Arches to Zion

Hey! It looks like we've let it get to be a long time between posts - oops! Here we go...

On July 18th we went into Salt Lake City with Erica to do some sightseeing and catch the shuttle to Moab from the airport. Salt Lake City is quite... Mormon. Most people dress conservatively, many of the men wearing white dress shirts and dark pants, and it's very clean. Visiting the Mormon temples is a main attraction, as is the new shopping development built for the Olympics. Interesting to visit, but just another city. It would probably get really boring really quickly.



Moab, however, is AWESOME. It's a hippie-ish, artsy little town surrounded by red rock desert. We stayed with a really cool couchsurfer and through him got so meet some other cool people. His ex-roommate Sarah even let us borrow her car for three days! Us being us, we of course managed to get a flat tire within the first ten minutes... bringing out total to 26 bicycle tire flats and 1 car flat. Yay, us!



Having a car in Moab was a huge bonus, because the parks are pretty spread out and designed for drivers, not hikers. There would have been a lot of hot, dusty, frustrating hitchhiking going on if we hadn't had a car.

Now, how to describe the parks??? I think I'll just give a brief description and then post some pictures to do the rest of the talking.

Arches National Park, just 5 miles north of Moab, is known for it's... wait for it... arches.


Canyonlands National Park is split by the Colorado and Green River canyons so you can access it from three sides but can't cross through the middle of it. The "Island in the Sky" area is a small web-like maze of mesa standing up above all of the surrounding canyons.



The "Needles" park of Canyonlands is south of Island in the Sky and full of red hoodoos capped with white, mushroom-shaped sandstone.



Bryce Canyon is southwest of Moab and is not so much a "canyon" as it is a series of horseshoe-shaped bowls full of jagged hoodoos. The park sits up on an 8,000- to 9,000-foot mesa and you can hike from various points down through and among the hoodoos.






Zion National Park (even farther southwest) is a deep canyon carved out by the little Virgin River between incredibly high sheer cliffs of Navajo sandstone. Sorry, we don't have any pictures of Bryce or Zion uploaded yet, but when we do we'll post them here.





Ever since we left Moab we've been hitchhiking to get where to want to go. It's been working out quite well for us! It's usually pretty easy to get a ride, since there isn't any public transportation around here and quite a few people do it. Also, we've met a whole bunch of cool people along the way who've told us a lot of very interesting things about the area. One time, a nice guy named Eric actually drove 50 miles past his destination so that he could drop us off at Bryce Canyon. We managed to convince him to come into the park with us, and we had a great time hiking together and chatting. These are the kind of experiences that make hitchhiking so much more worthwhile and interesting than just taking a regular, boring old bus! =P

We've been in Zion for three nights already now, and will be heading out again tomorrow. Our plan is to hitchhike down to the Grand Canyon, then to Las Vegas where we have a place to stay right on the strip with another couchsurfer. Should be fun! We're going to take advantage of all the free/cheap stuff provided for the gamblers without gambling. Well, maybe a few nickel slots so that they'll bring us some of those Long Island iced teas =P

We're trying to figure out if we'll be able to hike down from the north rim of the Grand Canyon and then back up the south rim, rather than hitching all the way around the outside... hmm... need more info. That would be pretty cool, though.

That's it for now! Hope everybody's doing well!

Finishing Photos

Here are our obligatory "Conquering Heros" photos that we took at our final destination in Ogden, Utah.

Mission #1 Accomplished

So, we're in Utah! Sweaty, exhausted, and cured like jerky from smoke coming off the scrub fires, but here nevertheless!

Our bike ride into Utah was pretty rough. That area is known for it's high winds and dust storms, and although we were lucky to not run into any dust storms there was a strong headwind the whole hilly 90km. Add to that the smoke and smell of charred cattle blowing at us from the hills and you might be able to justify our shoddy appearance afterwards =P

We were so exhausted when we finally arrived in Snowville, 7 miles across the state line into Utah, that we could barely talk. We even broke down and stayed in a motel room (Alana's dad gave us credit for 3 to 5 nights in a motel room as a gift - best gift ever!!!)

We made the best of our time at the motel. I calculated that I slept for about 13 hours before we checked out the next day. We decided that we didn't have the legs left on us to do the 70miles to Erica's house in one day, so we decided to split it into two days and rather than checking out early we would wait out the heat in Snowville then cycle to Tremonton in the evening. Nice.

A couple of words about road quality in Utah: they suck. Plus, miles seem to be longer here than in other states. Seriously. It's not heat stroke.

