eLIFELIST.com Bike Trip

First things first Lexington was awesome, just wanted to get that out in the first sentence.  Having Lexington to look forward to was a great morale booster and gave us some serious initiative to get there on time, especially for me since my wife Melissa would be flying in to meet me there.

We stayed with Garyen and Bethany Denning at their beautiful house, with the most manicured perfect yard you’ll ever see.  Garyen was roommates with Brent and I at Wake and Bethany is definitely his better half.  We had a great time at their house and they were so generous to put up with us for what was supposed to only be two days but we extended it to three! 

Spending time with Melissa really refilled my spirits, she and I were glad to extend our visit together one more day.  Tons of napping, eating and resting was going on the whole time and you could just feel your battery meter raising. 

The first night Bethany’s parents Craig and Madonna Turner came over for steaks, chicken, potato salad and for desert brownies and pound cake.  We had a great visit with the Turner’s and look forward to seeing them in Colorado, we are stopping in at their place out there and can’t wait to get there. 

Thursday night the five of us went to dinner at the Merrick Inn which was a lot of fun.  Tons of people were out in the perfect weather and then we topped the night off with some ice cream from Graeters.  Seriously, all we did was lounge, sleep and eat, oh yea and tour the Woodford Reserve Bourbon Distillery.  Turns out “Bourbon” is only made in Kentucky, partly because of the huge limestone shelf 75 feet below the ground in Kentucky.  Bourbon is basically a form of Whiskey but it is distilled three times and then aged a minimum of 2 years in a white oak barrel, usually Woodford Reserve is shelved in the barrel between 4-7 years.  The bourbon goes into the Barrel clear and over the years the white oak caramelizes and mixes with the clear bourbon.  Pretty interesting process and a really thorough tour.  The drive out there was all horse farms, the perfect vision of Kentucky, a much better one than southeastern Kentucky that’s for sure. 

Bethany took us to see one of the sites where Garyen is building a “Raising Canes” franchise right in the heart of the University of Kentucky.  If you don’t know what Raising Canes is, it is restaurant based out of Louisiana and focuses on really tasty Chicken Fingers and Fries.  We learned the term “Dropping Bird” which is what they call it when they are about to drop the Chicken into the fryer.  Garyen had the chance to work about 5-6 shifts on the floor to get a feel for Raising Canes before bringing two Franchises to Lexington.  Pretty exciting and we wish him the best of luck.  Personally we think it’s going to be great late night food for college kids after partying. 

We hated to leave Lexington as it is the last place we will see familiar faces for about 4 weeks.  Thanks again to the Dennings and especially to Melissa for coming in to spend a few days with a smelly tired biker.

Also, if the blog isn't updated for a few days we promise it's not because we're lazy, it's because we don't have any service.  Keep checking back regularly and feel free to leave comments/advice etc.  We will be putting out a new edition of the newsletter soon.   Cheers!

Pictures from July 11th

Pictures from July 12th

Pictures from July 13th

July 5th: The Smashing Pumpkins.  

It's taken me a bit to write about the Smashing Pumpkins show because I'm still recovering from it.  After an Earth shattering ride to Asheville, seriously we almost died ending the day on the Kopac's hill "Rose Hill", seeing the Smashing Pumpkins in concert was awesome.  Asheville is such a great city and the venue "The Orange Peel" was perfect.  It was the last show of their 9 show residency stay in Asheville and they played a pretty wide range of songs for about 3 hours.  Standing on our feet for about 4 hours after the day's ride was tough, we were walking like Frankensteins after the show.  Fortunately there wasn't a lot of motion from the crowd, but every time someone bumped into you there was a risk of falling on your face because our legs were no exaggeration "stiff as boards".    

