Tag Archives: RTWbyBIKE

The Beartooth Highway – Yellowstone on the way to Salt Lake City

The Beartooth Highway was a really great ride and it goes up to 10036 feet (3345 meter). Yellowstone is impressive no question about that. The scenery, the geysers and the wildlife; but suddenly there were everywhere so many people, partially you had to cue up. We were not use to it. Nevertheless we enjoyed the parts we saw but we decided to shorten it a little bit. A funny thing was we met Bill and Josh at the camp site and they gave us one of these hiking dried food bags for the way, “Pad Thai”. Everybody who knows us knows we do love Southeast Asian food especially Pad Thai – but like that??? So we are curious to find out one of these days how the taste is – but for now we will keep it as an emergency reserve. Thank you Bill and Josh! It was a pleasure meeting you and have save travels!

It was not only because of the crowded places we hurried up. In Salt Lake City, were we are just know, we are hosted by Patty and Kevin – thank both of you for your great hospitality and your help!!! They offered us to stay with them and using their workshop.  Do you remember the broken gas pipe? Since then we do smell a little bit too much gas all the time, and sometimes the Transalp seems not to take the throttle – it feels like little holes/hick-ups. Sascha is just working on that… I hope we will find out the reason and we are able to fix it. As we were rushing we just went through Grand Teton National Park but really enjoyed the ride – it is certainly worth to spend more time there. Going to Jackson (hey you know the song!?) we were hungry, tired and running late. Just before the sunset we found a place for our tent when we drove 6km into a gravel road a little bit south of Jackson. Surrounded by cows, mosquito’s and birds we felt soon asleep. We woke up early to arrive in time in Salt Lake City. We built down the soaking wet tent (we slept next to a river) with frozen fingers and we hopped onto the bikes. Somehow it felt very strange to me (I did not have a coffee yet!) and I said so to Sascha. He just yawned, yeah me as well… BUT ohhhhh nooooo!!! You have a flat tire!!! Here we go… we used the “fix A flat” as we wanted to get a new tire anyhow. And with some stops at gas stations filling up air we finally made it to Patty and Kevin in Salt Lake City. We started with maybe 2-3°C in the morning and arrived completely sweated and overheated with 36°C. Puhhh we need to get used to the new climate from now on and rearrange our clothing packs.

Oh I nearly forgot to mention our new companions. The 18th June we had our 8th Wedding Anniversary (and 18 years together). Sascha got a little black bear from me to take care of him. Two days later on a very remote recreation camp we found `Pepe´ alone on a bench looking really sad. For sure there is a kid somewhere very sad as well. We decided to take Pepe with us – either we will find his owner somewhere on the way or we will find a new kid taking care of him on our way to Tierra del Fuego. So from now on Kerstin is driving `two-up´ ;)

Cheers and see you soon!

 

 

 

Into the Wild (-derness)

In the early chilly morning we left Anchorage to reach Denali National Park and finally made it at the end of the day.  It was mostly cloudy and later on it even started to rain. Finally, after a 400km ride in the rain we reached Healy and moved in the warm and dry trailer of Paul who is a fellow rider which we know from ADVrider.com. We had an awesome time in and around Denali. Actually it is hard to find the right words to express the beauty and the variety of the wild life and the scenery – it is breathtaking and we were incredible lucky with the weather. Even Mount Denali was showing his full presence to us and we now belong to the 30% club (only 30% of all visitors to the park can say that they even have seen Denali without being covered completely in clouds…). We saw bears (even quite some beers….;), moose,  Dall sheep, arctic ground squirrels, caribous, marmots, a raven nest and many more… we had a wonderful time in the wilderness and spent some very relaxed moments with Paul, his son Brice and the friends of Paul (THANK YOU PAUL it was such a great time and whenever you come to Germany there is always a place for you!). Very strange thing here is the “time”… you are sitting at the fire and having a beer or two and you think it must be around 19:00 or 20:00 o´clock… and Paul says “ohh I think I should go to bed soon…”, my response was “hmmm, Ok what’s the time?” “00.45”… the Sun here at this time of the year nearly never goes away… And what it doesn’t make it better is that all our “watches” e.g. camera, phone, laptop they all show a different time… but we are working on it to set them right…. ;)