From Snowville we climbed to around 5,000 or 5,500 ft and then got to "enjoy" 10km of downhill into Tremonton. Only on Utah-quality roads would we wish that we were going uphill again instead of downhill!

In Tremonton we found a luxury campsite for ourselves in the parking lot behind the Sinclair gas station between some old cars. There was actually a campsite in town, but trust us when we say that our gas station suite was in way better condition.

Then, on Saturday morning we biked to Ogden! We got to Erica's place right at noon and have been overstaying our welcome ever since. =P It's been wonderful to relax for a bit, meet new people and eat real food.

Total cycling distance: 1688km. Total number of flat tires: 24 (with one flat caused by four separate punctures). Total amount of sunscreen used: 746ml (probably not enough, if compared to the amount of peeling skin).

We're using our time here to make plans for stage 2. It's harder than we had expected to get around southern Utah without a car. There's practically no public transportation, so we're pretty much just going to head down to Moab to see what we can work out from down there.

Wish us luck!

The many disasters that are Alana!

Near Glenns Ferry, Idaho



Alana's Eye patch


So after our luxury night in Mountain Home Idaho, we were feeling pretty good and squeaky clean. It did not last long. We were heading up a small hill, just outside of a town called Glenns Ferry when my knee went all strange and then I could not move it, I could not stand on it and ouch it hurt like crazy. We turned around and coasted down the hill to the medical clinic in Glenns Ferry. By the time we got there, I was fine. I can't even hurt myself properly! At that point it was too hot to keep going, so we spent the hottest part of the day under a tree in front of the medical clinic enjoying the shade, an old lady's dirty jokes and some yummy diner sandwiches. As the weather cooled down we were able to start going again and found a patch of grass behind a gas station in Bliss, Idaho. The next day, just as we had passed Twin Falls, the air quality turned to complete crap and I started to have alot of breathing problems. It was not a full on asthma attack, but I knew that one was coming. 40 kms later we pulled into some small no name place near Hazelton where there was meant to be a campground, but there was not. As we were looking around for a place to camp (and I was still having an asthma attack), a lady pulled over to help us out. She informed me that there was a really nice campsite "just past the gas station, at the top of the big hill on the left." She also let me know that her son and three grandchildren were staying there and told me a bit about her family. Robyn and I headed up the big hill...that was not really a big hill (in the heat of the day) and saw nothing. By this time we just needed to stop riding and find a place to settle for the night. We stopped at the nearest house and asked if there was a campsite around, they informed us that there was no campsite anywhere around this area, so we asked to sleep in their backyard. Later, I was at the gas station and I was talking to an employee, I was telling her how some lady had told me that her son and grandchildren were staying in a campsite that we never found. The lady at the gas station laughed...she was like, "I see that you have met Mandy, she is convinced that she has a son and grand kids, sometimes she will introduce them to you, she comes in here all the time and buys them drinks and candy, but really she does not even have a son". She was even able to describe the lady's car and her looks. She informed me that they know she was bound to cause some trouble sooner or later. Crazyness! So we ended up camping at the home of a Mexican family with two crazy Chihuahuas, one named PeeWee who loved to bark at us. Once again we seem to have entered a state where campsite are really hard to find...Bonus points to Oregon for making like so much easier (although more expensive). The next day we made an amazing discovery...do not eat chips for breakfast, ice cream and fries for a snack and then chips and salsa for lunch...it does not make you stomach very happy. Then to end our day of healthy eating we had some Kraft dinner!!!!!! Damn gas station food. We figured that you know you have been on the road too long when you see a gas station and think cool let's stock up for dinner! That afternoon we made it to a rest stop in the middle of nowhere. There was not campsites for miles and we had to be as close as possible to make the crossing into Utah easier. We had a pretty inspirational afternoon people watching at the rest stop, that ended with two conclusions: 1) (talking about the thigh) Robyn: "If I was going to eat a fat person, that would be the part I would eat, In fact I kinda WANT to eat her thigh!" and 2)We are going to go on a tour of Brigham Young Mormon University in our bathing suits with our bike rashed butts hanging out, drinking beer and playing cards. That night we ended up sleeping behind the men's bathroom, seriously the best place to crash at this reat stop. I woke up in the morning with the sorest eye. I quickly took out my contact, but still I was not able to see or really open my eye and it felt like it was really swollen. After pouring bottled water and contact lens solution, we covered it up with a nomad scarf and continued packing the trailers. When we were getting ready to leave, my eye was still not better so we had to bandage it up and go. Hmmmmmmm, all I know is that sometimes I think that my body is trying to tell me..."Exercise......what???? You are a Menges, sit at home and watch TV, maybe go shopping or out to dinner, but whatever you don DON'T EXERCISE!" To make matters more Alana-ish we also had to patch the inside of my tire since some metal wire type things started sticking out and my sleeping bag is constantly wet and damp from some unknown source. Good thing Robyn really wanted to make it to Utah cause I certainly was not going to make it easy. Oh yeah, now all is well, knee, eye and breathing.

