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Travel Journal for Katura and Chris
"At the end of the tour, when the road disappears..."
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3rd-Jul-2008 10:08 pm - Different adventures.
kr & cn


Summer is here, and we're really settling into Eugene. Riding our bikes and living on the road for months was exciting, for sure. Now the excitement is a different flavor--anticipating the first fruits of the tomato plants, for example. And it's so nice to have a safe place to park the bikes. We have even gone so far as to buy a futon to make our visiting guests more comfortable!


This time last summer we were working furiously to own less stuff, to pare down to a bare minimum. Now, a year later, we are slowly and cautiously settling into a new home base. And I must confess, this process is also a heck of a lot of fun.
19th-May-2008 10:45 am - Eugene in the Springtime!
kr & cn
Somehow, now that we aren't living on the road, it's harder to focus on a travel-blog! But a quick update on life in Eugene nonetheless...

We're both settling into our jobs, learning skills & making friends. So this is good. We went to see a game of bike polo that is played in one of the local parks, and Chris is now hooked on the idea of this sport--he is making prototype mallets out of golf clubs, water-bottles, &c. He is whacking tennis balls down the traffic-free bike paths, and on the roads he takes pot-shots at bits of garbage or dandelion flowers to practice his aim. He's like a little kid with a new toy!

Chris also experimented with making a polo mallet out of a length of bamboo he had lying around...when he sawed off a section of it for the head of the mallet, he noticed a strange fibrous mass in the end. When he picked it out, he realized it had a tail--yup, somehow a mouse had managed to crawl into the length of bamboo and die! "I had always thought that bamboo was just a smelly plant to begin with, that explains a lot..." muttered Chris, aghast. And then he realized that he had only dislodged the back half of the mouse, he'd cut the mummified creature right in half when trimming the bamboo segment. (What's worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm? Finding half a worm!!)

Photos of bike polo (mouse-free) and of the wildflower festival at the local arboretum (which is where K did her geeking out) are right here. Hope everyone is well!
9th-Mar-2008 09:12 am - Moving right along...
kr & cn
Hello, team! What are those crazy bike-riding kids up to nowadays, you might be wondering? Well, the adventures are continuing apace. We managed to haul all of our worldly possessions (including a large number of bikes) up to Washington state, hoping to find cool jobs in the Seattle area. And then we found the cool jobs, but it turns out they were in Eugene, Oregon!

Chris is now learning to build bikes from scratch at a folding bike company, and Katura is in charge of hanging all the art shows at a non-profit art gallery in downtown Eugene. It's pretty exciting stuff.

We do have some new photos. One set is from a day spent at the Seattle Public Library (a building so nifty that it's hard to pay attention to your book!), and another set is just general snapshots of our adventures in Washington. Hoping to add some Eugene shots once our brains get settled somewhat! You can see 'em here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kr_cn/

Hugs to you all,

k&c
13th-Jan-2008 12:05 pm - Photo Update
kr & cn
Well, as it turns out, we have more than 600 photos of this crazy 4-month, almost 3,000-mile bike trip up on the internet. This morning we went through and did a new "set" of photos to make it less overwhelming. This "Best of the Trip" group is a merciful 66 shots, which you can scroll through really quick for an overview of the whole thing. We'll work on making sure the stories behind all the photos are explained in good detail in the descriptions, so you have a sense of why we chose this handful.

Here they are:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kr_cn/sets/72157603513490215/
11th-Jan-2008 06:26 am - Borderlands/La Frontera
kr & cn
Even the auto-transcribe machine got the picture: yesterday we finished the trip. We left the youth hostel in San Diego, took a tiny ferry across the San Diego Bay, and rode down the Silver Strand: a very lovely stretch of bike path runs down the narrow spit of sand the separates the bay from the ocean, and K stopped often to sketch wacky migrant duck populations. The cable for C's front brake spontaneously broke on the trail, but he decided that if we rode carefully he could get by on just the rear brake for the day.

