Saratoga, WY

Made it into Wyoming! Things have been going much better today than yesterday - feel like I'm getting over my case of SARS, but it's still around a little bit. Made it into Saratoga just before 1pm, average speed (not counting breaks - just what my speedometer spit out) was over 17mph, pretty quick all things considered! Although I had been planning on spending the night here, I'll probably head on to Rawlins, WY to make up for the rediculously short (~18 mile) day yesterday. Talked with my friend Clair yesterday from Steamboat Springs and made tentative plans to get to McCall, ID by the 20th, so that puts me on a schedule for the next couple weeks.

The scenery lately has been nice, plenty stuff to look at, but the hills are generally quite gentile and not too long. Most of the area I've been riding through has been pasture land with occasional cows and horses, this morning there were some fields of hay. The mountains are looking less familiar than a week or so ago, definitely in some new territory for me! I'm looking forward to getting up nearer the Tetons and Yellowstone, should be getting around there in a week or so. Not planning on spending much time off-route in those areas as I need to keep moving to make McCall on time, and get done with the trip before school starts, but it'll be nice to at least see the scenery from the road and campsites! Lately, towns have been quite a lot farther apart than most of the rest of the trip - it's often 50+ miles between towns with resupply options - so I've been careful to carry plenty of water and "camel up" in towns. Roads have been mostly very quiet, and since crossing into Wyoming this morning, have had nice shoulders too!

A little more on yesterday:
Woke up at a funky little rental cabin/RV park/camping place feeling pretty low energy and generally unenthused, but still ended up getting on the road reasonably early. A little over an hour into the ride, my chain "sucked" up into the front derailer and jammed, not by itself a huge issue - just backpedaled a little bit and everything sorted itself out. A couple hundred yards later, the chain just came undone and was dragging behind the bike - bad news.

My guess is that the section of chain that got sucked in had the special "master link" in it, and that it got disconnected when the chain jammed. Then, when I started pushing on it again, half of the master link wasn't holding onto anything, the other part bent, and suddenly my bike was non-functinal. Anyways, half the master link was bent and the other half looked fine. I made an attempt at straightening out the bent half of the master link using my little multi-tool thing (which, naturally, doesn't have pliers,) but couldn't get it quite good enough to reconnect. Thought about trying to use my chain tool to just cut out a link and reconnect things to end up with a shorter chain, but decided that was a halfass solution and that I'd need to get a new chain at some point anyways. And, I wasn't feeling particularally motivated, so I just packed everything up, changed into sandals, and started pushing.

A few short hills and coasting sessions later, I was just shy of Walden. Saw the first pickup truck heading my way since the chain broke, so I stuck my thumb out and it stopped! Had seen a couple passing cars, but didn't even try hitching with them as I didn't want to leave my bike beside the road that long. Anyways, the two guys in the truck, Mark and Randall, were heading over to Steamboat Springs for an outing, and convinced me to come along with them to Steamboat, where there are a few bike shops, to get things fixed. About an hour later, we were at a bike shop in Steamboat, I had a new chain (and another master link to repair my old one,) and we made plans to meet up at the truck a few hours later to drive back to the route. Lucky ride!

Spent a few hours relaxing in Steamboat Springs after fixing the bike, ate some food, and picked up some random other bike goodies (a tube and a new bottle of lubricant.) I was feeling pretty sick with this case of Dengue Fever most of the day, at one point I was standing in line to get a bagel (yay! first fresh bagel of the trip!) and started feeling really weak and had to sit down for a couple minutes. Not fun, but after that passed, the lunch was excellent!

When we got back to Walden, I met some other bike tourists who were heading the other way, we wound up camping together at the city park and having a good time visiting over dinner. One guy had a little PDA with Wireless capability, so I used that to post the last update here, neat little machines! Got some reading in before going to bed early (no fireworks to be seen in Walden) to try and kick this case of Bird Flu that I've been trying to get over for a few days.

I've been reading a very interesting (although somewhat geeky) book lately on modern physics, by Brian Green and is called "Fabric of the Cosmos." In mostly plain english (very little math,) it goes over how physicists understand the universe from standpoints of Newtonian Physics, General and Special Relativity, and Quantum Physics, and on to how the views all tie together, how time fits into the picture, a bit on entropy, and some other neat stuff. Very well written book, and it has definitely helped me tie together a few different concepts that I "knew" but didn't really "understand," and plenty of interesting theoretical stuff as well.

Anyways, my time here at the library here is about up, and a little thunderstorm has come and gone, so it seems like a good time to hit the road and roll to Rawlins!