We had a blast with A Hawk and a Hacksaw at their home in southern Albuquerque. Check out the webisode when it drops for all the music. Beautiful sounds!
Now, we introduce our new cyclist:
Hi ya'll. It's Alex checking in for my first ever Bandcycle blog post, an event far more meaningful to me than any of you. Having completed my first week I wanted to start this post off in a fairly conceited manner and give a little background into how I ended up on this whirlwind adventure.
Honestly it's not really much of a story. Dan called me on a Sunday and by Tuesday I was in Wichita, tuning up a new, to me, bicycle, and silently patting myself on the back for leading such a spontaneous and adventurous life.
Such is my preoccupation with the perceived level of fun and excitement in my life I have developed a litmus test called "The twelve-year-old self test" - an attempt to objectively gauge how much fun I'm having. Very simply, I imagine my twelve-year-old self time traveling and checking in on me. I try to imagine what parts of my life would elicit "rads" or "cools" and which parts would seem boring and mundane to this time traveling Alex of yore. When faced with an opportunity or decision such as dropping everything I'm doing and heading out on the road to ride bikes with my friends I find this test a powerful counter force to the more responsible, "How are you going to pay rent next month?" type questions brought up by present day Alex.
I figure I can deal with next month when it gets here. Anyway the reason I bring all this up is to say that riding bikes and living out of a van has been a dream of mine since I was a youth, and to finally get the chance to take a trip like this is a dream come true in every sense of the phrase (so eat your hearts out cubicle dwellers!). Now onto the ride report!
Waking up we thought we had an easy and straightforward 60 miles from Santa Fe to Albuquerque. This was not the case. After an easy trip out of town we turned off into an off road vehicle park - basically a large expanse of nothing with doubletrack jeep paths winding throughout. Our plan was to take a road that appeared to parallel the main highway connecting the two cities. We counted on some dirt or gravel roads, but nothing we couldn't handle. Wrong again. The road (and I use this term in its broadest sense) was a boulder strewn nightmare. With dozens of steep chutes populated with a wide variety of different size, but always loose, rocks.
We managed to crawl down into the valley below with fistfuls of brake and more than a little blind faith only to find the road dead end into a field. Luckily, New Mexico is one of the few states that allows cycling on interstates (a fact that I found astounding every time we passed an exit or entrance ramp) so we simply hopped on I-25 and headed south into Albuquerque. All in all a good day, even with a few bone jarring hours.
Like Louis L'Amour said, "Adventure ain't nothin' but a romantic name for trouble".
Love,
Alex
Pop Culture Reference for Google: Peyton and Eli Manning. Man Tanning.
Distance Biked: 65 miles
Distance Biked to Date: 2266 miles
Hey Guys (and especially Dan