Cirque du Solei

Yes! We were so lucky to see Cirque du Solei Live! This was definitely the highlight of our stay in San Francisco, however beautiful and interesting this city is!
The show was amazing! Probably the best show we've ever seen. Whoever knows Cirque du Solei, can understand what we are talking about; whoever doesn't - hight time to check them out :)
Thank you Santa! ;)


That's just a taste of what we saw

On the way back to our bikes

It’s been over a month since we last pedal, seems so long ago…and it was very unlucky day; we were in a hurry to meet up with someone and Raul got a flat tire – twice! Bad luck seems to come in package…we haven’t had a single problem with bikes for over 5 months and now three punctures in less than a week! All happened to the same wheel and the last two ones without obvious reason. Faulty inner tube? We hope so, we changed it for a new one and see how it goes in a couple of days…

Now we are on the car, still a day and a half driving ahead; yellow landscape of California’s desert passing behind the widow; temperatures around 20’s C (60’s F), so difficult to imagine that Christmas are in a month time; we are stuck here in summer, for the last 5 months; summer is good, is definitely good for cycling, but it is also good when it ends…

Raul’s the driver, so I can do some catching up on our blog. We’ve done over 2000 m in the last two weeks in order  to visit the greatest, the lowest, the hottest and the craziest places in western US – Yosemite NP, Death Valley, Las Vegas and Grand Canyon. It’s been very intense trip – from mountains to desert, from over 2000 m a.s.l. to nearly 100 m u.s.l. (I had my ears all the time blockedJ), from the greatest trees to places where there was no living being, from soundless desert to probably the noisiest city in US. It was intense, it was crazy, but it was worth it. I think we did the best of our time; we spent 2 full days in each park and enjoy it as much as we could; however, there are places we’d like to visit again…

Surely many will ask why by car, if we are on bike tour? Ok. So I’ll explain; we want to continue cycling along Pacific Coast and cross the Mexican border in California Baja (Baja is apparently safer and beautiful and less touristy), but we also wanted to see those Parks, who knows if we ever be back in this part of the world…  it’s November and we were already out of season, struggling with sub-zero temperatures at night, short days and cool evenings; if we cycled, places like Yosemite or Grand Canyon would be deeply buried under snow, our gears are not ready for this, and we would have to cycle back to the Pacific –it would take us 2-3 months, we are not welcome for so long in US. So, excused? ;)

And the Parks itself – stunning, breathtaking, extraordinary! Much to say, hope we will fing some time soon to share  our experienceJ

Ukiah

a small town north of San Francisco where weird things happen....time elapsed, space froze and not knowing when and how we are still here in the same spot nearly 3 weeks after we first arrived here. But things are back to normal, the Sun travels its usual route on the sky, people are walking, card are riding, Halloween decoration are being replaced by Christmas ones, Planet seems to keep spinning, and we are moving on...however we'll be back again to Ukiah! We are going on a side-trip to see the great parks: Yosemite, Death Valley and Grand Canyon, by car... I know, some people felt a bit disappointed that us-cyclist go by car... but we never felt that we have to cycle everywhere on this trip, this journey is more about travelling rather than cycling and in the circumstances we have (late in the season -snow in Yosemite and we want to keep cycling along the coast) car is more convenient for us to make a loop trip of over 2000 miles...but we'll be back and pick our bikes from exactly where we left them and start cycling from where we stopped!
another weird thing about Ukiah was two totally unexpected meetings within one day!
First an e-mail from Alex, a great person and cyclist who hosted us in Nelson, BC and who coincidentally, at that time in Nelson, was about to start pretty much the same cycling trip as we are on ; and so we were in touch and trying to catch up somewhere on the way, and  there is she! Stuck in Ukiah as well for the last 2 weeks :)

with Alex and her friend Jen

And then totally unexpected visit from 'the old world', a friend from Edinburgh, who happened to be in SF. Daniel was the first person from ''far-away' who visited us here; it was super short visit, but it was so great to meet him! However, he left us a bit melancholic, missing you all there even more...

with Daniel

And so it happened! 

On a sunny day of the 12th of October 2011, in a beautiful victorian town of Eureka, 8km before our speedometers shown 7000km we had the first flat tire! Raul's rear wheel was the first one to fail...

That was a big nasty nail that pinched the wheel and ripped the inner tube so badly that it might not be fixable...something we need to check; that day we just put new inner tube to save some time.

We were lucky that it happened next to a car repair place , so we had all tools handy :)

Raul happily coming back with pumped wheel!

No website, but still looking....


Unfortunately, despite our efforts, it looks as if we won't have our tri-lingual website, at least not very soon..:( we tried for over a year, we tried to get different people involved, but it never worked out. We can't afford paying to have the website done, we are looking for a sponsorship or some king of co-operation...we will still keep looking.
But as for now the blog, as it looks now, is the most we can offer. That's all we can do with the tools, knowledge and little time we had. So we at least try to write some stories in our own languages, the rest will be in English. However, if there is something you would like to have translated to Polish or Spanish, we can do it.


