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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »