Back from Mecca...
...or at least the Mecca of riding bikes off road. While thousands of my fellow students here at PSU hit the tanning beds and the gym in February, preparing for exotic beaches on SB '09, I contemplated how I was going to keep up on my bike in the desert, after a broken wrist kept me sidelined from riding all winter.
Making things worse, I went out and saw the writing on the wall (Red Bull/Vodkas - $2.50) a few days before leaving for Moab, Utah for break and came back to my apartment and released some angst on a concrete wall, which I had assumed was just another of the 3" thick partitions in our humble dwelling.
Things weren't looking good the next morning when I couldn't move my hand or grip a pencil in class, let alone write. I decided I was going to avoid the doctor's office and apply some TLC in the form of frozen bags of veggies. It looked liked things were going to pan out OK, and then I called Mike.
Somewhere the dates of both of our Spring Breaks had become lost in translation, and the night before I left we were on the phone and realized they did not actually overlap. Luckily, as I breathed into a paper bag and tried to get my head around how this had happened, Mike saved the day by deciding to take an extra week off from school to make the trip happen.
So I crammed as much of my cycling junk into a bike travel box, lent to me by my friend Sparky, whose real name I finally learned by reading it in the 'IF FOUND' sticker on the side, and hit the road for Pittsburgh, where I would catch the never-ending train to the west.
During a 6 hour layover in Chicago, I was able to take a walkabout and see some of the sites that I will undoubtedly see again in the next few days, as I travel there for school.
Anyway, down to the good stuff.
The first day I took a ride through some of the trails at the Horsetooth Reservoir, which was like my introduction to mountain biking west of the Allegheny Plateau. The reservoir provided a much-needed warm-up for the days to come, which were like discovering another planet.
So, as the intro to this was long and monotonous, I'll let the following pictures speak for themselves of the trip. I'll summarize by saying that the combination of mountain biking in Moab and camping in Arches National Park was one of the more incredible things I've ever experienced.
Look for more posts from the Windy City this week as we tour some architectural wonders...
Making things worse, I went out and saw the writing on the wall (Red Bull/Vodkas - $2.50) a few days before leaving for Moab, Utah for break and came back to my apartment and released some angst on a concrete wall, which I had assumed was just another of the 3" thick partitions in our humble dwelling.
Things weren't looking good the next morning when I couldn't move my hand or grip a pencil in class, let alone write. I decided I was going to avoid the doctor's office and apply some TLC in the form of frozen bags of veggies. It looked liked things were going to pan out OK, and then I called Mike.
Somewhere the dates of both of our Spring Breaks had become lost in translation, and the night before I left we were on the phone and realized they did not actually overlap. Luckily, as I breathed into a paper bag and tried to get my head around how this had happened, Mike saved the day by deciding to take an extra week off from school to make the trip happen.
So I crammed as much of my cycling junk into a bike travel box, lent to me by my friend Sparky, whose real name I finally learned by reading it in the 'IF FOUND' sticker on the side, and hit the road for Pittsburgh, where I would catch the never-ending train to the west.
During a 6 hour layover in Chicago, I was able to take a walkabout and see some of the sites that I will undoubtedly see again in the next few days, as I travel there for school.
Anyway, down to the good stuff.
The first day I took a ride through some of the trails at the Horsetooth Reservoir, which was like my introduction to mountain biking west of the Allegheny Plateau. The reservoir provided a much-needed warm-up for the days to come, which were like discovering another planet.
So, as the intro to this was long and monotonous, I'll let the following pictures speak for themselves of the trip. I'll summarize by saying that the combination of mountain biking in Moab and camping in Arches National Park was one of the more incredible things I've ever experienced.
Look for more posts from the Windy City this week as we tour some architectural wonders...
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