Max’s stuff in black, Mark’s in brown.

Into Pittsburgh

I started to feel the weirdness in Chicago, but it didn’t REALLY hit me until going to the Metropol nightclub in Pittsburgh. To see scantily clad young professionals mixing with frat boys and goths brought me quickly back to the urban nightlife we’ve been lacking this entire trip. It wasn’t country or Hispanic music. Were we really just biking across the US? It was hard to imagine this same group of hip grinding bipeds had ever gone camping or biking since early childhood if ever. Did I blend in? Would my brother and I be allowed back into normal society? After dancing for a couple hours I rode back to our Great Uncle Seven’s house and really sat down and reflected.

During this whole trip I kept thinking to myself that I was becoming more and more patient (and, correlated with this, that I was becoming more and more tolerant – which I later found not to be true as soon as I got back home to Portland to find that Robin has become engrossed in, what I think is, horrible TV). I was not in a hurry to go anywhere. This was most evident when Max and I sat in the back seat of a relative’s car when we went out to dinner or whatnot. In some cases, like with our Great Uncle in DC, abject fear took over, but most of time, like when Leo, our cousin, was driving, just a sense of why-the-hell-are-we-going-so-fast-when-we-don’t-really-need-to syndrome. I didn’t mind so much with Leo since he is a confident driver, but all around us ever since we reached Chicago, we could see the implied hurriedness of everyone around us. This was one aspect of our fear that we wouldn’t fit in anymore.

Another, kinda bigger, aspect (at the time anyway) was that our lack of social etiquette would make us stand out. In Idaho we met a man, Johan, who had been biking around the US as a lifestyle. He has no job, no cash on him, just a bike and a trailer. He looked like a bum, but not one of those alcoholic, total wretches, more of an anarchistic, hippie type. While talking to him he would scratch his balls and fart, who-gives-a-crap-what-people-thought-of-him kind of an attitude. By the time we reached Chicago/Pittsburgh, we had become accustomed to that attitude, maybe not to such an extreme. Would we be allowed back into normal society when we obviously didn’t give a crap about the formalities of etiquette. For example, our Great Uncle in Pittsburgh’s wife would have leftovers in the fridge and when we wanted to eat something we had to have a different plate for each thing of tupperware because obviously food shouldn’t be served out of tupperware, and we had to each have about 3 plates or bowls because you can’t have rice and meat and veggies and then when you’ve finished put fruit on the same plate. All the while we’re trying to explain to our auntie that we only needed one plate to save the hassle of doing more dishes. When we said that for the last two months we’d been eating out the same bowls that hadn’t been washed with soap for weeks and using the same spoon that we licked clean, she only assumed that we said this to illustrate how crappy a way of living it was and that of course we wanted a whole production for lite snackie leftovers because that’s how civilized people act.

And so we worried that we no longer fit in. It didn’t bother us that we were wearing the same clothes for a week and that our showers usually consisted of a river or a sink in a fast food restaurant. But now that I think about it, I stipulate, that when Max and I were questioning our chances of being let into normal society, we were in the wrong frame of mind. To paraphrase the Tick, “We’re not crazy! We’re sane in a crazy world!”

All those people we met way back in Wyoming, like super tanned ex-Navy Alex, who we watched and listened karaoke while his laptop got stolen. He biked for something like 36 hours with 4 hours of sleep to get to the youth hostel in Jackson because he was afraid bunkbeds might run out. While we just arrived and casually checked in without knowing how incredibly lucky we were. I thought about the desolation of Eastern Oregon after we broke off the Adventure Cycling route. There were days of abandoned barns along ruler straight roads, and me trying to pick up a radio station to prevent from going mad. I thought about the nightly rodeo with crazy bull riding in Cody, Wyoming. The rodeo and the dance club – two utterly different nocturnal worlds, not too far from each other.

One really cool thing about the Metropol that night – I met a model for the Kabuki comic book. She was dancing with a Kabuki mask on and I talked to her ever so briefly. To all those people out there who think comics are for kids and they are all like X-men, read David Mack’s Kabuki. He really shows that comic books are both an artform and an unique storytelling medium. The man’s a bloody genius.

I opted out of going to Metropol because, unfortunately for all the ladies out there, clubbing is not my scene. Instead I went back to our PGH HQ and watched the Wallace and Gromit trilogy.

Cathedral of Learning

Non-denominational church where our parents got married

While in Pittsburgh, which I should emphasize ends in ‘h’, we stayed with our grandmother’s brother. The twin brother of the crazy driver we would later meet in Washington D.C. He and his wife are incredibly nice and they pampered us like toddlers. It was great. We had dinner with both of them and Alice, our mom’s college dorm mate, and Alice’s boyfriend. Everyone was in academia, which probably explains why they all had good humor and were missing that glazed over look salarymen often have. Bo and I also visited the beautiful church our parents got married in.

We went to the Carnegie Science Center one day and Carnegie Mellon the other. My brother thought it was so cool that THIS museum had a SELF guided tour of the submarine. So cool in fact, that he made it his personal mission to turn every knob and pull every lever that wasn’t zip tied in place. Once, he didn’t see the “do not move levers” sign and low clunking sounds were heard from the deep underbelly of the beast. We kept moving.

our stay with our Great Uncle

Carnegie Mellon was really neat. There are three programs there I’m interested in: wearable computing, robotics, and green design. I got to talk to some faculty and the robotics program gave me a snazzy video. Do I see grad school in the Max Chen crystal ball?

Max’s stuff in black, Mark’s in brown.

It’s now the 23rd of August and I’m in Boston, so I’ll try and do a seance on myself and write like all this stuff is just happening.

Since I’m a lazy bastard, I didn’t edit this until the 3rd of September and I only covered stuff until the 29th or so of August. Also, I’ll just interspace my thoughts in between paragraphs.

More Chicago

art museum in Chicago

Chicago library

The Chicago Art Museum is pretty amazing. We got to see a lot of the paintings, especially Impressionistic ones, that we had only seen on slides or in books. I was a little disappointed with the current Pharoahs of the Sun exhibit. I was in the mood to see crazy bejeweled gold scarabs and treasure like in the Mummy, but it was mainly stone sculptures over three thousand years old. Call me ageist, but it was somewhat boring. All the heiroglyphics were cool though. Question for the day: How to scholars know how to pronounce ancient Egyptian names like Nefertiti and stuff like that? I thought all the verbal language was lost.

No clue. As usual I spent a lot of time looking at the contemporary stuff. I really like fields of black with subtle variations in texture. Not for everyone I know, but I find them very soothing.

Huge thanks to our cousin Leo and his wife Stacy for letting us crash at their place for a week!

Mark tries his hand at artistic photography.

So that night (August 10th), we boarded Amtrak in the nick of time. Unfortunately our bikes did not make the train in time and arrived in Pittsburgh a couple days late. I know technically we could have planned a little better and arrived at the Chicago station a bit sooner to disassemble and box up our bikes, but whatever. We made it, and that’s all that really counts in the end. While running to make the train I got serious leg cramps carrying my trailer and could barely walk or move for hours. That was by far the most painful experience for me on this whole trip. I guess I can handle biking 3500 miles, but make me do some heavy lifting and my whole body falls apart.

As a consequence, I had to carry Max’s trailer around for a while… But I thought it was more amusing than a hassle. As for our bikes, I would later discover (from my Amtrak trip from Providence to Portland) that it doesn’t matter how on-time you are; sometimes Amtrak just decides to delay your baggage. But by then I’m thinking, ‘I’m back in Portland; I don’t need my bike until I start work 5 or 6 days from now, so who cares if it’s a couple days late?’

I slept on the train the whole way even with the air conditioner blowing right in my face the whole way.

I didn’t sleep the whole way to Pittsburgh. I didn’t sleep at all on the way to Pittsburgh because, unfortunately, a really annoying person was sitting in front of me who would not keep his mouth from yapping away. He kept talking to himself or the person next to him, wowing at the sites or complaining that he wouldn’t even be able to sleep if he tried due to his sleep apnea. No sleep to be had by the people near him. I suppose talking is better than snoring, but he could have shut up completely and just read or something… At the end of the trip, the person next to him politely told him that he would probably not have such a severe case of sleep apnea if he lost 100 pounds or so. I had to stifle a laugh.

