Monday, June 22, 2009

Telluride --> Buffalo, WY (18 days)

It's Monday and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival is over. We now begin the longest leg of the Bluegrass Bicycle Tour. 700-800 miles to Buffalo, Wyoming via Jackson, The Tetons and Yellowstone Nat'l Park.
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Telluride ended with a very emotional moment when Craig Ferguson (the TBF director) sang an ode to his recently passed away father, accompanied by Sam Bush on mandolin. There wasn't a dry eye in the house. Then the "house band" of Sam, Bela, Jerry, Luke, Edgar, Bryan proceed to tear the house down with a set full of classic bluegrass numbers.
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It was nice to see our old Appalachian Trail friends, Easy and Handstand, who were are the festival this weekend.
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Telluride ended with some good news for us. Our camp site, dubbed "Camp Not-a-lot-a", got voted Saturday's most environmentally-friendly campsite. They announced our names on the main stage and we won some swag (a bamboo shirt!). That was quite an honor and we are now in the running with the other 3 day-winners for the grand prize. We'll know in a week or two who Planet Bluegrass selects as the 2009 winner. Wish us luck! I think we have a good chance. Our spiel was that we don't have anything so by default we'd be more environmentally-friendly than the camp site that, say, has a solar panel. An example of our selling points for our camp was that since we had no cooler, we bought no aluminum can drinks and hence no ice. Of course the big selling point was that we had no car and used no gas bringing in our camp or taking it away.
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We'll be heading to Wyoming by way of Gateway and then Douglas Pass, both highly recommended routes. Then we'll skirt the west side of the Flaming Gorge in southern Wyoming before heading towards the Tetons and Yellowstone. We'll give some updates along the way if we hit the libraries at the right time.
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So far the BBT has be very well received by all we encounter. Folks are always encouraging and often in disbelief. My goal all along with the BBT has been to raise awareness to the ability to vacation on your bicycle and it seems that we are getting results; one person at a time. I even have some very serious inquiries about joining the BBT from fellow cycle tourist. I hope that pans out, it'd be fun to create a posse of BBT'ers.

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