What's next?

Over the past little while, we've realized that we're making much better progress that we had anticipated. Also, we've decided to leave the bikes in Ogden (just north of Salt Lake City) because of the heat and logistics of keeping the bikes safe while hiking and transporting them back north on a vehicle. So, that means that we're well ahead of schedule!

The biking part of our trip really has been fabulous. We've seen some gorgeous scenery and it's a neat feeling to have seen the progression of the landscape all the way from the Pacific Northwest to this desert landscape. There's such a feeling of freedom, being able to choose where to go each day, and such a feeling of accomplishment to have done it all under our very own power.

Since we'll probably be arriving in Ogden this coming weekend (if we can dawdle enough until Erica gets home), our current plan is to spend some time with Erica and then head down to Moab for a couple of weeks of hiking, then try to get to some other parks -Bryce Canyon and Zion Nat'l park. Ray will be flying into Salt Lake City early on August 12th, and his current instructions are to meet us in Zion. This plan changes daily, of course, as we are constantly trying to pack as many adventures into this trip as possible. Then, with the car he's renting, we'll drive around to see some more sights (maybe the Grand Canyon??) and then north to the Bonneville Salt Flats to watch the car races for a few days.

It's so nice to have more time than we actually need because we don't have to worry about being on time, or about keeping to a schedule. It's a much freer way to travel - and how often can you take a 2 month break where you just don't have to stress about anything and can enjoy what you're doing in the moment.

There's just so much to do down there, the world is so exciting!

Mountain Home Hospitality

We're in Mountain Home tonight, staying with a life-saving guy named Steve. We biked here this morning from Boise and spent the hot hours enjoying the air-conditioned luxury of McDonald's, Wendy's, and Walmart, not worrying about finding a campsite for the night since there were three in town. Once we started looking for a place for the night, however, we found that we couldn't stay at any of them (for various reasons).



We were a bit stuck, so we went back to the Walmart where we had been talking to some very friendly people to see if they had any suggestions of government land, etc, where we could stay for the night. Steve thought about it for a little bit, then started to draw a map. His coworker said, "Where are you sending them?", and it turned out that the map was to Steve's house, where he has pampered us with every luxury that two tired bikers could want (chocolate mint ice cream, couch with fan, bed, showers, laundry, internet, two cute dogs, and good conversation) plus several things that we don't know what to do with (hair dryer, epsom salts).



He's an amazing person (former cop and member of the Air Force) and it's very funny that he seems concerned that we trust him and keeps warning us to not trust strangers. Teehee. He's got kids our age and I bet he's glad they're not wandering like we are.



Thanks Steve, and don't worry - we'll pay it forward.

into Idaho

Camping under the stars behind a Boise Social Housing complex....NICE!!!!!



Party for Alana's front wheel in Caldwell, Idaho...it made it to Idaho and over 1000 kms without a flat and is still going strong!



Party for Alana's front wheel in Caldwell, Idaho



Yummy salad that we made for the party...mmmm feta cheese and garlic!


From Baker City we had an awesome day riding downhill all the way to Huntington - Catfish capital of Oregon! =P The campsite beside the Snake River was really nice, but kind of buggy and it was so hot that we couldn't even walk from our site to the lake. We just kept soaking ourselves in a nearby sprinkler whenever it got unbearable (until the inmate work crew turned them off, that is).

So when we got there, we picked out the best site with the most shade, close to the bathrooms etc and then Mr. "BlingBling" with his huge pickup with the shiny hot motorcycle with American flags hanging off the side mirrors, towing a massive RV pulled right into our site, right where we were sitting and had our stuff spread out and basically forced it away from us. Grrrr!!!! The rest of the campground was practically empty, too... karma will get him.

The next day we biked from there to Ontario, just a few miles away from the Idaho border. We stopped to pass the heat of the day under a tree in front of the library, and planned to keep biking that evening when it cooled off. While we waited it out, a guy who rode around town and the highway collecting bottles to return stopped to chat. He was sweet but kind of drunk. He really wanted to help us out, and ended up biking around town to collect tourist maps and information for us about Idaho so in the end he really did help!

