eLIFELIST.com Bike Trip

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. 

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

There are a ton of things we will be doing on the trip.  Below is a list of the Life-List items we plan to check off. 





- Hang Glide in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
- Go to a Durham Bulls baseball game
- See the Smashing Pumpkins in Concert
- Camp in the Great Smokies
- See the Ozarks
- Go to Sturgis Motorcycle Rally
- Camp in the Badlands of South Dakota
- See Mount Rushmore
- Climb a 14,000 mountain in Colorado
- Compete in the Muddy Buddy Race in Boulder
- Mountain Bike Moab, Utah
- See the Grand Canyon
- Hike the Narrows at Mount Zion National Park
- Bike the “Extraterrestrial Highway” at Area 51
- Camp in Yosemite/See El Capitan
- Finish at the Golden Gate Bridge

We've pretty much nailed down our route across the country and have referenced a number of different sources for the right roads to ride on.  We are riding on parts of the TransAmerica Trail established by the Adventure Cycling Association.  The Adventure Cycling Association was established in 1973 and is the number one source for Bicycle routes and travel by bicycle.  We will be following the TransAmerica Trail mostly through Kentucky, Missouri, and Kansas.  The trip is fairly straightforward until we get to Colorado and then we are in for several physically grueling weeks.  We are completing numerous Life-Lists items, competing in races and attending all sorts of events in Colorado and Utah. 

If you click on the map and the little biking icons on the map you will see each stopping location plotted out on Google Maps, the projected mileage, and the projected dates we will be at that location.  The mileage and dates are subject to change and not set in stone.  We have several "padding days" built in, some days we may do more or less miles depending on the conditions.  Up to the departure and once we're on the road we will be updating this map with content for each of the locations.  The GPS map tracking us will be very similar but with tons more stats about the weather, altitude and our speed.

Brent recently checked Skydive off his list.  Check out his face right before he jumps. 

We have Compete in the Muddy Buddy Race on our lists and August 19th we will be competing in the Muddy Buddy Ride and Run race in Boulder, Colorado.  It is the 2nd annual Muddy Buddy event and they have them all over the country: San Jose, LA, Austin, Chicago, Richmond, Atlanta, Orlando and Boulder.  The race is in teams of two and consists of roughly a 6 mile course with several obstacles courses; a bike ride, a run and ends in a huge mud pit crawl.  It looks like a lot of fun and we’re pumped to participate.  Check out a few videos from Last Year. 

Ok, so the Smashing Pumpkins are hands down my favorite band and Siamese Dream is my favorite album, wanted to get that out of the way early in this post.  Siamese Dream came out when I was just beginning to find and play music and I have a deep nostalgia for the Smashing Pumpkins.

I saw Zwan play in New York a couple years ago, which was great, at the very least it was Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlain playing together and I like a good number of the tracks on that album.

That said, I've never seen SP in concert and it is on my Life-List to see them.  I heard they were getting back together for a new album and tour and had hopes that seeing them wasn’t a lost cause.  I remember being 14 and a couple of my friends were going to the Lollapalooza tour the Smashing Pumpkins played in and I was so pissed I couldn't go. Now that I'm older I of course understand my folks hesitation to let me go to a huge rock festival at that age.

The battle for the tickets was pretty intense.  The deal is that they are playing 9 residence shows in Asheville North Carolina to kick off their US tour.  They are playing at The Orange Peel, which is a venue that holds about 950 people.  The tickets were set to go on sale this past Sunday May 20th at 1PM EST.  I was online, credit card in hand at 12:50 ready to put my ecommerce quick check out skills to work.  At 1PM TicketWeb.com came to a screeching halt and trying to get through to purchase tickets was a joke.  I wasn’t sure if it was my connection or if other people were getting tickets ahead of me.  I stomped and huffed like a little kid that just lost his Ice cream scoop to the ground. 

To make a long self-indulgent story short, TicketWeb’s servers crashed hard and later that night they announced the tickets would be sold on Ticketmaster.com the next day, Monday.  I was there again at 7PM Monday, burned through check out and got 2.  All 9 shows sold out in under an hour. 

It’s great that we will be able to see them on the trip and check that one off the list.  We are going to have to seriously haul it to get to Asheville by the 5th.

If you haven't seen this show on the Discovery channel yet, check it out.  The host Bear Grylls is an ex British Special Forces soldier, climbed Everest when he was 23 (youngest Briton ever to do it and live) and is a well regarded motivational leader, adventurer and a master survivalist.  On Man vs. Wild he puts himself in extreme outdoor situations and environments with usually just a canteen, knife and a flint, sometimes less and has to work his way out to safety or civlization. 

A few of the more intense moments from this season were when he ate a fish while it was still alive, ate meat from a dead zebra, drank the liquid from elephant feces because his body needed fluids, and ate a live snake, the list goes on.  It's not that he does these things to be "crazy" either, he has a matter of fact, "I need to eat, I need to sleep and I need water" mentality and that's what makes him and the show so great.  He loads every episode with tips and advice.  The show is one of the best things on TV, as is just about everything on the Discovery Channel, don't even get me started on how ridiculous Planet Earth is or the fact that I'm kind of obsessed with it.  There are new episodes of Man vs. Wild starting in June.  Hopefully we won't face any situations on the bike trip near as intense as the ones he puts himself in on the show. I like my meat cooked thank you.  

However, two of the episodes from this first season were based in places we are going, the Sierra Nevada mountain range and Moab, Utah.  I'm honestly looking forward to the unknowns and challenges of the locations we will travel through. 

Brent has "Mountain bike Moab" on his Life-List so we will be doing that among other things.  

Carry on  Mr. Grylls, keep doing what you're doing.