Well so like we predicted, it became a lonely ride after departing RAGBRAI. The Patels in Iowa City were super nice and the town’s small downtown has two comic book stores, free jazz, and ridiculously good food. It was a nice break from the hectic week before. Plus taking a crap in a non-portapotty was pleasant. The following day we rode to the Muscatine Phantasuites. A bit expensive but we stayed one night on the moon, sleeping on a velvet lined Viking spacecraft. To elaborate would just make it sound more weird but it did involve watching hours of Son of the Beach, Powerpuff Girls, and Johnny Bravo.

Fantasuite

Movie of the towpath trail in Illinois

It rained while we were on the trail.

We followed a really scenic trail the next couple days, but the limestone and heavy storms really clogged up the cables and chain on my bike. It was fun having to lift everything over a fallen log, but it wasn’t fun getting about thirty mosquito bites. We met a guy riding from Boulder, Colorado to Tajikistan, raising money on the way for orphans. We had lunch together and I donated some money. After all, it’s for the children.

Giant Heart at the Museum of Science and Industry

fun with mirrors at MSI

MSI Chicago

Movie of a 3D painting

Movie of a futuristic bike

Colin would’ve like this museum

We’re in Chicago now. Basically, we’re just visiting a bunch of museums during the day and reading all the comic books we bought at night. The food is phenomenal in this city. And I do mean CITY for once. There are nightly shootings and actual mass transportation to prove it. We arrived last Thursday night August 3rd to our cousin Leo and his wife Stacy’s apartment. Last Friday, Saturday, and Sunday we spent at Wizard World Con 2000. Holy wet dream, Batman!

Chewbacca

action movie star, Cynthia Rothrock, the Lady Dragon!

the Hulk himself, Lou Ferigno

We met director Kevin Smith and his friend Jason Mewes (Jay and Silent Bob), Lou Ferrigno (the Hulk!!), the actors for Darth Vader, Boba Fett, Biggs, Chewbacca, Sabertooth, and Darth Maul. Plus we saw Spiderman, Catwoman, Batgirl, Bart Simpson, Vampirella, Scooby Doo, and a really overweight Superman. I shook hands with comic book creators David Mack, Stan Sakai, and Mark Crilley. Oh man it was awesome. We got an enormous amount of free stuff, plus I won a T-shirt and watch from an action figure sculpting studio. I bought way too many comic books and artwork. Oh man it was awesome.

Stan Sakai, creator of Usagi!

Scooby Doo’s Mystery Machine

To top that off I learned that my Taiwanese popstar cousin Lee-Hom is getting into Hong Kong films. He was going to star in Black Mask 2, but that fell through. Right now he’s working on a Tekkan 3 movie!! Dang, I’d be willing to cut my left arm off and become the parapalegic-stuntman-who-gets-his-arm-ripped-off to work in the HK movie industry. Even if it is run by triads. That boy Lee Hom sure has a bunch of albums now. I gotta milk this blood relation thing before it’s too late.

Which reminds me, we visited our maternal grandmother’s youngest sister last night. Grand Auntie Six and her husband are the cutest couple. Especially since they drive a VW Rabbit. Thank you for treating us to dinner! We also visited their daughter Alice and Alice’s family. Thank you for the cookies and ice cream! Oh man those three kids are hyperactive and super intelligent. So far we’ve met some amazingly smart kids on this trip. They basically make me think I was a complete television junkie moron with the imagination of a very unimaginative thing. (See!)

Leo, Stacy, Max, Mark, Great Uncle and Great Aunt Six

Max, Leo, Great Uncle and Great Aunt Six, Stacy, Alice holding Anna, her husband Andrew, Ethan, Alex (or is that Alex, Ethan?), Mark kneeling

That’s it for now. I’ll add details later.

