Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Day 51: Dubois, WY To Jackson, WY

When we woke up, the hotel office asn't open yet. Though most travelers could have just left their keys and gone, we hadn't paid yet, because we'd been checked in by the owner's son. Since we were very hungry, we packed the bike up and rode downtown.

The sidewalks of Dubois are made of wood, in an effort to keep the mud out of the buildings. The old section of Dubois is very western, with all sorts of history.

There's also a former mine in town. We weren't in town long before finding a coffee shop to camp out at and enjoy breakfast.

While there we talked at length with the owner, who had ridden a bicycle from Seattle to New York many years earlier. Once again, we really wanted to be done with the trip, and to just be hanging out at a coffee shop at home getting things done.

When we left the coffee shop, we stopped at a gas station so that Jillian could ride the giant Jackalope.

Then we were finally able to check out of the hotel and get on the road for real, only to stop at a gas station on the edge of town to enjoy our last civilized bathroom stop for a while. For a gas station in the middle of nowhere, the lines to use the bathroom were rather lengthy.

Perhaps because the scenery was finally green instead of brown, we were able to perk up and got into a better mood. We talked about teaching English, and told favorite short stories we remembered for a while. We soon hit more road construction. Time time, the pilot truck gave us a ride over the very, very rough road.

There couldn't have a been a better time for us to get a lift. The truck drove us almost half way up the pass, before dropping us off after the construction. We climbed for a while before coming to a little store/motel. Here we refueled on drinks and food and met another group of touring cyclists. This group was moving slow, taking a few seasons to do a cross country ride. This summer they were doing Denver to San Francisco, the long way.

The mountains started to look very impressive as we got closer and closer to the top.

But we were to be robbed of the chance to ride over the top of Togwotee Pass. Just before we got there we once again hit road construction, and had to hop in the back of the pilot truck.

We were actually very glad to not be on the road. There was no pavement at all, with huge machines all over. We'd read reports of cyclists who hit this stretch on a Sunday and were stuck riding it. We were glad it wasn't us. After the first stretch, we stopped at a transfer station and waited for another pilot truck. We finished the construction at about 2 in the afternoon.

From here we were hoping for a very easy ride to Jackson, over 3000 feet below us. We rode a little way before stopping at a gas station for lunch. Inside our jaws dropped at the price of a can of soup, but we were very amused by the cans of air for people who aren't used to the altitude.

Just down the street from the gas station we caught our best view yet of the Tetons.

The Tetons are something you need to see first hand. No picture will ever do them justice. All of Jackson Hole Valley was gorgeous in the same way. No matter where you were there was a set of five to seven thousand food tall mountains in view.

The change in geography between the two sides of the pass was startling. Now, on the west side of the pass, there were trees everywhere. Our original plan had been to ride around Jackson Lake, but we were quickly turned off to the idea by the steep prices at the gate to Yellowstone (Note: Turns out there is no road around the west side of Jackson Lake; I'd simply read the map wrong).

Riding the highway to Jackson wasn't a bad consolation ride. The wind was in our favor, and we rode hard to try and have some time in Jackson to explore. We even saw other cyclists out, though we were unable to catch them (they weren't touring cyclists). Some time after passing through the little hamlet of Moose, I bonked. We stopped at a gas station on the edge of town and refueled on slushies.

We dragged ourselves into Jackson, only to find it was much too touristy for our tastes. Mostly it was because of the absurd number of people in town, and the fact that our night at the Motel 6 was going to rank as one of our most expensive hotel rooms all trip.

Jackson was a kind of neat town, and I'm sure it's a fun place to visit if you have the money, but we just felt out of place. We checked in to the Motel 6, which was full of other young people traveling, and discovered that we were spending the night in an Ikea Catalog.

We did have enough time to walk back toward town for a real dinner. We had some wonderful potpie at the Sidewinder, as well as some fantastic salads. Though we couldn't have been very good food critics after last night's meal. After the walk home, it was laundry time. Unfortunately, there were lines to do laundry, and we ended up hand washing everything, hoping it would dry by morning, which was doubtful, since it was getting late already.

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