Figure 8 On A Bike

It's time for us to crash someone else's travel plans: Susan's mom, dad, sister, and our two nieces were in Colorado for a week, so we got to join for their last 3 days around Twin Lakes and Leadville . 3 days of walking less than 2 miles a day, hanging out and recovering around the spacious "cabin" up on the hill above Twin Lakes, and eating as much food as we can. Even better, they brought a bag that had new shoes for us, and we could send a few extraneous items (like the Microspikes, no longer needed for the mostly-thawed mountains) back home. The convenience! Definitely worth it for cramming into the trunk of the Forester and trying not to bang our heads along bumpy dirt roads; who knew the Forester was a 7 passenger vehicle? 

* Day 0:  Get to Albuquerque . Despite the airports' best efforts, sitting on the tarmac 30 extra minutes in Omaha and an hour in Denver. I guess in Denver they had to tape the plane back together. And then we spent 20 extra turbulent minutes circling Albuquerque. I don't think I can take another plane this year. After the motion sickness wore off we enjoyed a birria quesadilla down the street from the Super 8 in Bernalillo . Excited to hike tomorrow... Less so for the last bus ride. Sandia Peak is pretty and there's even an aerial tram to the top. Albuquerque has a light rail all the way to Santa Fe. Are we actually in Europe? * Day 1: 5:30 alarm to catch our Lyft to the bus stop and then catch our bus to Cuba . I'm grateful I tried the hydroxyzine because I managed to catch a little more sleep on the bus and didn't even get motion sick. It's raining lightly, and is supposed to rain most of the day. Walk to the Cuban Cafe for French toast, eggs, bacon, and COF...

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...

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 this point in the trip we were feeling a little discouraged, a little gray, a little tired of packing, and a little ready to relax. We couldn't quite start this second round in Brașov relaxing; however, as we had to check out of the hotel and check into the Airbnb where we had left our stuff. Our host wasn't getting back to us, so when we checked out of our hotel, we used the codes from the last time to get into the complex. We snatched some shoes from our pile of stuff in the laundry room and left our mountaineering gear in the pile. Unburdened, we headed out for another day of sightseeing in Brașov. We checked out some places we hadn't seen during our first stay in Brașov. Like Rope street which claims to be Europe's narrowest alley. We enjoyed the street art and graffiti before heading towards Biserica Ortodoxa Sfântul Nicolae and the First Roman School. It was steadily raining and we were looking forward to hiding inside the museum. Alas, when we arrived...

Not a pair of cities I ever thought I'd link together in my life. But here we were in Bishkek , the capital of Kyrgyzstan, with a day for touristy activities before making our way back west to Europe, flying into the Romanian capital of Bucharest. The night we arrived in Bishkek, preparing dinner was a bit awkward since the woman who seemed to run the small set of basement rooms (and also might have been living out of a storage closet) stood guard by the electrical kettle and microwave all evening, but after some gesturing and random bits of Russian she happily heated some water for our ramen, let us pop our doner meat into the micro, and grabbed us some dishes and utensils to eat with. As is inevitable, our day in Bishkek started with a hunt for a cafe. Of course, our hunt started far too early (at maybe 9:30 AM?) and it took a little searching to find an open one. Unlike Almaty, Bishkek does not have two quaint coffee shops lining each side of every downtown city block, but a...

Frozen Barskoon Falls high over the valley From Almaty in Kazakhstan we took a bus to Kyrgyzstan as we had read about a very cool ice climbing area there. The bus meandered slowly west to the border with Kyrgyzstan. Once there we had to get all of our stuff off the bus, waddle to the Kazakh border desk, stand in the wrong line, and waddle to another line. Once in the correct line, I was met with a border agent’s halting English and I didn’t recognize the name of Almaty’s airport so I got a few more questions, but eventually he allowed me to leave Kazakhstan. Ben benefited from my hard work and made it through with no questions.

Erzurum had been a decent first stop for our winter tour, but Susan and I were both excited to go see the higher, colder, and hopefully snowier mountains of central Asia. But since we're Americans, and any land route from Erzurum to that part of the world has to pass through Russia or Iran, it was back west to Ankara first, before catching a long flight east, to Almaty in Kazakhstan. Besides, that gave us time to do a little sightseeing that we'd passed up during our previous stopover there. Walking through central Ankara

After almost 7 weeks (and minus one week in Istanbul), Susan and I finally bid farewell to the southwest corner of Türkiye and the Mediterranean Sea. We looked forward to starting a new stage of our trip after making a trove of good memories (fun climbing and international travel time with friends) and a few less-good memories (Susan in the hospital); but it was almost time to put our new, giant, heavy bags to use and find some Winter! One stop first, though - Cappadocia. Erciyes Dağı towers on the horizon of Cappadocia

