Courtesy of www.SladeRide.com

    (Gallery & FAQs at bottom of post)

    Home time.

    I’ve spent a couple of months thinking about it.

    And now, I’m back in the UK, with my bike
    (Charles).

    For now at least I feel like I’ve done enough.

    I set out alone from the Arctic Ocean coast of
    Alaska at the end of May 2009, 250 miles
    inside the Arctic Circle, unsure if I could
    make it through the first day, let alone keep
    going for …

    6 months and 5,150 miles or …

… the equivalent of cycling the length of Africa from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa.

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Villa Grove, CO, USA - Alpenglow abounds

Courtesy of www.SladeRide.com

(Gallery at bottom of post)

“Wait here while I get the spear I used to kill him!” he says, running off to his van.

Its almost pitch black, its below zero, I’m at the otherwise deserted far-end of a campsite in a remote Colorado valley and John, half-Irish, half-Sioux has just gone to his ‘RV’ (a converted UPS truck in which he lives year-round) to get said weapon.

“And I put one end on the ground like this and the dagger-end up like this and then, HE RAN!  He ran onto the blade and I twisted and I twisted and held him down until he stopped fighting.  I had no choice.”

John is a Vietnam Vet, ex-Special Forces, a ‘tunnel-rat’, Mossad-trained in hand-to-hand combat.  In the months following the war he, in his own words became dangerously unstable after so much, well, I think you get the picture.  Again in his own words he was saved from the brink through taking a job from his father, as a cowboy spending months on end with a herd of cattle or flock of sheep, living wild up in the Colorado mountains.

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Yes, I am 5 years old, taking pictures from the plane to LA (oooh look, you can see the curve of the earth!)

Courtesy of www.SladeRide.com

(Gallery at bottom of post)

“Where’s my gin!” we’d mockingly imagine her adding after she’d ordered us to “Keep left on highway 270″ in her slurred, robotised voice.  I’m driving, near Denver with Jeff, a long time friend from Milwaukee and we’ve just switched on the GPS unit that came with his hire car – we decided we got a bit of a dud since the unit’s ‘voice’ always seemed distorted at first but improved later (after she’d had some gin, we teased).

(on later occasions ’she’ would go completely silent despite frequent and complex intersections as a result of which we’d joke that she’d ‘gone for a bit of a lie down’ not before telling us “you know where your going, just look at the pictures”)

Not since June had I taken any real break from the cycling – aside from a few days here and there at campsites – so I was very much looking forward to 10 days off the bike in Denver with Ethan, April, Gage, Elise, Jeff and Catey, relaxing, catching-up and exploring the more far-flung bits of Colorado.  Just prior to this I’d found myself slightly ahead of schedule so took the opportunity to visit (for the first time in 10 years) David and family for a few days in Westlake Village near LA, CA, taking advantage of cheap flights from Denver.

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Grand Teton Nat Pk, WY, USA - The 'snapped-off branch in question' aka 'the culprit' deftly decorated with a small wad of my hair from the injury (I sawed the branch off afterwards, sorry US Federal Government)

Courtesy of www.SladeRide.com

(Gallery at bottom of post & 2 videos below)

I value the top of my bonce, my head, my noggin, my tete, my skull, my scalp.

So, why is it that I stabbed a broken, dagger-like tree branch (still attached to pine in question) into the top of it?  Yup.  And I wasn’t even riding my bike at the time!

Picture the scene: having just ridden some amazing descents through construction areas on dirt roads, cranking the top gear, grinning wildly at the road crews as they waved me past, having seen the Teton mountains (gorgeous) for the first time, having met and chatted to some lovely people along the route and then not failed to notice a truly enormous proper mountain storm developing overhead, I’m part elated part anxious to get to the campsite quickly and pitch my tent before the maelstrom unleashes its wrath and fury from overhead.

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Nr Maligne Lake, Jasper Nat Pk, Alberta, Canada - Alvin gives us a turn...

Courtesy of www.SladeRide.com

(Gallery at bottom of post)

“What do you mean you ‘don’t take tents’? You’re advertised as a campsite and the road signs show a picture of A TENT!!!” say I, incredulous in the least.

“I’m sorry but we don’t take tents, we’ve had some trouble with vandalism from ‘tenters’.  There’s a site which does take tents 15 km out of town, I can give you directions.”

I: “I’ve ridden 90 miles to get here on a loaded bicycle, I don’t think I can ride another ‘15k’, can’t you make an exception as it’s just me on my own?”

(by ‘loaded bicycle’ did I mean ‘loaded’ like a gun?)

RV site lady: “I’m sorry there’s nothing I can do.”

Me: “I’m not happy, I’m really not happy, this is not on – you should take down the signs 5 MILES OUT OF TOWN WITH A PICTURE OF A TENT ON THEM!!!”

(in hindsight I realise – thanks Nancy – that at this juncture, with a queue of eager but undoubtedly somewhat embarrassed RV-ers building behind me that I was no doubt compounding the view held by ‘RV site lady’ that tenters were aggressive, surly vandals)

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Hi everyone, this is Jason. I’m helping Jon to keep his site up-to-date. One thing that would help keep the site looking good is if the comments you post have your avatars next to it.

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums.

This is a free service, just sign up at http://en.gravatar.com/

In other news, the Route page has been updated and now shows that Jon is no longer in Essex!