October 7th-8th, 2015

What happened…

Andrew writes: Sorry for the photo bombardment of mountains today. Cycling along Teton Park Road, through Grand Teton National Park, one can’t help but take photo after photo of the majestic granite peaks. It is such a unique geological formation. We continued our descent, dropping below 2000m for the first time in a long time; last night it was a bit warmer than the night before for instance. Back to today’s tale…

Casey had given us directions to her house, and we did our best to follow them. Grand Teton National Park has really wide shoulders, and also has some bike lanes that run all the way to Jackson and beyond. This was a pleasant change from the narrow shouldered Yellowstone.

When we got to Moose, we turned off on to the Moose-Wilson Road, and I ignored the “Road Closed Up Ahead” signs for about 8 miles, until sure enough, there were barriers across the road and a park ranger guarding them. “Road’s closed,” he confirmed, “They poured some sort of toxic dust-abatement substance on the road, it’ll destroy your bikes.”
“I don’t suppose you could give us a ride back?” I asked.
“Sure, hop in,” he offered.

With that, we quickly removed all the bags from our bikes and chucked everything into the back of his truck. I got in to the front seat, basically sitting with a shotgun and semi-automatic assault rifle on my lap, while Amanda sat in a small jail-cell in the back seat. The park rangers are federal law-enforcement officers, first-responders, EMT’s, paramedics, and fire-fighters. We had a pleasant drive all the way to Gros Ventre where he dropped us off. It was really cool of him to give us a lift. I think Amanda got some video of her trip in the jail cell.

Casey and Janet passed by us on the dirt-road to Wilson, and we confirmed that we would meet up in a few hours. Casey had some errands to run, and we had to buy some food for dinner. We arrived in Wilson (population: 200) and stopped in at the General Store where another woman also offered for us to camp in her yard. What is it with all the friendly people in this neck of the woods?? After a quick shop, we pulled up at Casey’s house, and as she wasn’t home, we got settled and started dinner. Casey ended up having some mechanical issues and arrived home late, but we still were able to sit around and talk over dinner. Then we retired to our tent in her yard.

We heard some strange noises that night, which we think were from moose, eating in the yard. There are supposedly a lot of moose in the area. It’s kind of scary as a bicycle rider; I don’t want to meet one on the open road. There were also some sort of gopher or ground hog that kept trying to tunnel their way into our tent. We spent all day Thursday working. I was working on updating the website, and Amanda actually worked for a few hours for REAL money. I’ll let her tell that story though…

Amanda writes:

While riding in the rangers truck was fun, it was a bit annoying that Andrew ignored the road closed signs and continued on. I did follow him although I really need to assess if I’m just going to continue following him blindly while he doesn’t want to hear my opinion on the route. In any event, no blood shed as the ranger helped us out.

Arriving at Casey’s place was awesome. She lives in this dream little house in a wonderful community that reminds us a lot of Whistler, BC, Canada. A little community close to a ski hill that is well kept and super expensive. Clearly you also need to be super cool to live there because everyone we met was so nice.

As Andrew said, Casey gave me a terrific opportunity to spend more time with her, meet some motivated women and earn some money. Casey was helping out at an alumni meeting for Womentum Wyoming. http://www.womentumwyo.org is a community building mentoring program that develops women’s skills, confidence and local network. When being introduced to the host of the evenings event she became intrigued with my story and asked me to share it with the group. Now that I think about it, I really enjoyed sharing my journey of leaving behind ‘normal’ lives and jobs and embarking on this adventure. In years past speaking in front of others was hard where as here I loved it and it must have showed because I had loads of questions. It reminded me that what we’ve done is special and we’re lucky to have made the decision. After my speech I got to chat more with Casey and learn more about her life story. Truth be told I think she should have been speaking to the Womentum group because her life story is inspiring! To me, someone like Casey has lived life the way it’s meant to be done without the need to escape the ‘normal’ life.

Today’s Photographs