And then those Road Angels entered the picture again. Each and every one of the few cars who passed stopped to offer water. Or orange juice. Or candy bars. By the time we reached the campground, we were carrying the same amount of water we had started the day with even after spending the whole day climbing.
“I don’t like this,” John said as he glanced around the campground and at the darkening sky. “A storm is moving in and this campground is totally exposed. If the storm brings high winds, our tent won’t be able to handle it.” He set off to see what he could round up.
As the kids and I waited, the storm drew closer. Lightning flashed and the seconds between the flash and the deafening roar of thunder decreased rapidly. Wind kicked up large clouds of dust from the campground floor.
“I found a place!” John yelled as he raced toward us. “Grab your bike and come with me!” By now the rain had started and was coming down in drops that felt like large rats when they smashed into our arms and legs.
“It’s just up there! We’re almost there!”
Fortunately, John had found a ranger who gave him permission to set up camp in a storage shed belonging to the national parks. It was a very basic structure closed on three sides but open to the elements on the fourth. For us, it was perfect. It was a roof over our heads and we slept well listening to rain pelt the corrugated tin roof all night.
The following morning the four of us crested the pass and plunged down the other side. We felt the air steadily increasing in temperature as we screamed down into the valley. We descended lower and lower and felt heat waves radiating out of the ground – as though the flames of hell were escaping.
By the time we arrived at the campground two hundred feet below sea level, the wind was scalding hot and it felt as though we were standing in front of a huge, blazing fire with tongues of flame worming their way into our throats. We collapsed onto some campground benches and wondered just how we were ever going to get out of this one. Sure, the climb to get into the valley was tough – but the climb out would be even harder. And in this blazing heat, I wasn’t sure we were up to the task.
Death Valley
The following day we stayed put. It was 107 degrees – cool, we had been told. We had intended to cycle to the lowest point in North America, but it was just too hot. We spent the day in the air-conditioned national park visitor’s center and learned more than we thought there was to know about the valley.
That evening we sat around our campsite pondering how we could get out of the valley. Our only hope was to leave early – very early – and get as many miles in as possible before it heated up. John convinced me to pack the tent and sleep under the stars in order to speed up packing the next morning. I hate sleeping under the stars.
As romantic as it sounds, I just don’t sleep when I’m not safely ensconced in my nylon home. The wind blows my hair and tickles my body and I just can’t sleep. Before I crawled into bed, I made sure my hair was braided tightly to keep it pulled back, but it didn’t take long for a few little wisps to escape from their braids and start to tickle my cheeks.
I pushed the hairs back and flipped over. They jumped back out. I pushed them back.
I got up and rummaged through my panniers until I found my bandanna and wrapped that around my head – that should hold my hair in place. It worked for a few minutes, but eventually the wind managed to pull a few wisps of hair out again.
By now I was desperate. I. Needed. Sleep. We would be getting up before dawn to climb out of the valley. It would be a massive 3400-foot climb and was sure to be hot. I needed to sleep.
John and the boys slept peacefully beside me while I wracked my brain to solve my dilemma. Finally I crawled completely under my sleeping bag – that should block the wind! That lasted all of a minute before I sheepishly crawled back out covered in sweat. That obviously wasn’t a good solution to my problem.
I built my sleeping bag up into a wind-breaking barrier and hunkered down behind it. That lasted a few seconds before my barrier crashed down in a heap of nylon and feathers.
I finally pulled out my spare t-shirt and wrapped my entire head, leaving only a small hole for my nose and mouth. That worked. I drifted off to Dreamland.
“Nancy! Nancy!” John called a few minutes later. “Nancy!” He called with an urgency typically reserved for an emergency. The last time he used that tone of voice was when a skunk was pillaging our food stash immediately outside the tent. I sat up in a panic, sure that some kind of famished predator was lurking nearby – and this time we didn’t even have the protective walls of the tent surrounding us. “Do you know where the oatmeal is?”
