Gosh, it doesn’t take long and numbers start to add up. You read that right, we have 163 birds- maybe a few more? Most of them are chicks right now, a few of them are chicks we are brooding for a friend. Here are the numbers:

• 10 egg laying hens (full grown)
• 50 meat chicken chicks
• 68 straight run layer chicks
  • straight run means males and females (cockerels and pullets)

• 15 heritage turkey chicks, mixed breeds
• 20 chicks I am brooding for a friend

Birds are an easy entry in to having farm animals around. They’re cheap (cheep?) upfront, and they provide a lot of food, not to mention fertilizer for the pasture. I think they’re probably a little more expensive to raise on a per pound basis? But for now this is our start.  Eventually we’ll get around to posting some details about all of this.

Here is what it looks like around here now:

We did! We purchased it in Feb 2013. It’s about 8.5 acres, right on the edge of Montrose, and it has a house, outbuildings, and a pasture in pretty decent shape. The area here is high desert, so we have irrigation water on just about all of the land. What? We decided this is a life we want to live while we were in China. But it goes back further than that. Montrose is a farming community, and the town I grew up in (Huntley, IL) is/was also a farming community. I have always wanted to be a farmer. I was even in FFA for awhile in High School.

Here is an aerial image of our property courtesy of Google.

8.5 acres of fun!

See those bare spots out there in the pasture?  Yup, we still gotta do something about those.

This house was built in 1961, it has very good bones but eventually we’ll get some pictures up and you will see that it needs a little updating. It’s kind of like a grandma’s house now.

What are we planning to do with all of this? Our main goal is to more or less self sufficient. We aren’t planning to grow grains or sugar, but we are hoping to grow most of our own vegetables and raise our own meats & dairy. I know we can do it; Dream it, Plan it, Do it. We might eventually try to make a small business out of it, but for now we are focusing on foods for us, family, and some friends.

Life on our farm and organic farming is what the new focus of this blog. Or maybe we’ll start a new one? Not sure. But there is a whole lot of cool stuff to talk about- way more than you would expect to hear. So stay tuned.

For those of you who know us, you can tell we are playing Catch Up here. We moved from Bend, Oregon to Montrose, Colorado back in the Fall of 2012. This was a very difficult decision to make. Oregon is a fantastic State, and Bend is an awesome town. There is a lot of love there. We also have a lot of really great friends there. And the beer.

But family is important. We’re now living in Emily’s hometown and her sister & family, parents and some extended family live here. And Montrose is not a bad place to live. Like Bend, it’s hard to get to and remote. Like Bend it is surrounded by mountains and cool outdoors stuff. I also like the fact that, like Bend, there is no interstate running through town. Somehow that seems to support a slower pace of life. However Montrose only has 2 breweries compared to Bend’s 19. And Montrose is a little, how to say it, small townish? It’s all good.

Our cycling adventure made a big impact on our lives, especially the 15 months cycling through Asia. Almost without exception the people are poor and happy. Asia was a very unique experience in this regard. What can we learn from it?

Family is a huge part of life throughout Asia. In the US- and the 2 of us are no exception- family members often live far away from each other. Seeing each other a few times a year. In Asia it’s not uncommon for an entire extended family to live in a one room house/shack. Grandparents watch the children, middle aged people work and farm, and children help with daily chores. They sleep together on the floor and do it all again the next day. For a westerner, living like this would probably make us unhappy. We’d want more. But our impression, based on what we saw is they are happy; who needs anything more? What is Want anyway? They have a roof, food, and they’re all together.

To be clear, life is certainly not perfect in Asia, just like it’s not prefect here. Some of the cultural differences are hard to see. For instance arranged marriages are still common in India & Nepal. ‘Love marriages’ are the exception in many areas. Trash and sewer services are pretty much non-existent in most of Asia- therefore pollution is a problem- seen and unseen. Kids in rural areas often don’t have access to schools. Illiteracy is common. However, school and literacy aren’t necessarily needed if the kids are taking over the family business or growing food. Hard to say but it’s true. Foreign NGO’s sometimes have a hard time admitting it themselves.

(We promise we are going to keep updating this website. This is the first of many posts we will publish in the next few days to get caught up)

Well we’ve been back in the US for a bit over a year now. We have all sorts of mixed emotions about being back. Mostly we are glad to be amongst friends and family. We also continue to be disappointed by apathy in the US. But all of that is way off subject.

What this post is about is things we would & wouldn’t do again related to out bicycle tour. The short answer is we would do it again in a heart beat!

We loved New Zealand and Australia, and it was good to be in a developed country before heading in to Asia. We could test our gear, acquire anything extra, and ease in to things a little bit. However we probably spent a little too long in Australia. We loved it and hope to go back and ride some more. But life is expensive there, maybe a tad more expensive than in the US, and since we were on a tight budget it ultimately led to us having to shorten our trip by a few months.

