Figure 8 On A Bike

  * Day 1: Drop off, leave Lordsburg at 6:30. Excited and sleepy and a little car sick. Bumpy. Met a talkative yo-yoer. Cool day, I guess it snowed a teeny bit last night. Glorius weather for us as we're dropped off at Crazy Cook , the southern terminus. Mostly flat around Big Hatchet Mountain. Ocotillos in bloom, fiery red torches scattered in the creosote. Snagged some shade from big junipers and saw one big green tree. A few lizards, and Susan saw a bright yellow bird (someone said a Warbler). Maybe 20 people started today. Camped at the water cache after 14 miles. Good first day. Waiting for the shuttle early in the morning Crazy Cook Monument, southern terminus Fruiting cholla plant Susan admires a blooming ocotillo At the first water cache *Day 2 : Hard. Nauseaus overnight and woke up feeling bad. Nervous about my health. Susan is a saint, put up with me and did everything in the morning. Seriously considered taking the shuttle back to Lordsburg. We didn't start walking...

It's been a minute.

View from the train

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

After struggling to meet our winter sports ambitions in Romania, Susan and I were wishing for a few last days of decent skiing in Bansko, one of the largest ski resorts in Bulgaria. We hauled our bags up out of the cave apartment into the bright sunshine, and despite the mid-morning warmth in Sofia the slopes of Vitosha mountain to the south still shone white with snow. We remained hopeful that the online reports of a decent snowpack up high would bear out and that, even without any powder, some nice, consistent pistes would hold on against the heat. Our bus to Bansko (there is a train but true to stereotypes the Bulgarian train takes longer than the bus) didn't leave until about lunchtime, so despite Susan's antsy-ness I dawdled in the apartment and we left about 10 minutes later than intended. This wouldn't have mattered much, except that finding the bus that goes to Bansko turned out to be a bit of a scavenger hunt. First, we'd asked our taxi driver to drop us off...