I mumbled something about stashing it in my pannier and lay back down to sleep.
And then those hairs crept out and started dancing on my face again.
I looked over at John, who was peacefully sleeping now that he knew where the oatmeal was. Why was it so important to find out now, in the middle of the night, where the oatmeal was? What was so bloody important about that oatmeal that he needed to wake me up in the wee hours of the morning to find out where it was? He interrupted my hard-earned sleep to ask about OATMEAL? What an inconsiderate slob he must be to deprive me of a few hours of sleep like that! How could he even think of doing such an incredibly self-centered, egomaniacal thing? Doesn’t he care about my sleep? I'll be climbing 3400 feet out of this god-forsaken valley in the morning, and now I'll be a total zombie – thanks to that ungrateful sod!
I looked again at that man lying there in blissful sleep, with the wind gently caressing him into dreamland and realized how easy it would be to get rid of him. But then I looked at my little angels curled beside him and realized that they needed someone to haul them out of the valley on the morrow. Besides, it was too blasted hot to dig a hole for a body.
I rolled over and went back to sleep.
As we heated up water for breakfast in the morning, I asked John about the oatmeal.
“I heard coyotes singing last night,” he told me, “and I wondered if they were eating my Strawberries and Cream breakfast. I actually climbed out of bed and looked for it, but couldn't find it on the table. I couldn't bear the thought that I might not get my oatmeal this morning.”
I simply shook my head and ate my Blueberries and Cream oatmeal in silence.
To our surprise, the climb out of Death Valley was tough, but not overly obnoxious. Shortly thereafter, however, we noticed a change. Maybe it was our reaction to the heat and arduous climbs we had endured lately, or perhaps it was just a natural reaction to being on the road for four months, but we had turned into a bunch of wacky sarcastic bitches either laughing hysterically or bickering endlessly. One day it all came to a head.
We hit a new low in our culinary pursuits that morning. We had eaten peanut butter and jelly for breakfast many times throughout our journey. PB & J sandwiches, PB & J on tortillas, PB & J on crackers... But that morning we had only PB & J. By the spoonful. But as John so gallantly pointed out, at least we had a choice. I had a whole pannier full of food – rice, spaghetti, soup – but it all required cooking, and we didn’t feel like cooking. So we ate peanut butter and jelly instead, which may not have been the most nutritionally sound meal we ever ate, but wasn’t the worst either.
I had learned over the years to leave the task of taking the tent down to John. John was, in a word, fastidious about the tent. It needed to be folded just so, with every part in its place. Invariably I messed it up by my very presence. Normally I busied myself with other chores while John prepared the tent, but that morning I had nothing to pack since we had never unpacked the previous night. Against my better judgment, I headed over to help my husband with the tent.
As I arrived, John picked up the tent and asked me to shake off the tarp we used as a ground cloth to protect the tent floor. We had slept in sand that night and there was a fair amount of it on the tarp. I gently shook the sand off in the wind and laid the tarp back down. I managed to get it fairly flat, but there was a slight
wrinkle on the opposite side. “Would you put your foot on that corner so it doesn’t blow away while I get this flat?” I asked John as he stood with an armful of nylon.
The next thing I knew John had shoved the tent in my arms and snatched the tarp off the ground. “I’ll do it!” he grunted. “I don’t know why you can’t do it right – it isn’t that hard!” He shook the tarp violently in the wind to get rid of the last few grains of invisible sand, and flung it down on the ground. He looked up at me with a smile of smug satisfaction. “See – it isn’t that hard. Why couldn’t you do that?” He let go of the tarp and rose to get the tent from my arms. The wind caught the tarp and folded it neatly in half.
John paused for a second, then casually walked to the bikes and grabbed a few stakes. He put a stake in one corner of the tarp and moved to Corner B. Corner A pulled out of the ground and began waving wildly in the wind like a whip. I silently snickered to myself.
