Thursday, December 13, 2007

Was the dead guy wearing cycling shoes?


First, since I was kind of rude putting a terrible sneak peak negative of Denali, I thought I'd share a real photo. You are looking at 20,000+ feet of rock, ice and snow. I took this photo on a day that I still believe was the 3rd greatest day of my life. You'll hear the story in a few days.

(I wrote in blue pen in the morning and green pen in the evening)

August 28th
Slept for 11 hours last night. Body is still sore from yesterday. It's a beautiful morning, calm & cool. I am having a Power Bar, oatmeal and hot tang for breakfast. We are trying to decide how far to ride today. It all depends on how we feel on our bikes and on the terrain.

We ended up doing 50 to get close to Talkeetna, only 18-20 miles left. Terrain was rolling with a constant gradual climb. Rode 49.6 miles in 3 hours 28 minutes. Didn't feel tht good today on my bike. Staying at Montana Creek Campground. It truly sucks, it is a big gravel parking lot.

Highlights today include:
- descent traffic
- other bike tourists found a dead body on the side of the road
- bought some postcards to send home
- first sighting of the Susitna River

Lowlights today include:
- gravel parking lot
- lactic acid

Did you catch that part about other bike tourists found a dead body on the side of the road? True story. Remember the moms and kids I mentioned in my last post? Well, let's just say John and I were very, very lazy in getting out of Rocky Lake Campground. The mom's got out very early and got a good head start on us. We must have been on the road about 10 miles when I saw the mother on the wrong side of the road. It was sort of a pull off area with a gravel shoulder. She had a look on her face that told us there was something wrong. Like true men, we made an assumption that someone was having mechanicals and offered to help. She said, "No, that's not it. My son just found a dead body on the side of the road while taking a potty break! I'm just out here waiting for the police to show up." Just then, the boy comes out of the woods jumping up and down like he had just won a giant candy jack pot. He was so excited and made his mom promise that he got to tell and show the police to the body.

We just asked "Was the dead guy wearing cycling shoes?". When the mom and boy answered no, we got back on the road and headed north.

3 comments:

Jason said...

Holy crap! I guess that's Alaska's version of "road kill". I get freaked out by the numerous possum and deer I see on the side of the road. I think I faint if I came up on a dead body.

MG said...

yeah, that'd pretty much suck...

the kid seemed like he was having way too good of a time with it though. kinda' morbid.

what was it with the cycling shoes? did you think it was one of the germans you'd come upon earlier or something? curious...

cx nationals was AWESOME!! missed ya' down there buddy.

cheers,
mg

GNAT said...

MG, sounds like you had a good time at Nats. Wish I could have been there.

I asked about cycling shoes because I had fears that a motorist killed a cyclist. Had they been cycling shoes on that dead body, I'm pretty sure we would have turned around and ridden straight back to Anchorage to fly home.

Thankfully, the dead guy did not have cycling shoes and we pushed on.