Many readers have been asking about my male problems. Basically, ever since I changed saddles waaay back in Corvallis, I haven’t had problems with maleness (at least not physically – I might sometimes still have masculinity problems). A new problem has arisen, however, and that is that part of me where my thigh meets my butt, that crease area, you know, and the crease extends forward between my um… sack and my thigh. (Man it is impossible to make this a family friendly site when you have to talk about these things.) It gets kinda raw there, and over the last weeks I’ve been cultivating some serious zits or boils or whatever they are. I have no idea what they are. It was at first on my right side, but now I have it on both sides. I keep reading that I need to use cream or Vaseline or whatever, but I just don’t think it’s worth it. I mean I’m almost done and it’ll heal eventually, right? (note to gentle reader… it isn’t all that bad, really…)

It’s also come to my attention that some people can’t believe I’m writing about this kind of stuff. But seriously, for those first few days before I changed my saddle it was the major concern of my trip. I mean, nothing else mattered. I didn’t give a crap’s ass where I ate or slept, all I could think about was my pain and numbness and wonder if I would ever be able to sleep with someone again. Maybe that’s kinda an adult issue, but, you know, I’m a male in my 20s. What could be more important? 🙂

Have we found Heaven? No, we’ve found pho. Tears of joy welled up in eye as we approached “Vietnamese Asian Restaurant” in Omaha, Nebraska. Oh sweet pho, how I love thee. We entered a pocket of Vietnam, complete with pink plastic bathroom chairs, martial arts soap operas, bucket of chopsticks, and flip flops. The only things missing were the humidity, wall fans, and the never quite dry concrete floor. Can’t have everything I guess. The food smacked us with authenticity which made this whole quest worth it. Even the tricolored bean jelly drink was right on. Who knew Nebraska would have this many Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Chinese? There was even an Oriental Market next door with Korean instant noodles. Hallelujeh, our week’s diet has been determined!

We’re staying in Omaha.

Tomorrow we visit the Omaha Zoo. We hear it’s better than Disneyland. Saturday there is a bike convention in Council Bluffs, and then RAGBRAI starts. Apparently it is a 15,000 person bike party through the entire state of Iowa. Then to Chicago’s Wizard World comic book convention! Parteeeeee!

nice penguin

(Pho is Vietnamese rice noodle soup. If you haven’t had it, you should try it with beef tendon and tripe!)

Since we wanted to join RAGBRAI, we had to slow our trip down thru Nebraska. We stayed in Norfolk for an extra day. We basically hung out at their public library and read some books and mags. I would have checked email, but they installed censorware which didn’t allow telnet access. After hours at the library we went to watch X-men. Outside the theater, we met a whole slew of BMX bikers. They talked us up really well. My favorite line went something like, “Damn, look at those tan lines. You were really white. If we biked from Portland would we be Asian, too?” After the movie, we saw them again at a park and three of them asked if they could bike with us.

The Norfolk kids’ bikes weren’t as tricked out as this one found during RAGBRAI…

And so we had an escort thru town by pretty cool teens on single speed BMXs, a couple of them missing a brake or having a broken saddle or headset. And they were all over the streets, blocking traffic like good delinquents should. They took us to a Chinese restaurant, but it was closed by then. We lit some crazyass panda bear fireworks. They were pretty cool – bright and nice; the kids, that is. I hope we planted seeds in their heads to take up bike touring, and I hope that before they go, they learn some road rules. 🙂

Wall Drug Dinosaur

All roads lead to Wall Drug

Jackalope

Movie of Wall Drug’s T-rex

Movie of the Chen Brothers’ $5 version

We left Rapid City and made it to Wall on the 10th. We saw the first highway signs for Wall Drug way back in the middle of Wyoming. By the time we got to Rapid City, we’d see one every fifteen minutes or so. Wall Drug was everything I thought it would be. Kitschy and cheesy and pretty fun. On the way to Wall we stopped by Olde Glory Fireworks and bought a whole arsenal to mail to our friend Grey. You have to wait for us Gray!

pyromania

Badlands

Movie of Chen brothers’ MI2

flying a kite in the Badlands

From Wall, we followed the Badlands Loop Highway, which is a nice 30 mile loop through the Badlands. While checking out the Badlands, we saw a yuppie couple with full-on biking gear, including clipless pedals and camelbacks, sunglasses and biking shorts, posing for photos of each other at a lookout point. They then rode about 20 feet to their sporty SUV and put the bikes away and changed out of their gear. I could not see any trails nearby, so I can only assume they totally faked biking in the Badlands. I hope Max and I put them to shame.

