4,075!

For a while back at the beginning of my trip, my bike computer had developed the obnoxious habit of resetting itself to all the factory presets. This meant I lost my cumulative mileage, and it was resetting often enough that I stopped bothering to reprogram the odometer. Back in Texas it somehow spontaneously fixed itself, and has been completely reliable ever since. Thus morning I was curious to see how far I've actually gone, so I busted out the paper log I'd been keeping in my sketchbook and did some math.

4,075 miles!

I thought I was getting close to 4,000 but didn't think I'd quite hit it yet. Anyways, as a reward, I decided that instead of biking 38 miles through New Jersey traffic, I would take the train into New York City.



Gotta say, it feels pretty decadent.

I took a detour up to Montclair, NJ to visit my friend Cole. We met on the crazy commune in West Texas, and he's one of the three people with whom I now share a tattoo of the constellation Orion. It was really lovely seeing a travel friend in his native environment, and we will see each other again in a few months because he's moving to Portland.
I forgot to take a picture of us, but we did take a picture of our tattoos to send to the other member of our triad.


That's my calf and cole's arm, kinda hard to tell. Cole still has a pretty fierce biking tan.

I managed to go 2,000 miles without a flat tire but my streak ended this week. I got two flats, both of which turned out to be caused by almost invisibly small pieces of metal that I had to pull out of my tires with pliers.


Yup, that little thing that looks like an eyelash is enough to bring me to an obnoxious standstill. So cars, while I dislike it when you roll down your windows and blare on your horns and yell at me about the extra six inches of room I should be riding in, I find the experience preferable to riding through metal shavings and gravel that give me innumerable flats.