207 miles

I woke up in Nebraska. I’m not the biggest fan of the state of Nebraska. To be honest, I don’t really like Nebraska. There are not any real mountains here and the fields seem to stretch on forever, but it doesn’t feel like there should be fields here. It’s too hot and dry for any crops to grow naturally. The cows look a little uncomfortable and even the native grasses seem strained. Farmers wouldn’t have much success here if it weren’t for irrigation. I guess these farmers draw out of the north and south Platte rivers for their irrigation needs instead of the Colorado, which is a little bit better, but it still doesn’t seem very environmentally friendly to have big fields of green in what is otherwise aired semi desert like grassland. Instead of going through the town of Kimball and restocking the night before, I’d elected to camp on the north side of Kimball and stop in the morning at a store. The town of Kimball was exactly what I would expect Nebraska to look like. The people were nice and I got a couple returned waves as I pedaled through the town, but there wasn’t a lot going on and it was kind of copy and paste from any other Midwest town I’ve seen. The main street had a couple local stores, but there were just as many boarded up windows. I thought about being a good person and stopping at a local coffee shop instead of another chain gas station, but I just knew they wouldn’t have any food that I could take with me on the bike and so I once again fell victim to classic American consumerism. Like a sheep, I made my way into a convenience store at the behest of a multinational oil conglomerate, and sent my money up the chain to line the pockets of some billionaire. They had some hot breakfast and I was able to get a couple breakfast sandwiches and some biscuits and gravy. Takes me all the way back to the Tennessee and the cooking of my friend’s mom, Mrs. Shanda. She can cook some mean biscuits and gravy. I enjoyed my breakfast before kicking it out across 70 and heading south. The land was almost indescribably boring. It was so boring, that I think it’s easier to capture how magnificent the mountains of Alaska are in writing than it is to capture how boring the fields of Nebraska and Eastern Colorado are in writing. The only thing I had to look at were a couple cattle and fields that looked like the plague had scoured every living thing it could get its hands on. Short clumps of grass grew and little tussocks, but the landscape was almost devoid of green. The grasses were a dark brown, borderline timber orange in spots. All the greenery had been baked away by the sun, and the lack of rain had turned the majority of the ground into dirt and dust. I crossed into Colorado and found myself in the Pawnee National Grasslands, but there wasn’t much grass. The land wasn’t completely flat, but it wouldn’t be accurate to say that there were hills. It was more like the slightest ululations in terrain that led down to one dry wash to another. There was truly not much to look at. I expected to become quite bored, but I’ve been surprised to find on this trip that boredom has not come easily. Many of my training rides I would find myself tiring the mental redundancy of riding for so long every day. There’s something so special about having Ushuaia as a concrete destination and knowing that I get closer with every pedal stroke that has prevented me from being swept up in the waves of boredom I feared. Not only that, I have dozens of audiobook recommendations, 50 podcasts have been sent to me, and probably about 100 hours of music recommendations that I need to work my way through. In addition, I always have my own thoughts to work through and I have this blog to look forward to writing. I also have friends and family to call or to look forward to calling which helps provide direction throughout my day. Even if the land is barren, and ubiquitously boring, I can always turn my head up to the sky. Today the sky once again seemed impossibly wide-open. The sky was completely cloudless and rang many shades of blue. It was a little bit hazy today, so the horizon faded to the lightest of blues, almost to white. Further up in the sky, it was more of a baby blue that transitioned into a deeper sky blue and then almost impossibly dark, borderline black blue straight above me. The contrast between the height of the sky, and the horizon was quite remarkable. When I looked up, it felt like I was looking into space more than usual. It felt like I was in a fishbowl and someone had just plucked off the lid. Perhaps I could just jump right up and get out of here. Everything was so open that the sky seemed to press down on me and I thought perhaps I could just float away into the dark blues above me. Speaking of air pollution, one thing I haven’t had any of is wildfire smoke. Should’ve just kept my eyes out for my friend Swerg who’s been fighting wildfires across the west all summer. Keeping the air clear for me and the path wide open. Wildfires and the fallout from the smoke were a real concern for me on the Alaska Highway and in British Columbia. In past years wildfires have shut down sections of Highway 2 through Yukon and BC for days at a time. I was late enough in the season that the fires were all under control and this year wasn’t a particularly bad forest fire season in Canada anyways. Nothing like last year that is.