That evening we arrived at about 8pm at an RV park outside of Caldwell, Idaho, and there was a sign on the door saying to just pick a camp spot and pay in the morning when the manager got back. We were pretty sure that we would leave before the manager got there in the morning, so we planned to just leave the $10 in an envelope with a note. Well, at 1am the hidden underground sprinkler system came on and shot right into the tent through both mesh doors and soaked us and all of our gear. It sucked big time. We ended up having to move the tent onto the sharp crumbly concrete parking spot and sleep there, wet, for the rest of the night. We were PO'd. Anyway, since we left at 6am anyway we didn't feel like paying for that crappy night so we left a note explaining that we'd been there but giving them some constructive criticism on how to improve their level of customer satisfaction. Later that morning, as I was fixing a flat while Alana waited a few hundred metres in front of me, a crazed man in blue overalls pulled over onto the shoulder beside her and demanded that she pay. Alana, who was in the middle of having an asthma attack and couldn't even respond to him, ended up having to just hand over the money because he was kind of creepy and she needed him to go away immediately. Essentially, she paid him to go away, not for the campsite.

We only made it to Caldwell that morning (about 19km) because we were burnt out from lack of sleep, too many days in the heat, and "biker rashes". So we decided to stay in Caldwell for a rest and that was a good decision - except that for some reason we keep ending up in the strangest time-warp places during our rest days (Alana says, "think 'Napoleon Dynamite' "). We had an eating and "Man vs Wild" marathon ( TV show about this guy who parachutes into really intense wilderness situations and finds his way out - highly recommended, crazy guy) for two whole days! It awesome and air conditioned. Yippee!!

From Caldwell, we had another short ride to Boise, where we had to find a bike shop to get some supplies. We had gone through all of our inner tube patches, Alana needed new gloves, and I needed to resolve the flat tire situation. I got some good new tires and, for good measure, some "slime tubes". I've never seen slime tubes in Canada before... basically they're just inner tubes filled with this goo stuff that moves around and plugs punctures as they happen - technically eliminating the need to patch them externally. I know it sounds gimicky and amateurish and polluting, but they are actually supposed to do a decent job. And let's face it! I'm desperate! Flat #17 was the last straw.... >=O

So, there was nowhere to stay in Boise. No campsites, nada, and it was already the middle of the day and too hot to depart for the next city which was 50 miles away. We went to the library to look for places to stay using the couch surfing website and ended up running into a cyclist named Bryan. He was a really interesting person who had done a lot of cycle touring and understood the situation that we were in and wanted to help us out. He ended up finding us a place on the grass behind a social housing complex where the friendly people let us camp. He also went out of his way to bring us Gatorade and library books with good detailed maps of the area. Thanks, Bryan! (by the way, we returned the books to the library because Alana's little fists could not bang on the door loudly enough to wake you up... just in case you didn't get our note =P )


Contrary to what we heard about Idaho before coming here, it's a great place. We've met lots of nice people (lots of kooks too, though), the roads are in decent condition and we haven't met a "goat head" yet. Bikers here are paranoid about goat heads... a quick Wikipedia search explains that:

The nutlets or "seeds" are hard and bear two sharp spines, 10 mm long and 4–6 mm broad point-to-point. These nutlets strikingly resemble goats' or bulls' heads; the "horns" are sharp enough to puncture bicycle tires and to cause considerable pain to bare feet.

Here's to a goat head-free Idaho! =P

It's HOT!!!! Front page of an Idaho Paper!!!!


Sorry,for some reason this computer won't let me type in the title field,so no title for this post.

Erica you are amazing!!!!

Erica is my friend in Ogden Utah,our final destination(on bikes at least), and she sent me an email today that I felt I needed to share with the world (or at least the world that is reading our blog). Although Robyn are both excessively stubborn Tauruses, it is nice to know that we have an out if it is really needed! Good people,YEAH!

Here is the email:

Be careful in this heat ... it's dangerous. Also, you guys are within rescue distance. If you need me to, I can drive out and pick you up. The bikes might be a bit of a challenge, but I'm sure we could make something work.

Apparently southern Utah is experiencing record heat ...

- Erica

Yeah, also Idaho and the entire west is experiencing a heat wave!!!! HOT,HOT,HOT! So the plan is to drink lots,bike early and stay in the shade and sleep and eat the rest of the day...life is not really all that bad.

Thanks again Erica and see you soon, although hopefully in Ogden and not stranded on the side of the I-84 somewhere :-P

Change in Plans

So Randy and his crew are not going to be ready to race in on the salt flats this August...they have had to postpone until October. We are going to spend a couple of extra days in Moab, before meeting Randy in Wendover to check out the current races for a couple of days. Then we will cheer him on from Vancouver (and somewhere on the Amazon River for Robyn)in October.

