Another road warrior, more pictures from an expedition

I wrote yesterday about running into epic walker Steve Fugate a little west of Lavina on Highway 12.

That was at the beginning of a quick dash across several counties for me. Today, as I was driving home on Highway 12, this time mid-afternoon about midway between Martinsdale and Two Dot, I encountered another road warrior.

Actually, two road warriors, both of them riding recumbent bicycles and well bundled up against another rainy day. The first biker, Tom Hall, was so enveloped in dense layers of green and black, all of which blended in neatly with his bicycle, that I was well past him before I was even sure he was a bicyclist.

And there was his partner, Rick Stiles, several hundred yards behind him. So I pulled over again, as I did yesterday, though not in nearly as safe a spot, I confess, and snapped a few photos as Stiles approached.

When he got closer, I shouted out, “Where’d you start and where you going?”

“We started in Billings,” he shouted back. “We’re going to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.”

Well! That sounded like a story. I asked Stiles if he had a few minutes. He didn’t really answer, but while looking nervously ahead as Hall disappeared in the distance, he fished his wallet out of his gear and a handed me a business card.

The card had links to his Web page (who doesn’t have one these days?) as well as his Facebook page. And that was about it. He needed to go, having put barely 100 miles under his bike on a 3,300-mile trip.

I told him — and just then a pickup pulling a horse trailer slowly drove between my vehicle and Stiles’ bike, illustrating the inadvisability of our arrangement — maybe I’d do a story later on, after he’d finished his trip. In the meantime, check out his pages. You can also read about his coast-to-coast bicycle trip last summer.

Here’s the most amazing thing I found on his website: “As of 2012 I was 66 years old, overweight, under active, and had heart problems. As I tell people, I am not built for speed. One thing that I have going for me is endurance. I may not be the hare, but I hope to do the tortoise proud.”

Go, Rick!

And so my own small journey continued. It had none of the adventure of the journeys of Stiles and Fugate, but there were a few moments of rising alarm — once near Belt when I was getting low on gas and the road threatened to end somewhere in the nearby mountains, and again this morning when a heavy rain started pelting my car, and the gumbo road we were on.

It’s hard to believe just how short my trip was, given the number of different kinds of weather I passed through. Five or six times I was driving under low clouds so thick with rain that I thought it wouldn’t stop for days, only to break up into blues skies and billows of white cloud just half an hour later.

Here are a few things that caught my eye along the way.

 

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