I came into the town of Brush, Colorado for lunch. I found a subway gas station combo that was the perfect escape from the building heat. Those worried about my atrocious diet will be happy to know that for lunch I had a loaded, foot-long subway sandwich, which is sadly healthier than my average lunch, with a large salad, and 1/2 pound of cashews among many other items of junk food. I debated whether getting a salad was worth it since it really doesn’t do much for me in terms of fueling my riding, but I enjoyed the taste and more than anything I kind of missed the texture of fresh produce. When I was in Canada, it was easier to find grocery stores between Dawson Creek and Calgary, but since then I’ve been meandering through interstate towns that lack grocery stores with the multitude of fresh produce that I would like. Granted, I haven’t been making an effort to really go out of my way to pursue fresh produce. I certainly could’ve taken the time in Casper to find a grocery store, but they have not been readily available. I took my time eating lunch and finished up yesterday‘s blog while I ate. I let time get away from me and by the time I was back on my bike I’d realized I’d let almost an hour pass. Over the last couple of days I’ve found my lunch stoppage time growing longer and longer. I need to reign myself back in and stay more focused. If I do want to take longer lunches, then I need to take them at three or four o’clock when the wind is at its worst, and not twelve or one o’clock when the winds are still building. I wasn’t that mad at myself for taking a long break, but as I set off into the 15 mile an hour headwind out of Brush I vowed to do better in the future.

Now that it’s so hot out I pretty much need to be drinking nonstop. But I often find myself under-hydrating on the bike. I always try to make up for it when I go into gas stations. I have two bottles, my bike, both of which are about 1 L. The first thing I do when I go into a gas station is head over to the sink or soda fountain and fill up one of the bottles. I force myself to chug the entire thing as fast as possible then I take a break and fill up both of the bottles. Then I force myself to drink another bottle and fill it back up. I try to drink each bottle as quickly as possible to save time, but also so I don’t look like I’m trying to steal soda from the gas station. When I’m chugging my liquid of choice I forget to breathe and have to pull away, gasping for breath, or I’ll choke on a little bit of liquid, or if I’m drinking soda, I’ll have air try to force its way out of my throat and I inevitably end up splashing liquid all over myself every time I go in for a chug. I try not to make a mess and if I do I always clean it up. I must be quite a sight. The cashiers never really seem to be annoyed, they’re always entertained by my unusual and maybe even childish behavior. I’m like an overexuberant little puppy who’s been out playing in the sun and has come back inside and has forgotten how to drink. I am reminded of one of my dogs back home, Rocky. Every time he goes to drink, he manages to spill about half the bowl on the floor and you can always tell after he’s gone in for a drink because his whiskers and the whole front of his body will be soaking wet . He looks up at you, tail wagging those big brown eyes with water just pouring off his chin, looking at you like “what seems to be the matter?” I miss the little fella. What I wouldn’t give to have my dogs here for just a minute. I’m not sure what that says about me, if my mannerisms are reminiscent of those of an untrained puppy. I’m only 20, and I still go around saying yes ma’am, yes sir, so I can sometimes still get away with acting like a kid in public which is great because I’m totally still a child.