The Pumpkins put on a good show, they played some of the classics off "Siamese Dream" and some new ones off their new album Zeitgeist.  I wished they had played a couple off of their first album "Gish."  The venue only held a little under a 1,000 people which made the show really intimate and very loud.  Billy Corgan was great in all his weird glory and Jimmy Chamberlain (the drummer) was excellent.  Seeing the two of them play together is pretty special, their chemistry is easy and fun to watch, they both need each other as performers.  There were three other "whippersnappers" as Billy called them, playing with them.  I bought a T-shirt for $35 while the tickets were $20 each.    

I enjoyed hearing a few of their new tracks off "Zeitgeist", some I liked, others I didn't.  Now that I own the album I have a feeling it will grow on me.  

Billy Corgan has definitely started to get on autopilot in his song writing and even then his songs are very well composed.  I guess what I mean is that he doesn't really have anything to fight for anymore in his writing and hasn't since "Siamese Dream."  He's rich, successful, and has great sales so his music has lost a bit of the passion and pain of his earlier albums.  I know that tends to happen with all great musicians once they "make it" but I'm glad to see he's at least back in the saddle with the Pumpkins and wants to keep writing and performing, that is a good sign.  

The show was great and I'm glad to check "see the Smashing Pumpkins" in concert off my list.  There are some photos below, I will be posting videos from the show soon. 

July 6th Day 7 –

The first rest day and massages!?!

After six pretty intense days of biking, we were extremely ready for a rest day. Not just any rest day, but a rest day in real luxury. First off, the Kopacs could not be any nicer to us. Two, their log cabin in Asheville is beautiful. Three, they fed us like Kings. And Lastly, Mary is a licensed masseuse. After she gave each of us an hour long Swedish muscle massage, we seriously considered buying ourselves a message table to attach to another trailer to pull. It may be worth it, but the only problem is that Lee and I would have to massage each other so that was the end of that idea…

Seriously, we wanted to thank the Kopacs for all of their hospitality and the help they gave us our first day back on the as we headed towards the Smokies, they were amazing.

Another exciting tidbit from our day off was being interviewed by the Channel 13 News crew. We made the 5:00 and 6:30 news as the ‘two stupid guys biking across the country’. Ok, I added the ‘stupid’part, that could have just been how I heard it. The video of the segment should be up shortly.

The rest day was just what we needed and were able to spend some quality time with the Kopacs, which is all that we asked for…

Well day #6 started with us holding our fingers crossed that our patch worked fix on Lee’s tire would hold until we could get a proper new tire. After not being able to find the correct size replacement tire for Lee’s blowout in Hickory(at 5 PM on Forth of July of course and failing to bring a replacement tire, doh) we used some scrap tire, epoxy, and a load of duck tape to hold the thing together. Our first stop was in Morganton, NC where by a stroke of luck or fate, Lee yelled out to a guy riding his bike down Main Street if he knew where there was a bike shop in the area. As it turned out, the bicyclist turned out to be someone, Chris, who was opening his own bike shop (Table Rock Cycles) in Morganton in two weeks only a block away from where we were. What are the chances? He said at first, he thought we were cops in our jerseys and riding Treks pulling his leg about opening the shop. After we explained we weren’t cops and what we were looking for he biked two blocks back to his home and picked us up one of his own new tires. Chris was extremely nice and very helpful when he didn’t have to give us the time of day when he had a lot of work to do. He showed us the inside of his new basement shop that he is remodeling and told us about his previous life as a competitive cyclist and Ironman days.

After our encounter with Chris, we made it a few blocks away to see Lee’s grandfather’s birthplace, which is no more than a few steps and open field now because of a fire from several years ago. Lee’s mom was there to snap a picture at the old homesite with Lee. In addition to the house, we also stopped at the place where Lee’s great-grandmother worked (picture).

From Morganton, we made it to Marion to stop for some lunch at (name of restaurant). While at lunch we ran into Jeremy Hayes, who had just driven up from New Orleans to bail his two brothers out of jail and was waiting for the bail bondsmen. He does not know what they did or why they were even in the state of North Carolina, but he did know that they were going to wish they were somewhere else after he got them out… Anyway, Jeremy was very excited for us, the trip, and what we were doing it for and gave us a $100 right out of his wallet. THANKS JEREMY!