Traveling by air with a bike is no fun. We never really did get good at it. Rules change by airline, not by country of origin or destination. I guess that makes sense but it can be an expensive learning curve. Some examples are we flew from the US to New Zealand with our bikes & gear and paid about $75 each for excess/oversize baggage. Not bad. We flew from Australia to Indonesia and paid $300 each for excess baggage. Ouch. We flew from Nepal to Denver with all of our stuff and paid nothing extra. But that ticket was expensive…

We had no problems at all with our Surly Long Haul Trucker frames. However we did have a fair amount of problems with our brakes and wheels. Regarding the brakes twice we had a spring break and lead to constant rubbing of the brake pad on the wheel. And with our wheels we wrote a lot about wheel failure due to abrasion from the brake pads rubbing through the side wall of the wire. If we were buying bikes again for a trip like this we would stick with the Surly LHT frame but we would go with the disc brake model, aka the Disc Trucker. Disc brakes do wear, rub, make noises, are fragile and generally aren’t prefect. But they don’t lead to wheel failure like rim brakes do. Of course if doing this we would have to bring all of our spare rotors and brake pads and know how to service it all. Disc brakes for bikes don’t exist in Asia, much less parts and know how. Another thing related to wheels is 26″ is definitely the way to go when in developing countries- not 700c. Tubes, tires and rims for 700c wheels aren’t easily available in Asia.

We didn’t have a whole lot of trouble with the drive train in either of our bikes. We lubed our chains every day and every few months we would take the chain off and clean it with gasoline. However I did get a case of bike geek envy when we came across a Dutch couple bike touring in China. Our bikes have 27 speeds. Sounds like a lot but probably 1/2 of them are duplicates. I won’t go in to the techy details but duplicate gearing on a bike is pretty common. This makes for extra weight and probably unnecessary stuff. The Dutch couple had 1 chain ring in front (we had 3) and they had 1 gear in back (we had a 9 speed cassette). They used a fancy 14 speed Rohloff internal geared hub on the rear, giving them 14 unique gears. And they had a belt drive instead of a chain. No chain to oil or wear out. This is the set up I would go with is doing a trip like this again and if I had a budget high enough to allow for a Rohloff

Having a tent and basically being able to camp is very nice. Not absolutely required, especially in Asia, but having the gear and being able to camp anywhere is a very nice thing. Drawbacks of this is we would sometimes go weeks or months without using our tent, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, camp stove, etc. Bulky, heavy, and at times burdensome. Small, cheap guesthouses are everywhere in Asia- they’re generally about $5 per night for 2 people. Quality for cheap rooms like this varies by country. In western China they came with electric blankets and an electric tea kettle. They were usually nice and clean in Thailand. Not so nice in India & Nepal. Camping in crowded Asian areas is not always fun. No privacy at all. Kids and grown men would hang out near our camp until the sun went down. And they’d be back at first light. However camping in remote places was always great. We had solitude, a clean tent, clean sleeping bags and it was free.

We used Ortlieb panniers and a combination of Tubus and Old Man Mountain racks. See our gear list for specifics on the racks. I like the combo of the Tubus rack in back and the Old Man Mountain rack in front. The Ortlieb bags did very well for the whole trip. They’re still waterproof and ready for a lot more miles. But we do have 2 complaints about them, see this post for a description.

Having a proper tool kit was essential. Maybe less so for a shorter trip, but for a 2 year trip it was invaluable. I repacked wheel hubs, replaced spokes, removed cassettes, not to mention all of the routine maintenance. The only tool I brought and didn’t use was a crank puller.

I know we have mentioned this before, but our single favorite country was Indonesia. It wasn’t all that great for cycling (too hot & steep), but the people were very friendly and it is very culturally diverse. Hindus, Muslims, Christians. Farmers, fishermen, shop keepers. And smiles all around. We loved it. For cycling our favorite places were western China and northern India. The 2 most populated countries in the world, who would of thought they would be our favorite places to ride? The nice spots about these places are they are very rural, very mountainous, and culturally very Tibetan.

We were hoping to ride from China, through Tibet, and in to Nepal. We would have done this during the summer of 2011. There are a ton of varying descriptions about doing this online, and generally speaking it wasn’t all that helpful. We just figured we’d get close to the border and see what happens. As it turned out the summer of 2011 was a double-whammy with the 90^th anniversary of communism in China and the 60^th anniversary of the ‘peaceful liberation’ of Tibet. To commemorate these anniversaries in June the Chinese government decided they were not allowing foreigners to enter Tibet and in July they kicked all foreigners out of Tibet. So, I guess Tibet wasn’t going to happen for us. Even if we were allowed to enter, the government we would have required us to hire a guide which probably would have been out of our budget. But it was certainly worth a try and we did experience a lot of wonderful Tibetan culture in the regions surrounding Tibet (China, India, Nepal). Tashi Dele!