After leaving Brush, I continued south under warming skies. Predictably, the scenery didn’t change at all for a while. I had planned on stopping in the town of Last Chance about 40 miles south of Brush so I could refill my water. However, when I got to Last Chance, there were no services open and I realized I would have to make it another 40 miles before I could refill my bottles. This was quite unfortunate as I’d been drinking my water with unrestrained enthusiasm over the past two hours in anticipation of a refill. When it’s this hot it is always a mistake not to ration your water if you don’t know for sure where your next refill will be. On paper, there was a place I could’ve filled up in Last Chance, but I hadn’t checked to see if it was open and it wasn’t. I still stopped for a minute though. My feet were giving me considerable pain in my cleats. My stuff hadn’t really dried last night and my shoes were still wet. My soles were beginning to ache as my skin wore away and blisters started to form on my borderline trench foot esk pads. I took off my cleats and socks and threw on my walking shoes. This is the first time this trip. I’ve put them on. It’s they are a little more than a string of Paracord on the thinnest possible piece of rubber. They weigh next to nothing and strap onto the outside of my seatpack. I put them on and rode for about 10 miles in these flimsy little sandals. My riding was greatly affected by the lack of cleats in favor of these little flaps of rubber. I almost would’ve been better off barefoot. It gave my socks and cleats and feet time to dry out though. I stopped about 10 miles past Last Chance to put my cleats back on. This winter when I began my training for this trip I was incredibly worried about injury prevention and had messaged Lachlan Morton asking for advice since he is, in my eyes, the best male endurance cyclist in the world right now— I also messaged Lael Wilcox, the best female endurance cyclist in the world, but she was too busy doing classic Lael things like smashing the Iditarod bikepacking race and preparing for her around the world bike attempt to get back to me. Keep crushing it, Lael, you’re an inspiration. Lachlan graciously responded to me and told me he doesn’t do any injury prevention work, which is astounding, and his one piece of advice for me was to ride in flats or sandals. Sometimes he rides in Birkenstocks which is truly incredible to me. I was on a steady low-grade climb for about two hours before I got to the top of a plateau at about 5700 feet. I’d had a headwind all day, but up here the wind was flying by at at least 20 miles an hour directly in my face. I’d seen some windmills up on top of this ridge from about 20 miles back, so I knew bad winds were coming. I love seeing windmills because it makes me happy to see many of the advancements we are making towards a sustainable energy grid, but I kind of hate biking through wind farms. Windmills are obviously placed where it’s most windy, so when you’re riding into a headwind, you do not want to be riding in a wind farm. This was by far the largest wind farm I have ever seen. In all directions there were hundreds and hundreds of windmills. I easily passed about 1000 of them in this one area. I somehow managed to keep a really positive attitude through this headwind. Perhaps I was nudged along by a call with some friends back home. Regardless, I was really happy with how I rode, even if it was quite slow and I was out of water. At the edge of the wind farm, I dropped off the plateau and enjoyed a nice descent into the town of Limon and crossed interstate 70. I crossed I-80 this morning on the outskirts of Kimball. The interstates are like a countdown clock. After I pass 10, my next milestone will be the US-MX border. Even though I’m just now getting to 70, I am much further than 70% of the way through the United States. In fact, there’s a very small chance that I only have three days of riding left in the US. At the most I have four days left in the states before I get to Mexico. That’s incredible. I can’t wait, but there’s a lot of nervous energy behind that. I was able to get my bottles filled, finally, in Limon.

I sat on a rock in front of a Sinclair gas station and watched the sunset to the west while I chomped down on an ice cream cone and 84 grams of protein on the form of core power shakes. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, there hadn’t been all day. Sunsets are almost always better with a couple of clouds, but tonight was one of the more brilliant cloudless sunsets I’ve seen in a while. Now that I think about it, it’s the first cloudless sunset of this trip. First, the sky was just ablaze in orange, deep intense orange where the sun was setting, but it faded in the corners of the sky into an almost grayish brown. The air pollution definitely affected the sunset a little bit. Ironically, I often find that a little bit of air pollution makes the colors of the sunset a little bit more saturated and orange. As the sun sunk lower the orange deepened in color almost to red along the horizon, as the sky above faded into a yellow and then a baby blue, violet, then back to blue and eventually black. Photos really don’t do it justice and neither do my words. The sunset seemed to last forever. 20 minutes after the sun had already disappeared the sky was still emboldened in color. It was like a perfect color wave. It was impossible to tell where one color started and another began. It all ran together in a beautiful pallet of unadulterated intensity. As the sun set to the west, I looked east in anticipation of the rising moon. Only about five minutes after the last sliver of the sun wavered and dipped below the skyline, the moon rose on the other side of the sky. I had expected a beautiful moon rise, and my expectations were surpassed. As I crested a small hill, it peered over the horizon. It truly looked like an orange in the sky. The air pollution gave it a deep burnt fading orange. As I slowly descended off the hill, my vantage point got lower and the moon sunk back under the horizon only to pop up a few seconds later. I’d given myself one sunset and two moon rises. What a fantastic evening. It was incredibly bright, but it was emanating such a low energy orange and I could see all the craters and marks on the surface of the moon better than perhaps I ever have been able to with a naked eye. I know that every time we look up and see the moon it’s always the same exact size. It’s an optical illusion that it looks bigger at times, I remember watching a lecture of the science behind this. Sometimes it’s more fun to ignore what we know to be true. Tonight as the moon rose, it looked easily three times as big as it usually does. The glow was so intense that the sky around the moon turned pinkish for a minute. There was a brief window where to my west I could see an unimaginably diverse sunset, I could look straight above me and see the first stars of the Milky Way beginning to twinkle, and as my eyes fell towards the east I could see the moon in a light which it is rarely witnessed in. Last night was the full moon, but with a naked eye it was hard to tell that tonight wasn’t also a full moon. Perhaps there was just a tiny sliver missing from the right side, but it did nothing to distract from magnificence of its presence.