With half the day gone, half the miles biked, and not even started the serious climb to Asheville yet, we still had a long day ahead of us. From the suggestion of Chris and our original route calling for it, we were going to take old Hwy 70 towards Asheville since it was much more scenic, had a lot less traffic, and allowed us to avoid I-40. This Hwy was very beautiful until we realized that a section of this Hwy is actually closed and it routed us through a fire road to get to the other side of the mountain. After a couple of miles of never ending switch backed fire roads, about a 1000 ft elevation gain, and a couple of gallons of sweat we made it back to old US 70. In addition to having to repair a tire, the longest mileage of our trip and the biggest day of climbing, we had a timeline we had to get to Asheville for, the Smashing Pumpkins concert. When we got back onto 70, it was 4 PM and we were still 25 miles from where we were staying. My friend, Matt, had contacted his parents who live in Asheville and were extremely gracious to offer us a place to stay for two days.

As we found out first hand, which they had warned us about and offered to give us a ride up, they live up a very long hill on the outside of Asheville. We decided to give it a shot and that shot almost killed us at the end of a very long day. We will not lie, we had to walk the bikes up about a quarter of a mile, but we made it and made it in time to eat a enormous wonderful meal that Roger and Mary had made for us and make it to the Pumpkins concert in time to rock out.

Day three was action packed!  We left Rocky Mount around 7AM and eventually got off of highway 64 which had tons of cars and was really annoying to ride on.  After 64 we rode on Highway 98 which was great, not many cars, beautiful scenery (cows, cornfields and trees pretty much.)  We encountered some pretty big hills on 98 but it's good for us to get used to.  Vollmer Farm was one of the places we stopped for a break on 98.  They had some great homemade peach icecream and peaches which really hit the spot.  The owner of the farm John Vollmer sat down with us for a while.  He was a really nice guy and said that his farm used to be a tobacco farm but in the late 90's they began to shift to more vegetables and fruits.  He told us a little bit about organic farming, basically said that the regulations and certifications for organic farming are very intense and also the organic seeds have to be shipped from Kentucky, Vermont and or Colorado.  He said that usually one ton of regular fertility products for a certain crop is arounnd $200 whereas the organic fertility products for that same crop is almost $500.  John's farm is 50% organic and he hopes to expand into even more organic products.  He has started an organic delivery service for a lot of his customers close to the farm and the demand continues to grow. 

We continued down 98 in to old Wake Forest where the campus for Wake Forest University was until it moved to Winston-Salem in 1956.  We got our first flat tire as we arrived in Wake Forest.  Not a big deal, had it changed in 15 minutes, it felt good to have the first one behind us.  Then we ate lunch as this great place called "Over the Falls Deli and Pizzaria" where Brent and I ate an entire extra large pizza, which our waitress Angela was shocked about.  It really is ridiculous how much food we're eating.  As we were leaving Wake Forest I had a bit of a problem with the rear derailer on my bike, it was bent slightly so changing gears was a bit of a challenge, but no big deal to get to Chapel Hill.  As we rode in to Chapel Hill our buddy Ramy greeted us  and rode the last mile in on his mom's 24 year old Schwinn.  He was blowing by us with our trailers.  Ramy's mom made a feast for us: steak, pasta, salad, pie, it was great.  Then we headed to the Durham Bulls game which was awesome, their ball park was top notch, the night was perfect and the stadium was packed.  We sat with Brent's cousin Melanie and her son Andrew and daughter Sarah.  Brent was able to check "see a Durham Bulls baseball game" off his list and the Bulls won 3-1.  Overall, it was a great day but the first day we encountered some larger hills, we know it's just going to get more and more intense the further west we go in the state.  Thanks so much to Ramy's and his parents for having two really smelly bikers into their house and feeding them inordinate amounts of food.  Tomorrow is Chapel Hill to Winston Salem.