We’re happy to say that we will do more cycle touring in the years to come. Traveling by bicycle completely changes the experience of travel. With most forms of travel it’s all about the destination. The beach, the mountains, the city. With cycling its all about the journey between destinations. Passing through small villages to eat or sleep, the types of places most tourists never pass through, let alone stop in. “Wonder what will happen this time?” Seeing how life really is lived in these areas versus what it might be like in Destination A. It’s a great experience.

Well I guess this concludes the bicycling portion of our website, at least for now. This website will change in the coming months to focus on our life now in Colorado. We’ll talk a lot about the changes we’re making and how our 2 year adventure influenced them. We are deliberately trying to stay out of the rat race, out of the consumer culture, and out of the excessive waste and materialism that is typical in our part of the world. Stay tuned.

We have decided to start updating our web page again.  Life is always changing and we like to talk about those changes- and people seem to like to read about them too.

We recently made the big move from Oregon to Colorado.  We love Oregon and Bend, the town we lived in.  Oregon is a hugely diverse place; mountains, glaciers, rain forests, deserts, the coast, hot springs, cities, all within a few hours drive of each other- a lot like New Zealand actually.  The hardest part of leaving Oregon was leaving our friends.  Of course we’ll see them all again and we’ll enjoy seeing gradual changes seem bigger as we go from seeing each other each week to a few times a year.

Colorado is also an awesome place and we are going to be happy here.  Emily is from Colorado and her family is here and excited to have us back home.  We are working on having a kid (no news yet), and having family close by will be great for that.

Emily is working as an Occupational Therapist in Montrose and I am between jobs at the moment.  But I have a pretty fun job lined up for the winter- a lift operator at Telluride Ski Resort!  Stress?  Nope.

We are looking to buy property in the area and start a small farm.  In time this blog will describe lifes changes as we go from city slickers to country folk, and describe how we do it all.  We have already made quite a few changes as we move in this direction, stay tuned for more posts as we update this site with what we have been up to since we got back from our 2 year bicycle tour.

We did it!  We completed our trip and didn’t kill each other.  So now we are officially married as of June 16, 2012!

We married near Emily’s hometown in Colorado with my dad as the Officiant and surrounded by family, friends, and the San Juan Mountains.  It was a great day.

Whats next for us?  We’re working on a kiddo.  Emphasis on a.  One.  1.  We’re living in Bend, Oregon for now.  Emily is back at work as an Occupational Therapist and John is working at an organic ranch, learning all he can for our future small scale farming adventures.

We don't have many pictures yet so this is as good as it gets.

It’s hard to put it all down in such concrete figures; our adventure was so much more than what these numbers say.  But here is what it looked like:

Total distance

John  21,545 km.  13,387 miles.

Emily  About 20,745 km.  12,890 miles.

*All distances calculated on a bike computer of dubious accuracy.  Emily’s distance is a little less than John’s because she went home for 2 weeks of December 2010 and John went on a solo ride in northern Thailand.

Duration

23 months.  We left Bend, Oregon on January 5, 2010 and returned to Colorado on December 2, 2011.

Dollars spent

John  $26,191

Emily  $25,204

Works out to $105/day.  These dollar figures include 100% of our spend on the trip.  Food, visas, plane tickets, bike parts, clothing, gifts, camping fees, guesthouses, shipping boxes back home, trains, scuba certification and dives, albatross sightseeing, paragliding, etc.  It does not include the start up costs before we left, such as the cost of our bikes, racks, panniers, and the gear that goes inside.

We started the trip figuring the cost would be ~$43/day.  We went over that in NZ and OZ but we expected that.  Asia was cheap, we lived on $20/day total for both of us the entire time we were there.  But add in flights, train tickets, bike parts, souvenirs, shipping, and all of the little expenses and we couldn’t fit that in to $20/day.

We used ATM cards to get money.  No travelers checks and no wad of cash in the bottom of our panniers.  We used Charles Schwab for our bank; they gave us interest earning checking accounts, refundable ATM fees, and no foreign transaction fee.  Quite a deal.

Photos taken

15,000+.  We would take the pictures off the camera card and in to our computer.  Then after leaving each country we would take the pictures off the computer and put them on a portable hard drive.  We’d also send home a thumb drive with our pictures from each country.  Even with all of that ‘insurance’ we still lost about 1/2 of our pictures from Australia and most of our pictures from Angkor Wat in Cambodia.  Grrr.