It was time for us to say goodbye to Peak GuestHouse. We ended up being there for a month! Which was maybe a little too long to stay in a guesthouse. We said goodbye to Aysel and took one last transfer with Ocan to drop off Hong-Yen at the airport. After dropping Hong-Yen off, Ocan pulls into a roundabout to leave the airport area and immediately gets hit by a motorcyclist. This occured across the street from the police station so first responders got to the man quick. The motorcyclist left in an ambulance and we were directed to the police station. Ben and I stayed out of the way while Ocan went in and out of the police station with various papers from the van. Finally, he was released and he drops us off at the bus station. Our vague feelings of unsafety while driving in Türkiye were justified. We bought our bus tickets for Çıralı , a sea side beach town with climbing access. The bus ride was a beautiful ride down the coast. The bus dropped us off on the side of the highwa...

Hello dear Figure 8 Readers! My name is Hong-Yen, and I’ll be this week’s guest blogger. Saturday, Nov 25 Daily journal entry - No sleeping in. Breakfast and second coffee. Shuttle to the airport. What should have been a short flight turned into a long day of delays due to weather. We finally get to the guesthouse at 9PM after a long and somewhat perilous drive in the storm.   Our last second coffee at the airport

Maria and I got dropped off at the Antalya airport together for our flight to Istanbul . Maria had a much earlier flight than me so she was allowed to go through security and I got to wait between security one and security two of the airport. It is more awkward than I realized trying to hang out in public places and not sit. I spent some time pacing. I spent some time reading leaning against a wall - oops, leaning is also NOT great for my back. Back to standing straight and reading. But then a nice family waved me to their seats when they left them and I didn't know how to turn that down politely so I took a seat for a while and then creakily stood up after I was sure they were gone. In the end, I paid for some curly fries from Arby's so I could stand at their high table to eat and read. Eventually I was able to go through second security and wait at the gate. Where I did some floor stretches. On the flight I sat for take off and landing and for the ten minutes we hi...

London Views London Bridge We woke up on the ferry to Liverpool, well technically Birkenhead . Groggy, but stubbornly, we did not give into the on board coffee not wanting to give them any more of our money. At the "NOT border" border control office we had to reassemble our bikes. The officer conducting document checks (they never bothered checking ours) told us we should rethink our plans and hop on a train as everything was flooded. I asked him for an online resource we could use to check on closed roads, "we don't have anything like that, but if you get into trouble just hop on a train". "Sure thing boss". We rode away with mild concern over our future.

Looking much less lost this time around, we walked on down to the Liverpool industrial estate with Cycal bike repair shop, eager to see Callum's work cleaning up the bikes. And man did they shine! Ignoring the dings, knicks, scrapes, scratches, bits of rust, Susan's beleaguered front fork... well, OK, maybe they didn't look *new*, but in our eyes they were beautiful. Sadly, Callum couldn't finagle a new fork situation in time for us, but thankfully no other repairs were major; a new cassette for Susan, and for the first time in a couple months my tires matched (since my front tire had also developed a bulge and wasn't long for this world, he replaced them both). I think the mech said that every single bolt on Susan's bike needed tightening. Shiny, sparkly, smooth-riding bikes! Thanks, Callum!

With some things squared away in Liverpool , we were ready to take a vacation from our vacation and spend about a week in Kraków , Poland, for the Unsound Music Festival. Poland Unsound is a music festival that "focuses on a broad swath of contemporary music — emerging, experimental, and leftfield — whose sweep doesn't follow typical genre constraints". Basically a bunch of weird music that I like to listen to and Susan finds herself enjoying a surprising amount of the time. I'd wanted to attend Unsound for years, ever since I read about an event there where Burial performed underground in some salt mines (more on the salt mines later), so I was super excited for this part of the trip to finally be happening :). Our RyanAir flight left fairly early in the morning, so at about 4 AM we groggily shouldered our packs and stumbled groggily (and as quietly as we could) out of our hosts' home to start the ~40 minute walk to John Lennon International Airport, doing our ...

We woke up to a light frost on the tent before sunrise. It was just warm enough with our equipment but we were looking forward to sleeping indoors and then flying south (since Scotland is known for being so warm in the fall :P). We packed up the tent wet and rolled to the bus station in Åndalsnes to catch the bus to Molde. This bus apparently does double duty as a school bus as there were a lot of school children who hopped on. This was another one of those moments where it hit me that I am not just on a summer vacation and I would not be returning to the classroom this fall. When we arrived in Molde we headed straight to a cafe to kill some time and enjoy our last cafe in Norway (and feed our caffeine addiction). We really just did a cafe tour of Norway. We don't know much about how Norwegians dine, but we are fairly familiar with their bakery items! We rolled our bikes towards home for the night. We knew the way as we were returning to the same KOA style RV park/cabi...

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