Is this really a post about biking?

There is a state of mind I sometime enter while biking, where I don't think using words but my mind processes ideas, long and slow.  I will come out of it an hour later and realize that I have come to conclusions without ever thinking deliberately on the subject.  Everything floats to the surface and is absentmindedly handled, considered; detritus of the mind precipitates like murky water slowly becoming clear.  The only way to let the muck settle from disturbed spring water is to sit back and let it settle.  

This simple lucidity is a reason to never stop biking.  But what do I do when that clarity of mind begins to tell me that I want to settle down somewhere for a while?  I love to travel by my own power, and over the last year and a half I have occupied myself, both employed and not, in traveling. Four hundred miles hiking. Three hundred miles by ski. One hundred and fifty miles by canoe and pilot gig (rowboat). Three thousand eight hundred miles by bike.  It isn't that I am tired of traveling- not by half.  But my mind is aflutter with the possibilities about having a house and housemates, a kitchen, a workshop, friends that are nearby, a slightly more typical job.  For the first time, I want to settle down- if only for a little while,  if only for a year and a day.

So I have begun looking ahead, past this trip and into my future once again.  It is a optimization problem that bears much of thought.  It is scary.  It is exciting.

A camp when a giant thunderstorm caught up to us.  There was nothing else for miles around.

A sunset under a thunderstorm

The best state sign

I didn't know they got this big

Eastern Colorado is hot

Keeping it classy on Hoosier Pass

Sometimes it feels like I am biking through a series of desktop backgrounds

My Halloween Costume

Morning comes to glory on the golden shoulders of the Rockies

We saw a herd of elk and a moose in this meadow in RMNP

It was so cold this morning at 10,000 ft we toasted our bagels, bananas, and a Luna Bar

Dave joining us for a few miles on his bighorn

Oliver on a littlehorn at CSU

So far I have gone 3575 miles and am writing this from Mike and Cathy Hettleman's house, family friends.  I will be loafing around Fort Collins for the next couple of days, climbing, reading, house and job searching, and (hopefully) learning how to shoot a gun.

Highlights of the last few weeks

• Racing lightning storms across the uncovered expanses of Kansas as they close in from five sides
• Staying with Svetlana and Richard in Florence, CO.  One of the coolest families I have had the pleasure of getting to know on this entire trip.
• Crossing the continental divide- twice
• Seeing the Rockies from 12,150 feet
• Racing a real bighorn down a mountain pass at 23mph for several hundred feet