Countries visited

11.  New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, India and Nepal.

Time spent camping

Roughly half of the nights on our trip we camped.  We camped almost every night in New Zealand and Australia (8 months!), the exception being when we got to sleep in a locals house.  We camped a lot in China, India and Nepal; and a fair amount in Laos.  We did camp in every country at least once, I think Malaysia gets the token for only 1 night.  When we would stay in a hotel the average price we paid was about $7 per night, sometimes including breakfast.  With prices like that it’s kinda hard to sleep in a tent, but sometimes we would get fed up with the filth and choose our nice clean tent and sleeping bags even though we’d often have to deal with curious locals and a lack of privacy all night long.

Flat tires and other wheel issues

During the first 5 months or so of our trip we each had about 20 flat tires.  Then we got a new set of tires and we each had 2 flat tires each for the remaining 18 months!  Schwalbe Marathon Plus Tour tires are awesome!

We went through a total of 11 wheels, 4 tires, and lots of tubes.  The wheels are the surprising thing.  Reading books before we left I read about wheels splitting in half along the spoke holes.  That never happened to us.  What did happen was the rim would split around the perimeter where the brake pads rub.

Chains

2.  We rode with a spare chain for each of our bikes.  We swapped chains in Bangkok after 11 months.  We cleaned the old chains in an old water bottle with some gasoline in it, then carried that chain with us through the rest of Asia.  Somewhere in western Nepal we swapped chains again and donated the dirty chain to a guy along the road.  2 chains, not bad.

Brake pads

Lots, and they’re not as easy to find as you’d think.  If there was one thing we’d change about our bike setup, it’d be to go with disc brakes.  Less wear on our wheels is the primary reason.  Of course if we did this we’d need to carry all of our spares and know how to fit them.

Dumplings eaten

About 10 million.  Well that’s probably an exaggeration, but we did eat a lot of them.  Mostly in China, India and Nepal.

Tents

2.  We used Nemo tents and eventually both zippers failed on our first tent.  When Emily was back in the States in Dec 2010 they gave us another tent at no charge.  Both zippers on that tent failed as well…

Tata is a huge Indian company, similar to General Electric or General Motors.  But bigger- or at least more diverse.  Most noticeable to us was when we were in India and Nepal just about every large truck was made by Tata.  But then we’d start to see the Tata logo on cars, satellite dishes, diamond jewelers, cell phones, laundry detergent; they’re the worlds 2nd largest tea company, the 5th largest steel (they own British Steel), computers and IT companies, banks, electricity generation, chemicals.  Huge.

Sometimes when we’d talk with local people they would talk about American manufacturing, and that India needs to be more like America.  They would say ‘We have Tata, that’s all we have.’

Tata doesn’t have a huge presence in the US- at least not that I know of.  But if you buy Tetley tea, you will notice a Tata logo on that box.

Here’s a little story to make you all cringe a little bit.  You’ve heard us mention over and over about the honking in Asia.  It drove us crazy.  And you’ve heard stories about crazy drivers there too, doing high speed passes on blind corners and stupid things like that.  I guess there were crazy cyclists too?

Generally there aren’t bike lanes or wide shoulders over there.  If a driver coming towards us wants to pass another car, they don’t wait until they get past us to make their pass.  They’d pull out, floor the gas and run us off the road in their impatient efforts to get where ever they’re going faster.  To help combat this annoying habit, when I’d see an oncoming driver attempt to pass another oncoming car, instead of pulling over to get out of the way I’d pull in to the middle of the lane to say “I’m not moving for you”.  Almost always the drivers would pull back in to their lane and wait to pass until they’re behind us.  But every once in awhile I’d see a puff of black smoke come out of the exhaust pipe and know that this guy isn’t backing down.  Of course then I would pull over and get out of the way, maybe with a few gestures of protest.  Emily would normally be behind me and was never thrilled with stunts like this.

Maneuvers like this would happen several times each day.  My worst experience was in Nepal when an oncoming bus was passing another bus.  No shoulder for me, with a vertical drop off in to a concrete ditch.  I pull out to tell the speeding bus coming towards me to ‘Wait until you get past us’, I see the puff of black smoke and now I have nowhere to go.  Close call, and I had bad brakes at the time due to my wheel issues.  Emily has had her own close calls and she was much more flagrant in her gestures to these crazy drivers.

One story I read on Mr Pumpy’s blog (happy reading, this guy is a whacko) described the usual oncoming bus passing another bus- this also happened to be in Nepal.  But to make this story unique he experienced a 3rd bus passing the 2 other buses.  3 buses coming straight at him.  It turned out to be a near death experience for him.  Ahh the joys of world travel.