John calmly picked up the tarp and stakes and moved to a different section of the ground where the surface wasn’t quite so sandy. He had pinned A down and started on B when A broke free and flapped wildly in the wind once again. I broke out into a full-fledged giggle, and John shot me a look that could kill.
John managed to get a stake in Corner A and held his foot on it while he did a sort of deep lunge toward Corner B. By that time my giggles had changed to howls of laughter and the front side of the tarp flapped up and entangled itself around John’s head and arms. John continued calmly playing some kind of bizarre game of Twister as the wind fought him, while I laughed hysterically and patiently held the tent until he needed it.
In time, John managed to get the tarp staked down and the tent put away and I was quite certain there was neither one grain of sand nor wrinkled piece of nylon in the bag.
All this time, the kids were bickering. A lot. (I wondered if it might have had something to do with our ‘nutritious’ breakfast?) I packed up my bike listening to the kids fight about who got a particular rock or quarrel about whose hiding place the crawl space under a bush was. John and I rounded the boys up and herded them onto the bike as they squabbled and argued about anything and everything.
Finally, we were able to get them to agree on one thing: to sing. As we fought a headwind, they sang, “Jingle bells, Batman smells... Robin laid an egg. Batmobile, lost a wheel…” That worked for a while until Davy got tired of it and stopped singing. Daryl continued… which annoyed Davy… and Davy turned around to smack his brother and yell at him to shut up. Daryl stopped.
He stopped until Davy started singing again… and they both sang until Davy tired of it and stopped… and Daryl continued… and Davy turned around and smacked him and yelled at him to stop.
Now it just so happened that John had a splitting headache and was quickly tiring of fighting the hill and the headwind, which meant he wasn’t all that eager to listen to a couple of kids fighting and arguing over a whole lot of nothing. And every time Davy turned around to smack his brother, the whole triple bike lurched like a drunken sailor.
Finally John had had enough and he slammed on the brakes. I happened to be following immediately behind him and couldn’t stop quickly enough. I smacked into the trailer and tumbled down to the pavement.
“Get off!” John shouted at Davy. “Get off right now! I mean it!”
Davy climbed off the bike in silence while I picked myself off the pavement. John took off with Daryl still attached to the bike, leaving me and Davy to fend for ourselves. I rode slowly for a mile or so with Davy jogging alongside me until John had cooled off enough to allow his son back on the bike.
We continued climbing a major hill against a headwind in complete silence. John was pumping as hard as he could, but the hill was steeper than it looked and he was tired. “Pedal harder!” John shouted at the boys. Davy and Daryl dug deep and pedaled as hard as they could. All four of us were panting and sweating, with no end in sight, when a car pulled up beside us.
“Hey! Remember us?” A couple emerged from the car and came toward us as we stood straddling our bikes. “We met you at the campground in Death Valley.”
We chatted with them for a few minutes before they headed toward their car to take off. “Say,” they said as they walked away. “You want us to take the kids up to the top?”
“Yeah!” the boys shouted as they made a beeline for the car.
“We’ll meet you at the top of the hill,” the couple informed us as they pulled away, leaving John and me standing, childless, on the side of the road.
“What have we just done?” John asked. “We just sent our kids off with complete strangers! What if we never see them again?”
The two of us panicked and raced up the pass in search of our precious boys. Fortunately, the car was waiting for us at the top and the boys were just fine. We made a mental note that we needed to be a bit more careful and a bit less trusting. All those Road Angels we were meeting were turning us into something we didn’t quite recognize.
You know those signs that warn of animals on the road? Generally they have a picture of a deer jumping out in the road. As we cycled through the Nevada desert, we saw something like a deer sign, but this one had a picture of a turtle. I tried looking at the sign in every conceivable manner to figure out what animal it could possibly be, but it was most definitely a turtle.
There aren’t turtles out here in the middle of the desert, I thought. I came to the conclusion that the sign was some kind of joke. It wasn’t.
