Figure 8 On A Bike

The long story short is that I had some medical things I thought were being managed okay, or maybe I was just in a little bit of denial, but hiking 80-ish miles through the desert made me feel like I really ought to see a doctor before spending days at a time in any more wilderness. So a quick bus from Lordsburg brought us to Phoenix , and then a direct flight put us in Omaha that night, where Susan's dad scooped us up and took us home. I enjoyed a great amount of care and support from a great number of family and friends while paying a few visits to the doctor. And... Everything pretty much checked out. Some of my symptoms persisted, but otherwise all the tests cleared without abnormalities. Equipped with some adjustments to medication, a meditation & stress reduction program, and a fancy spreadsheet to help with planning, we decided to get back on the trail in Cuba, NM. 9 days of hiking in the New Mexico mountains will bring us across the Colorado border to Chama. Omaha sky...

Round 2 of our transatlantic travel started with a flight to London , but in a nice change of pace our flight left late on a Tuesday afternoon instead of early in the morning. I got to replace some broken gauges for my ears, and even convinced Susan to run a few more laps at the Norris Hill in an effort to scrounge up training time in the face of a hectic travel schedule. Luckily we had enough time left over to shower before squeezing into a metal tube for hours. With the white Subaru crammed full of us and our dedicated entourage of bags, Susan's dad drove us to Eppley and said a sweet goodbye to Maureen. Uneventful flights took us through Chicago and then to London and none of us managed to get much sleep in the accelerated overnight schedule of the plane. All our bags rolled off the carousel and Susan wrangled the heavy grey backpack while I plopped the bright purple giant suitcase (courtesy of Scott's parents) on the floor and Maureen shouldered her own load. Grateful not...

We woke up at Ben's mom's. She had made us a welcome home basket complete with Nebraska themed t-shirts which meant we had something clean to wear! Which was great as our travel clothes reeked. We enjoyed delicious waffles for breakfast with Greg and Sue and then borrowed their car to head to my parents'. My dad was home with the littles and between hugs and conversation and entertaining children we managed to do a load of laundry, add our luggage to the our hoard in the basement and locate some respectable looking clothes for Easter the next day. On Sunday we made it to Easter service with Ben's mom and Greg and Jacob. We were offered coffee at the entrance, and my raised Catholic self was very confused and said "no, thank you" and thinking 'that's allowed!?!'. We probably could have used the coffee as we were still fighting jet lag. After the service, the family converged at Greg and Sue's and we got to see most of Ben's family. T...

Saying we had "a final leg to Omaha" is a bit of an over-simplification, though. Step 1 - get back to Sofia. We saddled ourselves with all the bags but only had to walk as far as the curb, since we cheated a little and called a cab to take us the half-mile to the office where our transfer would pick us up; my back had been feeling kind of unhappy for a bit so I didn't relish the idea of waddling the whole way. We left Bansko and after another hot few hours in a Bulgarian shuttle van we spilled out back at the Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky too early for check in at our hotel in Sofia . So we had a perfect amount of time to picnic on the benches and feed the pigeons a few crumbs. Selfie of us laden down with all the bags

At about 8 PM on Tuesday 6/20, some 28 hours after leaving Susan’s house on Monday (35 hours including the time change), we finally arrived at Hostel Vanderhjem outside Honningsvåg. Getting dropped off at Eppley Airfield by Susan's dad