Prairie dog

staying in Kadoka

The road to Murdo turned out to be a disaster. My rear tire exploded and there was no way to fix it, but luckily a really nice guy named Doug pulled over and offered me a ride to Murdo which was 12 miles down as I was walking my bike. In Murdo, we checked out the Pioneer Auto Museum and then spent 3 hours trying to deal with my tire situation. A couple of the locals we met at gas stations and at the museum helped us out by calling everyone in town about a spare tire. No one had one! We sat at a gas station in the blazing heat holding up a sign that said that we needed a ride to Valentine. That wasn’t quite working so we moved to the other side of the highway away from town hoping to catch people as they got off the intersection. That didn’t work either. So then we waited at the gas station again and tried to find some RV people with bikes that we could buy a tire off of. That finally worked after a big hassle. Too big for this log. [Mark’s post trip note: for a clue what the big hassle was all about, read the very last paragraph of the final entry.] I was very tired by the end of the day.

The General Lee

parking reserved

crazy tire difference

The road from Murdo towards Valentine was pretty nice except for the heat. In White River (was that the name?) we decided to wait a few hours due to the heat and ended up playing some billiards. Thru Mission and to the Rosebud Casino was pretty fun. We had been warned by a few people about biking with expensive gear thru an Indian reservation, but it actually turned out really nice. It seemed to me that all the natives we met were really laid back and liked to joke around. We ended up staying at the Casino which had the world’s smallest swimming pool and the world’s largest 4 women.

freakin Nebraska!

nice sunset

The next day we got to Valentine and got me a new set of tires. Then we waited until late and biked during the night until I hit gravel and wiped out. That’s when we camped.

The next day it hit me: we’re in freakin Nebraska! Never in my life did I think I’d ever be in Nebraska. Over the next couple of days I’d come to realize that Nebraska has been the most enjoyable state to bike thru not including Oregon. Almost every town has a free city park, many with either a pool or showers.

Mark’s post trip note: We had originally dropped down to Valentine from Murdo so that we could take part of the country’s longest rail to trail, the Cowboy Trail, all the way to Norfolk and then get to Omaha somehow. Max had already seen the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD, so we felt like we could skip out of that kitschy feature. Unfortunately, the Cowboy Trail wasn’t as fun as we would have liked. It was a little too rough for our liking, but would have been awesome if we had knobbier tires. By the time we hit the C & O Canal Towpath in Maryland, we had switched tires and had a blast.

Mark’s post trip note 2: Norfolk was pretty cool, but smelly as all heck because it is next to some cow rendering plants. Fremont is nice and we were able to go canoeing for half a day.

We’ve met a whole bunch of other bikers all throughout our journey to Omaha from Murdo. All of them are going to Council Bluffs in Iowa to join 15,000 others in a ride across the state called RAGBRAI. We’ve decided to ride along for at least the first few days.

Now we are in Omaha. Gonna check out the zoo.

A word about Bedrock City, South Dakota. There was a great sarcastic train engineer/guide who led us on a hilarious dinosaur safari, but it didn’t make up for the big disappointment of not being able to fulfill my lifelong fantasy to court the sweet mother of Bam Bam. Apparently I am not alone, because although we shook hands with Fred and Barney, and had our way with Wilma, the luscious Betty was locked away in a bedrock house. Woe is me.

Wilma and Betty and Max

I guess I’ll have to keep dreaming of the black haired vixen I left behind.

A field aglow with fireflies for miles of riding. That’s what we witnessed the night out of Valentine, Nebraska. Due to the incredible daytime heat and my growing deranged lust for frozen entities, we decided to bike only in the early morning and dusk. After meeting a Race Across America competitor at the Valentine bike shop Yucca Dune, we hit the cooling Cowboy Trail. The trail will be the longest rail to trail conversion in the US when completed. Right now mainly a bunch of bridges are finished, but boy was that first one impressive. 150 feet above the river. Neato.

As night descended we entered reed fields. I saw just a few flashes at first but soon the entire roadside was a miniature lantern festival. Unfortunately the air was full of other bugs as well and I think I inhaled and ate quite a few. That night we just pulled off the side of the road and were eaten alive by blood suckers. The inside of the tent became a blood smeared mess like in some slasher movie.