I rode on past Limon, heading southeast now. The concrete was smooth and fresh and my shoulder was wide and clear of debris. I let the moonlight carry me on to the western outskirts of Kit Carson where I set up camp for the night.

We have a question from the comments from Gray. Nice to hear from you, thanks for the question! Gray asked how I will navigate border crossings and any potential Visa problems as I get further south. Fortunately, I do not have to worry about obtaining a visa for any of the countries I will be visiting. Since my stay in one country will never exceed 10 days, I should be able to just bike right into each country. I believe the only two countries in South America that require visas for standard entry for Americans are Bolivia and Venezuela. As much as I would love to bike across the salt flats of Bolivia, it’s not in the cards for this trip and I will not be going into Bolivia. Border crossings in Central America are, from experience, a little bit stressful at times, but usually not incredibly difficult. The main thing I have to remember is that for every single country I enter and exit I need to get both an exit and entry stamp on my passport. Crossing the US Canada border is a breeze, you only have to clear customs on the side that you are crossing into and they just look at your passport and give it back to you. In Mexico and Central America you have to clear customs to exit a country, then you have to clear customs to enter the next country. You have to get a stamp each time you clear customs and if for some reason I failed to get an entry stamp into Mexico they wouldn’t let me out of the country into Guatemala until I went all the way back to my point of entry and obtained an entry stamp. This almost happened to me this spring when I was bikepacking in Central America. I had crossed into Mexico from Guatemala and there had been no customs on either side. I got back to the Guatemala border a couple days later and they gave me an entry stamp, but there had once again been no customs on the Mexican side, so I had two entry stamps into Guatemala, but no exit stamp. When I went to leave Guatemala for Honduras, the Guatemalan border patrol agent told me that he would give me an exit stamp, but Honduras probably wouldn’t let me in since I had two entry stamps. The Honduran customs didn’t notice because to help me out, the Guatemalan official had placed his exit stamp at the very end of the book so the Honduran worker would’ve had to scroll through the entire book to find my other entrance stamp. Many central American countries also require a nominal fee for entry, and exit. I always think it’s funny when they charge you to exit the country. In Nicaragua, the entry fee is $13 USD which is the highest I have ever encountered. Sometimes border crossings outsource the fee collection to local non-governmental workers who stand outside of customs . This always sucks because you can never tell who you actually need to pay and who is just trying to steal your money. It’s quite easy to get ripped off, but fortunately it’s never really that much money if you do get ripped off. Beyond that, there aren’t that many entry requirements in central America. This winter I scoured the US state department website for requirements and haven’t found any abnormal ones. Nicaragua requires proof of yellow fever, vaccination, and virtual proof does not count. You have to have your yellow fever vaccination card with you. I found this out the hard way when I tried to bike into Nicaragua. My yellow fever vaccination card had been in my passport which had been stolen when I was bikepacking in Canada just a couple weeks before, so even though I was able to provide electronic proof of vaccination, I had no physical yellow fever vaccine and the border patrol would not let me in. Luckily a $50 USD bribe Made them change their mind. I expect that at some point on my journey, I will run into issues at a border crossing. Either a customs office will be closed at an irregular hour, I’ll have to pay another bribe somewhere, or I’ll have to last minute scramble for some documents that I didn’t realize I needed. In general, I’m not too worried about border crossing. The hardest crossings will be Honduras, Nicaragua, and Columbia. Once I’m into Peru, I envision it will be smooth sailing across Chile and Argentina. The US passport is an incredibly powerful tool. If anyone reading this knows of any unusual entry requirements to any of the countries that I am going to be biking through that I perhaps overlooked please let me know in the comments, I would be forever grateful. The countries I am going through are: Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and finally Argentina.