We were merrily pedaling along looking for a campsite in the desert when we found him – Mr. Turtle. He was sitting in the middle of the road waiting for a truck to smash him to smithereens. The boys gently picked him up and delivered him to the sage brush on the side of the road. I like to think we did our good deed for the day – we saved Mr. Turtle from certain demise.
We helped Mr. Turtle off the road into the safety of the bushes.
A few days later, there was no sign. We were screaming down a hill when John suddenly slammed on the brakes. Fortunately I was following far enough behind that I could stop, so I pulled up behind him.
“Get the camera! Get the camera!” John was shouting. “Get off the bike! Did you see him?” I looked around – totally bewildered. The only thing I saw was a gigantic semi-truck quickly bearing down upon us. “Go back, Nance! He’s back there! Turn around and go back!” I figured my husband had finally lost it for good, but I dutifully turned my bike around and headed back – just what I was headed for was anyone’s guess. Eventually I found him – Mr. Tarantula. Sitting in the middle of the road. The big truck zoomed past – and swung wide to avoid us. He missed our newfound friend by a few inches.
The boys and I gawked for a while – it was the first wild tarantula we had seen – then we gently coaxed our friend into the sage brush and said goodbye. We like to think that Mr. Tarantula met Mr. Turtle and compared notes about their good Samaritans.
Jack Frost and Carrot Soup
As we pedaled toward the Grand Canyon, fall was in the air and Mother Nature played even more spectacular cards than we could have dreamed of. Day after day we cycled through new and unique territory with fascinating rock formations and brilliant colors. Trees, when we found them, were at the height of beauty with reds, yellows, and oranges contrasting with the surrounding rock formations.
When we arrived at Lake Mead Recreation Area we were awed by mile upon mile of spectacular desert scenery. Huge patches of red Aztec sandstone mixed haphazardly with incredible rock formations to make a kind of giant playland. It looked as though a baby giant had toddled through the canyons with a giant-sized red crayon, coloring splotches here and there, willy-nilly, with no apparent rhyme or reason as to their placement.
Camping out was wonderful and the kids had a great time exploring enormous sandstone hills. They climbed over and around them discovering interesting formations and caves formed by erosion. The early morning sun brought out colors in a spectacular manner and we were spellbound by the beauty of reds
emanating from the Aztec sandstone in the area as we watched our breath freeze into little clouds in front of our mouths.
Ideal biking conditions always seem to be short-lived, and this was one of those times. Due to some engineer’s poor decision-making skills, there was no option besides the interstate if one wanted to ride from Las Vegas to Zion National Park. The last thing we wanted to do was join the masses of steel and rubber on the freeway, but there was no getting around it. We entered the on-ramp to make the best of it.
Making the best of freeway riding wasn’t easy. All the junk created by vehicles whizzing past at seventy-five mph creates havoc for bike tires. Both my bike and the triple ended up with flats from the little wires spit out by thousands of steel-belted tires. To add insult to injury, I somehow managed to leave my helmet behind when we stopped for groceries, so had to turn around and pedal a couple miles back to retrieve it.
We were pedaling hard to reach a place where we could camp. Exits were few and far between and, while on the interstate, we were held hostage by wire fences on either side.
“Nancy!” John shouted at me to be heard over the din of the highway. “That rainstorm is coming fast! We can’t make it to the next exit.”
“We have to!” I shouted back. “We can’t camp here. We’re right on the interstate!”
“We don’t have a choice,” he replied. “It’s almost dark and that rainstorm will be here in a few minutes!” We looked eastward where we could see lightning flashing with scary regularity.
“There’s no way we can camp here,” I shouted back. “We’ll just have to go until we get to the next exit. Those fences along the highway to keep the animals out are trapping us in. There’s no place to pitch the tent.”
Twenty Miles per Cookie: 9000 Miles of Kid-Powered Adventures Page 6