Niestety  musimy oficjalnie wyznać, że wygląda na to, że - przynajmniej na razie - nie będziemy mieli naszej strony internetowej w trzech językach...:( chociaż materiały są gotowe, nie udało znaleźć się nam nikogo (a próbowaliśmy przez ponad rok - były obietnice, spełzły na niczym...) kto stworzyłby tę stronę dla nas; nasz budżet jest ograniczony, dlatego jedyne, co możemy zaoferować to sponsoring lub inna forma współpracy; ciągle szukamy...
Blog, tak jak w tej chwili wygląda, to maksimum jakie możemy zaoferować - narzędia są ograniczone, nasza wiedza niewielka, a czas wieczorami na kempingu krótki...
wiekszość informacji będzie w języku angielskim (jeslit tłumacz google sobie nie radzi, chętnie przetłumaczę), jedynie co jakiś czas napisze coś po polsku w dzienniku. I tyle, na razie!


No website, pero seguimos buscando...
Desafortunadamente apesar de todos los esfuerzos, parece ser que no vamos a tener la web en tres idiomas, almenos no por el momento...(hemos estado intentandolo desde hace mas de 14 meses, lo hemos intentado con diferente gente que ofrecio ayudarnos pero nunca se ha llegado a realizar) No podemos permitirnos el pagar a un disenador de webs, estamos buscando por un patrocinador o alguna forma de colaboracion...seguimos buscando.
Por el momento el blog sigue siendo lo mejor que podemos ofrecer, con las herramientas que tenemos, el limitado tiempo y acceso a internet del que disponemos mientras viajamosy es por esta razon por lo que almenos intentaremos escribir algunos de los articulos en nuestras lenguas madre y el resto en Ingles. Detodas maneras si hay algun articulo de los que solo estan en Ingles que quieres que lo traduzcamos al Polaco o al Espanol haznolo saber he intentaremos hacerlo para que puedas leerlo.

making our lives easier :)

so we upgraded our bikes a little bit - we now proudly carry flags of our countries and with info about our project; you can't probably imagine how many times a day we are asked: where are you heading to? o! where did you start? o!! how long have you been o the road? hmmm.... where are you from? spain and...? a! etc.

hope this will answer at least some of the questions....

and small luxury for Marta:) now she can drink her coffee and 'drive', that what people do here in US...

Vancouver

We spent in Vancouver 10 days, a bit more than we thought we would, but we had great time there and we met great people. It was the first big city after we left New York nearly four months ago. Did we miss big cities? I think we did, surly some aspects of them; the first thing we did, after arriving to Van, was to go for lunch. But not just anywhere – we went to an Ethiopian restaurant; up until then the only ‘exotic’ food we came across was Chinese…

We wanted to stay longer in Vancouver, because there was few things we had to get done and only big city offers this services; first of all catch up a little bit with blogging (hope you can appreciate this; for those who haven’t checked it yet go to ‘route’ – Marta spent the whole day mapping our trip!), fix/buy/exchange some equipment (unfortunately one zip in our tent stopped working, but luckily we found a tiny repair shop run by an afghan guy who replaced the zip for $20, so we didn’t have to go through the whole reclamation process, that would be pretty complicated for us; apart from that we had to exchange the sleeping mat that was faulty and to get some more bits and bobs) and last, but not the least check our bikes. By the time we arrived to Van, we had over 5000 km on our speedometers – high time to do a check-up. We made small research and found out that there is in Van a community bike shop, as they call here places like The Bike Station; and so we visited one that works pretty much like TBS (we hope to write a bit more about this place and any other alike we come across soon). The things we were concerned the most were our wheels – if they are nit well centered they can get damaged quicker and after that many kilometers the spokes could easily lost tension. And so we were content to find out that they need just little adjustment – well done ‘bikeys’! (and those ones who built the wheels!)

We obviously did some sightseeing as well and we truly like Vancouver. It has just the right size (excluding metro), right location, not bad climate at all and great vibes. There are lots of green areas, plenty of beaches, ski resort 2-hour drive of town and plenty of nooks to discover. Our favourite place was Granville Island (thanks Justyna!), a tiny peninsula just outside of Vancouver Downtown, where there is always something to do – market with local food, arts&crafts, live music, small shops and galleries, we could wander there around for hours…Vancouver (and area) are definitely on our bucket list; maybe was the people, good weather, great time we had there, amazing food, but definitely Vancouver make a great impression on us. But this is most of all thanks to the people and their hospitality.

Justyna, Michael and little Lily, thank you guys so much! It was so good to meet you and to connect! If we ever did a list of most hospitable people, they’d be the leaders with little Lily on the top, as she let us sleep in her bed and in her room for all 10 days! But there was more than just warm welcome, we connect, had fun, we made friends and we hope to see them again.

And, thanks to Justyna, we discovered raw food. And Raul was so happy! J I’ll write about it soon an share some recipes for those who dare to try.Hhowever, the principal of raw diet is eating food raw, which means no cooking, roasting, baking etc., no high temperatures as this is what kills enzymes and all good stuff food naturally contains. The only process you can use is dehydrating. So we made our attempt to prepare dehydrated cookies; well, they were edible J still lots to learn…We tried some amazing food prepared by Justyna and we left their place with three big bags of dried fruit. We cannot wait to experiment more with it once our adventure is finished!

Victoria

We spent in Victoria just one day, but we like it a lot. We had only time to stroll around downtown, get lost in their little Chinatown, have our ‘good-bye-Canada-and-well-done-guys!-Canada-completed!’ dinner (that we were again invited by some Angels, Thank you very much!) and in the evening go for a walk along promenade in Victoria’s little port and listening to great live music there.

It was also our last day in Canada and we felt a bit sentimental; over those three months we got to like Canada, or shell I say BC and a bit of Yukon? We haven’t even seen half of this country, but what we saw we liked a lot and what we experienced was only positive.

Thanks to all of you, who made our Canadian experience so special!

m.