It’s a rather prosaic photo, but I
liked it. Just a shot of some bikes covered with snow. But it has some character. It says something…and in fact the
photographer, bennyjewell
has given it an active caption that reads: makes riding to school an adventure. Alas, it does. And it makes
the butt cold.
Cycling Laos
Last night over dinner a friend and I discussed which types of travel adventure trips we would and would not do. He mentioned that he had just read about a group who did a 19-day cycling trip through northwest Laos. We both agreed that this might not be the adventure we’d choose (having limited biking experience), but it sure is fascinating to read about others who have done it. The craziest thing is that one of the four men who went on this tour with Virginia-based Far And Away Cycling only bought a bike two weeks before the trip! But all ten participants biked the 500 total miles, and seemed to have a ball while doing it. The company’s Lost in Time tour of Laos runs again in December 2005 and February 2006. Price is about $1,000, not including airfare. They also run cycling tours in Spain, Slovenia and Corsica.
Riding Back from Zihuatanejo
Zihuatanejo (we’re into foriegn-sounding names today). The
name sounded familiar to me because I remember it from the movie The
Shawshank Redemption. Remember, that’s where the Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins were reunited after all those fun
buddy bonding years in prison? Well, it’s a real place. The kind of place you’d hang with Jack Johnson, or your wife,
or, well, old prison buddies.
Well here’s a nice story about Zihuatanejo in
the Boulder Daily Camera.
The author is posting to the paper as he rides a bicycle back from Mexico, no mean feat. The rider is a recent graduate
of the University and is on a strict “two-cans-of-beans-per-day diet”. The dispatches are enjoyable and they make a
nice contra-positive to the earlier story about the Ice Hotel.
Mountain Biking Killington
It’s getting a wee bit cold for this, but I was happy none the less to see
this
article in the Globe on mountain biking Killington, Vermont.
I guess this is sort of a swan song article for fall. The colors blazed, and now we should pay the mountain gods one
last visit to thank them for the nice summer biking season.
Anyway, Killington, also a fine ski area here on the East Coast, offers some fine scree biking, ample trail and
apparently some decent single-track. This might be a good way to kill a weekend before the snow comes.
Road Read: Riding in the Shadows of Saints
Today’s Road Read features a book by another original female travel writing voice. Jane Richman is
an ex-Morman who decided to ride a BMW motorcycle through the Salt Lake Valley. She was raised Morman but left the
Church at a young age. Although there are things about the religion that Richman can’t tolerate, her desire to
understand why her relatives traveled cross-country for their faith led her to undertake this journey to follow the
path they walked years earlier. In 2001, she traveled the 1,300 mile trail by herself, now chronicled in
Riding in the Shadows of
Saints. Here is a
detailed
review of the book and more information about Richman’s background and family history from the local paper in
Tooele, Utah, where she was raised.