Day 3 Pictures

Day two was a little better than day one.  We got the day started pretty early from Plymouth and arrived in Rocky Mount about 2:30.  It's much better to get up early, beat the heat, the traffic and most importantly the winds.  We grabbed some lunch and ate it under a highway overpass (see pictures.)  When we arrived in Rocky Mount we were starving but didn't want to eat dinner quite yet so we road our bikes down the road from the Motel 6 we stayed in to the Krispy Kreme and split 6 assorted donuts.  After we killed those we road up the street about 50 more feet to Wendy's and both got a frosty.  We're finding that we can just eat whatever we want and as much of it as possible. 

After some serious napping we went across the street to Gardner's Barbeque and it was great.  All you can eat North Carolina Barbeque, hush puppies.  Gardner's hit the spot really great food. 

Not too much to report from Day 2 honestly, however we were really pretty anxious about our ride to Chapel Hill the next day, as our GPS told us it was 96.5 miles from Rocky Mount to Chapel Hill. 

Pictures from Day 2

Day 1, DONE.  

We left the Outer Banks this morning around 8:30.  We dipped our tires in the Atlantic ocean and hopped on to get out.  Overall the first day went well.  Couple things we learned:

1. Our bags are really heavy:  We were talking about things we could ditch two hours into the ride.  

2. Head winds are the devil:  It is staggering how crucial the wind will be in this trek.  You can pedal at maximum intensity and not increase your pace in the slightest.  When the winds were really bad we averaged between 9-10 MPH.  Brutal.  When they died down or were behind us our average went up to 16-17 MPH.  We had headwinds pretty much all day today.  

3. Clouds are our friends unless they have rain in them.  

4. Eating every two hours is necessary.  

5. This trip is going to be awesome but we have our work cut out for us.  

About 10 miles from Plymouth some pretty hefty rain clouds and a thunderstorm starting moving in from the North.  We high tailed it and beat the storm before it reached us.  It only rained for 30 minutes so it doesn't count as a day towards the bet Brent and I made (1 hour of rain equals a day, I said it would rain 10 days on the trip before Colorado, Brent said 5, the looser has to carry 10 more pounds of gear for a week.)

We're staying in the Port O' Plymouth Inn "A World Center for Wood Products" they have a pool which was great after the first day.  On to Rocky Mount tomorrow, we're going to start leaving as early as possible from hear on out.  

Thanks to everyone that is following us!

Pictures from Day 1

Well we are one day away from jumping on the bikes and pedaling our way across the US one mile at a time. As pumped as we are for the trip to start, it almost came to a grinding halt before it even started. We were at Kitty Hawk Kites this afternoon trying our hand at a little hang gliding and don't think I will be getting my pilots license any time soon (watch the video below). We took the beginning hang gliding class, which takes us to the top of the giant sand dunes at the Outer Banks and fly at low heights WITH the help of an instructor. As you will see from the video, flight #1 goes just fine, but flight #2 comes to a very unexpected sudden halt. The only casualty turned out to be the shin, but fortunately I made the executive decision the day before to do something that I will only do one time in my life because of the trip and will make any kind of road rash much easier to deal with. I shaved the legs… A video of that fortunately does not exist and Lee now can't stop staring at my legs, maybe not.

In addition to having a good time hang gliding, we had good company on the dunes. We met George Simmons, who is now a retired US Park Ranger from Alaska on vacation with his family. They just finished a three-week white water down the Grand Canyon and are now finishing their vacation in the Outer Banks. They were on the waiting list for two years to go down the Grand Canyon, which from everything I had heard is a very short wait. The stories George told us made us both want to change the course of the trip up to Alaska, hey what is an extra 2000 miles?