Giant thunderheads spit out squall lines onto the hot plains kicking up true toad stranglers in the eastern New Mexico, with triple rainbows in my rearview mirror as they pass.

You also get the welcome and physiologically confusing experience of having the temperature drop 60 degrees from 104 in Austin to 45 at the top of the pass coming into Red River. And finally, sunset over the mountains, with the sky lit up like the fourth of july.

I spent last night doing few thing. There was HALO. There was some bike riding. There was some eating of wings (spicy ranch, you are a saucy mistress). Then there was the cleaning of my apartments equivalent of the garage, a 6′x5′ closet sandwiched between the kitchen and the bathroom. The goal of this domestic adventure, was to excavate enough old gear (to be relocated to a storage unit) to allow the accommodation of one of the three bikes currently inhabiting the apartment (the other two live in the dining room. really).

For me this was quite a trip down memory lane, as I’ve been collecting camping and climbing gear for almost two decades now, we uncovered a few treasures of questionable value.

• The coleman backpacking stove that leaked fuel at the supply-line juncture. Nothing will keep you on your toes while cooking a camping breakfast like a small fusion reactor’s worth of flames over a puddle of kerosene. Safety first kids.
• My very first camelback, or rather the remnants of the pieces of my version of my very first camleback: some PVC Tubing a sonic straw and a pump vendor water bottle that my dad grabbed me from a pump meeting (he attends his share of pump meetings). Why waste money when you can build your own.
• Climbing gear. Lots and lots of climbing gear. Seriously, you’d think I was about to tackle Cerro Torre. Sadly though, as my fingers get sore from typing now days, that’s been relegating to the storage unit, with the caveat that it goes at the front, just in case we need it for the zombie war.
• A truly alarming array of bike parts. My best guess is I could build at least two-and-a-half bikes simply from what’s still in my apartment. Again not the most useful use of storage facilities in a tiny living space, but handy for the zombie attack (given time, we could fashion wicked crossbows from derailleurs)  .
• A sizable stash of dehydrated backpacking food: We’ll file this one under not useful for anyone, anywhere, ever. You could use it in a pinch if you were trying to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and needed a back up heat-shield, but that’s about it.

Anyway, it’s was a bit of nostalgia for me to see all this strewn across the floor. Gone are the days when I was sure i’d spend most of my year sleeping in my car, bouncing around the various wild an beautiful places the continent has to offer. I’m sure 18-year-old me is a little pissed at the thirty-year-old-version who likes a glass/bottle of wine, works in an office, and if given a preference will generally sleep in a bed (although my mutant powers of being able to sleep anywhere are still strong). I’d don’t climb anymore, my Kayak hasn’t touched water in two years, and I haven’t been on a backpacking trip in quite a long while. Things change though, priorities shift. But at the end of the day, I’m certain that 18-year-old me would be pretty impressed with the coolness of my life, vagabond or no.

Also makes you wonder what 40-year old me is thinking right now.  Probably something along the lines of  ‘man, that kid was really smart to be so prepared for these zombies.’