A bike touring blog. Mostly about bikepacking and single speeds. By Montana Miller
A little black and tan chihuahua sprints flat out down the hillside. "Ahrahrahrah!" he yells at us. We're on a nice quiet road outside of Athens, Georgia. "Look at this little guy," I say. He keeps coming, hits the raised shoulder of the road with those tiny little legs, trips, plants his face in the … Continue reading Georgia
“I think I left your water bottle in the mini van, let me grab it,” Colleen says. It looks like someone filled the bottle with beer. She unscrews the top. Scrunches up her nose. “This is full.” She pauses and makes another face. Kinda the face you'd make if you'd just sniffed 24 ounces of … Continue reading Mystery Pee (and we’re riding cross country)
“Now, we enter the Plains of Despair!” I say. We’ve left the mountains and are have to cross about a hundred miles of very flat farm country before Christchurch. “I really wish you would stop calling it the Plains of Despair,” Colleen says. “Los Llanos de Triste.” “God,” Colleen grunts. “You’re depressing me.” “But I … Continue reading To Christchurch
We ride into Dunedin on a sunny afternoon, then a cold rain moves in. We pay to camp at a hostel, which is a nice option sometimes— sleep in the yard instead of in a smelly, snore filled dorm, hang out in the house if it’s raining. And at the rate we drink coffee, it … Continue reading Dunedin to Mt. Cook
Everything’s better on the South Island (maybe not the pies, that pork kumara pie I got from Owhata in Rotorua was pretty excellent). — On one of our off days in the Forest Camp campground in Hamner Springs, I did a little hub bearing re-greasing. Before we left home I'd packed everything with some nice … Continue reading Rainbow Road
I’m on the roof of the dry-rotted hotel in La Paz (the roof has been propped back up looks like four times now) with a case of beer, a crew of Mexican welders, and a Canadian Romanian computer programer. One of the welders chews off the top of a beer can, and spits the aluminum … Continue reading La Paz to Ohiopyle
"We gonna start another war!" yells the older French Canadian guy. We're burning some palm fronds that I gathered up earlier from around the campground. The fat bases of the fronds make pretty decent firewood. "Another war!" he yells at the woman from British Columbia. They've been playing the French and English Canadian thing back … Continue reading Loreto to San Evaristo
--- Ok, I think I’ll be good now. I stand up slow, covered in spiky grass seed. I’ve had four very loose stools (to use the clinical term) in the last eight miles. The delicious eggs we ate at that not-so-clean house yesterday really seemed like a good idea. So did the watery fresh goat … Continue reading Loreto to Agua Verde to Loreto
An A-10 pulls out of a strafing run, jet engines echo off the mountains. It takes a couple seconds for the sound from the gun to get to us. And at 3,900 rounds a minute, it sounds more like a zipper, or like that one time I hugged our cat too hard and he farted, than … Continue reading Phoenix to Ajo
1700 miles east of Carbondale the Shark started to sputter. Must have been some bad gas in Ohio. Close enough. We were almost home, ready to pack the van up and get the train west. Going back to Pittsburgh is kind of a convoluted way to start a bike tour in Mexico, but we had … Continue reading Mexico by way of Pittsburgh
Dirt Cruise 