When we got to the border itself, we had the option of crossing it as pedestrians or as cars. Read more... )
10th-Jan-2008 04:22 pm - Voice Post
kr & cn
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101K 0:30
“We did it. Oh we did it. Today we needed to Pihona(?) we had lunch and turned around and came back on the train to Santiago. We're done. We made it according to Christine's audometer(?) almost 3000mi down the coast with lots of detours and scenic side roads. Wah we did it. We're done.”

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10th-Jan-2008 06:53 am - San Diego--and just 18 miles to go.
kr & cn
We stayed in the San Diego youth hostel last night, after riding into the big city at sunset--very shiny view of the skyscrapers reflecting the golden light over the harbor. It's really a beautiful town here. This morning we head the last 18 miles south to the border, leaving the bulk of our stuff at the hostel for much a easier time dealing with customs!

Yesterday afternoon on our way into town we met up with our fellow traveller Alex, the recumbent cyclist we were riding with in much of northern Oregon. Though he's a faster rider than we are, he loved SD so much he stayed here for quite a while...so it's gratifying to catch up with him and share stories of the rest of the trip! He heads into Baja California tomorrow, ultimately his goal will be to reach Panama on his bike. Wow.

Tonight we may well be able to meet up with a Canadian cyclist we befriended in central California, too. So nice to see people and hear the rest of their trip stories!

Time to get ready to ride...

--Chris and Katura
9th-Jan-2008 11:51 am - Voice Post
kr & cn
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245K 1:14
“Cotura(?) here again. It is about 11:45 on Wednesday the 9th. Chris and I just decided to get off the main road and climb the very steep hill up into the Tori Pines State Park and it is so beautiful up here. Tori pine trees are one of the rarest mead of trees around. So its neat to have a huge chunk of them all over this mountain and it's just beautiful. We're away from the traffic, we're on this little park road, it's very steep. But it's amazing how steep hills are less of a big deal now. Now that we're more than 2000mi into the trip, it's steep it's actually quite of fun. Oh, if any of you haven't been to Tori Pines before I highly recommend it. It's just incredibly tranquile(?) and beautiful, it's a great view down to the ocean, there is a great view on east into all the hills and I just feel all very satisfying. We had a great day today. It's kinda sad to think that we're, that today is going to end.”

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9th-Jan-2008 10:04 am - Voice Post
kr & cn
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194K 1:01
“Hello friends, this is Christen Cathura(?). We are a little south of 10 Ali Hoe State Beach. Just south of Incanitas(?). We stayed last night in Ocean 5 we had a wonderful time. We're currently pulled over by the side of the road because there are tortoises(?) that are totally surfing out right along side the surfers. We can we're right next to the beach. The waves are coming in and the surfers are riding the waves and every now and then we'll see like 3 or 4 tortoises(?) riding the same waves and it's awesome. Tonight we should be able to get to San Diego and then tomorrow at Tijuana. We're really close to the end of the trip. Everyone we meet we just sort of talk to them briefly as we get by, thinks that we're from Canada because we started the trip in Canada. One Canadian was even really excited to meet us because, she was like. Oh I'm Canadian too. So little misunderstanding here and there but hey it's good to be Canadian right. It's it's it's a compliment oops there goes another tortoise. Alright we'll so excited we're having fun and we will update you as we progress.”

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8th-Jan-2008 07:40 am - Voice Post
kr & cn
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224K 1:10
“Good morning LiveJournal readers and listeners. This is Gatura(?) we are back on the road we camped last night in Dena Point along the cost here in Southern Orange County. And probably last night was a new to the tent actually because we're staying at friends houses and then new ___ from here on down to the border. The weather has been fabulous we sat out all the rains and now it's just big blue skies with tiny little wispy(?) puffy clouds every now and then lots of snow on the local mountain ___ in Gloria. Our camp site tonight was right next to the train track and effective from this rain now it's a quite rain dance so it might be able to keep talking always. We're looking forward to wrapping up this trip, we realized that it'll be almost 4 months since we started. So we've sent a long chunk of time adventury(?) and it's been really awesome. So ___ adventure alright.”

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