The Zombie Apocalypse Is Coming!!!!

If any of you have ever seen the tailgate of either one of my pickup trucks you couldn't help noticing the stickers - Skydive This! Jump That! Get Stuffed! - that completely covered them. When the stickers started to spread down the sides of the truck, I sold them. For the last year and a half during my travels I've been collecting stickers for the side cases on my bike. We were on our way out of a souvenir store in Cody when we walked past a display of knives unlike anything I've ever seen. It was huge! And scary! There were machetes and bayonets, tomahawks and spring loaded lock blades, stilettos and hunting knives almost as big as the machetes. On the top stood a sign " The Zombie Apocalypse Is Coming! Arm Yourselves Now!"

I was in there looking for a sticker, Ray was looking for jewelry. He's in trouble. It turns out that while he remembered to call his wife on their anniversary, he forgot to leave behind a card for her for the 10th anniversary of their first date. Really! I figure I'm doing well if I remember things like birthdays and Valentines day, but he 10th anniversary of a first date? Nonetheless Ray was clearly in the doghouse, so ever since he has been buying jewelry for his wife. The first thing he bought her was a pair of earrings from a gas station. Yes, it was a gas station/cafe/bar/grocery store on a mountain road in the middle of nowhere, yes they were hand made locally, but they were from a gas station!!!!

If I got a gift for my significant other at a gas station I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be anything significant going on for a long time after that. Then he picked up some necklaces for her in Yellowstone, and still he continues to search.

Me? Well, my girlfriend supports a homeless shelter, and so every time we check into a hotel I've been grabbing all the soap bars and shampoo bottles to give to her to give to the homeless.

Ray is stockpiling jewelry and I'm collecting soap, and he's the one in trouble?

When we got back to the bikes a local guy pulled up to ask me about my saddle bags, he has the same bike and hadn't been able to find anything he liked. He offered some great tips about our planned route, pointing out that the pass we had planned on taking through the Bighorn mountains was still closed and suggested an alternative. The alternative route went over a 9,046 ft. pass, in less than an hour we went from the heat of the high plain, climbed a canyon full of switchbacks, hit rain, then snow, sleet, more rain, coming out the other side to hot sunshine and an Espresso-Tapas bar in the town of Buffalo Wyoming.

Buffalo is the arch-rival of the next town over which was called Gillette, our destination for the night. According to our waitress, a sweet, young, corn fed, innocent, naive, blond haired blue-eyed bubble-head, if you're from Gillette you're only slightly above an amoeba in intelligence, and responsible for most of what is wrong with the world in general, and Wyoming in particular. She also recommended against our planned route, and instead tried to talk us into going in a completely different direction. I don't know if she's right about Gillette, but we should have taken her advice about roadways. Most of the road was great, a tour through the Badlands, long sweeping curves with easy elevation changes. Then we hit construction. Five or six miles being led by a pilot vehicle through the worst conditions I've ever taken a road bike. Every type of earth moving equipment moving earth everywhere, loose dirt heaped in random mounds, sometimes soaked by a water truck to keep the dust down but making the rutted and cratered surface greasy and even more treacherous for a two wheeled vehicle with high performance street tires.

Speaking only for ourselves and not for our waitress, we were awfully happy to see Gillette.