Getting Here

I'm not sure how I want to blog from now on. Sometimes I'm tempted to take pictures of things and post them to the blog with small comments. But if I did that with everything blog-worthy I'd be on my "smart" (I like to call it "stupid") phone this entire trip. But on the other hand, if I leave the blogging to longer posts and save them up, I'll get behind, not to mention it takes a long time to type on the little gadget. I'll figure it out. For now, I'm at a swanky Mac at our hostel, and I'm going to post some things I wrote in my notebook.

Sept 10th Flight

We just passed over the Grand Canyon. It looks gigantic even from thousands of feet in the air. We can't see the bottom, just the place where the forest ends and drops off. The land looks so dry and ancient, but swirly like the top of a marble cake. Five flight minutes (and hundreds of miles later), out of vast nothingness come squares of perfectly placed grids of human life-Las Vegas.

Getting the bikes broken down last night was more involved than we were hoping it would be. We were hoping to only have to take apart the headset, the front wheel, and the pedals. But in order to squeeze them into the bike boxes we picked up at a local bike shop, we had to take the back wheels off too, and fenders and things. We also shoved our tent, cookware and other suspicious knives and ropes and things into our bike boxes since we knew we would be able to check them.

We had to leave our little butane/propane tank behind for our stove.

Our flight left at 8am I said bye to my mom while my dad stayed to make sure we didn't have trouble with our strange packages (what a gift to have my dad around again). My mom hugged me and said, "You know everything I'm thinking." And I did of course, she loves me, be careful, use the skidding skills you read about in your bicycle safety book if you're faced with either a collision or a cliff - the usual. Then she went over to Lyon with outstretched arms and said, "Okay! Pretend I'm your mother for a second, YOU BE CAREFUL!" So, don't worry Vaunie, he's been told. (Also to Vaunie, I brought my neck-warmer/hat/ear-warmer that you knit me!).

Luckily, at the Alaska Airlines desk in Austin, we got an attendant who had to "research" what to do with our bikes. She only ended up charging us 50 dollars each! We were expecting way more, especially after doing our own research online since they were both oversized and overweight. It should have been like $100 each. Hurray!

Lyon and I had to sit in different places on the plane, but a nice woman sitting next to him said she wouldn't mind if I came and sat between them, so Lyon came and got me. We plugged our earphones into Lyon's ipod and finished listening to the crazy Jack Bauer-esc story that we had started on the road trip down. It was good for some laughs because it was so ridiculous. For example, the bad guys are pondering whether our protagonist (the Gray Man) is dead. They're pretty confident their kill squads from Kazakhstan have eliminated him. But! They get a phone call, and when they answer it's him: "I'm heavily armed, I'm royally pissed and I'm right outside." Baaa hahah! So you can imagine the rest.