Bicycling through Glenwood Canyon

I grew up in the 1970’s, the time of NIXON, Ford and carter. It was a time of polyester, smoking, wide neckties and shame at our perceived strategic reassignment of our objectives in Vietnam. 

“International” was on the back burner for America, and when my stupid older brother wanted to quit the Air Force after 18 months, they shrugged and said: “Sure. Okay. Thanks for stopping by.”

Domestic Achievements were the order of the day, and the crown

First road thru the canyon, 1903

jewel of our vast nation was our Interstate Highway System. We had been diligently linking up all of our nations regions since 1956 and it was all done by the late 70’s! Yay!

Well, almost done. There was one teeny, tiny 16 mile stretch of road that stubbornly defied all attempts at fourlanedom. 16 lousy miles out of 47,714. And that’s where my family vacationed every year.

“Round and Round She Goes…..”

June 13^th, 1986. 4 miles west of Ogallala, Nebraska.

A crappy place to have a rest day.

An average week on the Great Peace March, the rhythm that had been established on the West Coast and would be maintained all the way to Chicago, New York City and then down to Washington, D.C., was for each marcher to walk 4 days, work at their camp job for two, and we all rested for one.

That’s the way it was supposed to happen, at any rate.

What actually happened was that we were delayed almost 3 weeks in Barstow, California, as the original, legal peace march fell apart. This put us considerably behind schedule. Utah helped this situation by unceremoniously busing us across their state and throwing us across their border with Colorado. Fortuitous intolerance. But we were still a week behind schedule and had a big date in Omaha on July 4^th. So the schedule was changed and we upped our daily mileage from 18 to anywhere between 20 to 25 miles.

And now we only rested every 10^th day. Our last rest day had come in Denver, our reward for making it across the Rockies and the 12,000 foot Continental Divide. But now, 10 days and 214 miles of marching later, we were camped alongside Interstate 80 in the panhandle of Nebraska. Well, the locals called it the panhandle. I, for one, know the shape of the state, and where we were could only be described as the asshole.

2011 San Francisco Oyster Race

Sue and Kirsten, tied together, wearing bike helmets,
inside A.T.&T Park, solving a puzzle. 

Ah, Adventure. By thy very name you are the unexpected. And we were expecting the unexpected. But we were anticipating it during the Oyster Race - not on the way there, at 6am on a cold, foggy dawn on the shoulder of the freeway.

Adventure, you win this round.

Last year the four of us were part of the Las Vegas Triathlon (see blogpost HERE). Sue, Kirsten and I as competitors and Karen as our roadie/cheerleader. We had a great time training for the Tri, but the race itself was a poorly coordinated, heat-stricken endurance contest out in Lake Mead and the long, steep hills around it. Not fun.

So this year we decided to have as much fun AT the race as we did during the training. The Oyster Race seemed to fit this bill perfectly. It is one of the new wave of “Urban Adventure” Races where the emphasis is on your brains as much as your brawn and the gimmick is that you do not know what you’ll be doing beforehand.