Photos will have to wait,I cannot plug the camera into these computers.

Spud on Wheels Adventure Tour

Robyn Painting her BOB Trailer, Baker City, OR



The custon BOB trailes, Baker City, OR



Leaving camp with the spiffy new trailers, Baker City, OR



On the way to Farewell Bend, OR



Okay, so Leanna (who for some reason that I can't remember calls me "Spud") has just emailed me about the "Spud on Wheels Adventure Tour", as she calls it. Too funny! Just had to throw that in there.

Okay... 9 min left of library time... gotta make this quick...

In Baker City, we took a day off to paint the trailers. It was fun, we doodled on them and painted some quotes on them. We're now the "Custom BOB Girls", according to Mikey from Tennessee, who pulled in that evening. Mikey's riding his bike from Florida to Seattle, where he'll catch a boat up to Alaska. Go Mikey! What a funny guy... he kept going off on these hilarious monologues that had us in stitches. For example, first things when I met him, he goes "Where you going to? DON'T go to Idaho! I just came through Idaho, and it was hell. I'm never going back - in fact, I'm going to forget that Idaho even exists! You wanna know what Idaho's like? Go ride straight up that mountain, then full speed into the guardrail and do a back flip over it. THAT'S what Idaho is like!".

Okay, 4 minutes left left....

After Baker City we biked for a few more days and are not in Caldwell, Idaho. And it's frickin' hot! Tuesday and Wednesday got up to around 102 degrees Fahrenheit, and the weekend is supposed to be up around 105. Whew! You can tell it's getting hotter as the smell of the roadkill gets stronger.

Eeeek, time's up! Will write more later!

Blue Mountains

Our "lion lunch" outside of Baker City, OR in the tall grass, looking back at the bikes on the freeway shoulder.



Great shadows riding into Baker City, OR



Yummy, Yummy hippy lunch in Pendleton, OR



Robyn taking a photo of me taking a photo, going up Blue Mtn, OR



Blue Mtn, OR



Blue Mtn, OR



Blue Mtn, OR


Whew, where to begin???

I think the last time we wrote we were in Pendleton, about to cross the Blue Mountains to La Grande. The locals tried their hardest to freak us out about how hard it was going to be, but it turned out to be one of our best days of biking so far. It's so much more gratifying to pedal up a mountain and down the other side than it is to drop 100m, gain 110m, drop 100m, gain 110m, etc so that eventually you've gained a total of a few metres in a day while climbing all day in the sun. Grrr!!! Anyhow, back to Blue Mountain - yeah, it was great! This is park of the Oregon Trail wagon train route, so there were some historical markers and whatnot as we got up to Deadman's pass and then down into La Grande. La Grande is up on a bit of a plateau so it's cooler than Pendleton, which was really appreciated.

We found a little bike shop in La Grande where I bought some new gloves to replace the one's I'd lost in Snoqualmie and the nice mechanic straightened out the hanger on my bike. Then we camped at an RV site where they had apparently been experiencing some vandalism and there were angry signs in the bathroom saying things like, "There is no excuse for sticking plungers to the walls!" teeheehee... couldn't help but find that funny...

The ride from La Grande to Baker city wasn't very long - 45 miles or so - but it was hot, and we had several flat tires to deal with. Have I mentioned that we've been plagued by flat tires? I mean, of course flat tires are expected on a bike trip, but we've had 16 so far. SIXTEEN!!!!! It's getting kind of ridiculous. They're not pinch flats either, they're all from road shrapnel and thorns. Doesn't help that my bike tires appear to be shredding apart and have strings of rubber hanging off them and they're full of holes (yes, the actual tires, not just the inner tubes). I think the heat is getting to them. Will try to replace them in Boise, I think.

Anyhow, back the the original point of that last paragraph... I got another flat about 10 miles out of Baker City. We stopped to fix it on the side of the road and it took a little while because we hadn't been able to find the hole in the last flat that we'd fixed (about 20min prior!!) because of the wind and noise of the highway, so we had to patch that same tube and put it back in. Blah blah blah, anyway by the time Alana was pumping it back up a state trooper had pulled in behind us, saying "loads of people been calling in about two young ladies stranded on the side of the interstate with their babies". What the heck??? Just because we're female, people think that we have nothing better to pull behind our bikes than babies?? That's nuts. Besides, what terrible parents that would make us; stuffing kids into yellow rubber bags and then dragging them behind us along the interstate in 80 degree heat! Hehe. Good thing child services didn't show up before the trooper did.

Okay, this is getting a little long - I'm going to start a separate post.