home on the range

So I made it to "home" for the rest of the summer.  Jackson, WY.  It's seriously beautiful here.  Our house overlooks a valley and its a six minute bike ride into town and a thirty minute bike ride into Teton National Park.  I've never seen anything like this place before.  It's so west.  I mean like the wild, wild, west.  I feel as if I need to become a horseback rider if I ever want to fit in.  I am so much more a city girl than I've ever realized.

The 4th of July was amazing.  I started it with an hour hike up Snow King, a really beautiful view of Jackson from the top:

After the hike, Liz and I went food shopping for our 4th of July picnic.  Once we got the food back to the house we decided to join a couple of the guys on a float down Flat Creek.  It takes about an hour to ride the length of Jackson on the creek and some parts of it are relaxing while other parts are a bit trickier.  I was clotheslined by a branch at one point and flipped out of my tube on another particularly rapid turn.  It was so much fun though and I couldn't help thinking about how people pay money to go to water parks and go on a ride that simulates what you can do with an oversized innertube in Jackson.  It's crazy.

After the creek, we had our picnic and then rode our bikes into town for the fireworks.  It was a great show (has nothing on Paris' Bastille Day fireworks, though) and a perfect end to a really good day.

I'm definitely anxious to get out on a trip though; I'm ready to start working hard!  This week I go out on a GRAF (Guided Regional Area Familiarization) with a couple other girls that I trained with.  Its a way for us to be familiar with the campgrounds and trails before we're expected to lead guests through them.  I'll post again after the GRAF and before my first trip (July 12th!!).  In the meantime, here are some pics from my epic solo road trip:

on the road.

the drive is going well... so far.

I drove 560 miles today.  No joke. 

But the real reason I'm posting is because I finally got it together to post my pictures... so click on the link and ENJOY:

training pictures!

Click on the link below for some shots that the training team put together... my pictures are on the way!

Backroads Training

leaving the nest

Welp, training is all over.  After a crazy five days in the Canyons (beautiful, by the way) we headed back to the classroom for a few days and on Wednesday our group graduated to become full-fledged Backroads trip leaders.  Now they are flinging us across the country and I think the good-byes were harder than anyone anticipated.

The most exciting part of the week was getting our schedules.  They handed them out to us and it was complete chaos.  I will admit that I was chanting "Hawaii, Hawaii, Hawaii..." over and over in my head but when I unfolded the paper and it read Yellowstone I celebrated like I had been dreaming of Yellowstone my whole life.  The hysterical part is that I wasn't completely sure where Yellowstone was exactly.  Heidi told me it was in Montana, but really I'll be in Wyoming.  Wyoming.  Can you believe it!?  Haha!  If you had told me when I was drinking wine and eating baguettes last year in Paris that I would spend the next summer camping in Wyoming.  I would have laughed out loud.  But, man oh man, am I excited.  Word on the street is that Yellowstone/Tetons is one of the best regions to lead in.  There will be 30 of us going in and out of the leader house... sounds like Real World Jackson Hole, huh, Rosie?)  Here's a taste of what my summer holds:
http://backroads.com/trips/MYTQ

Training was an intense process and I'm sad to see us all splitting up.  I know a lot of the friends I made in the last three weeks will be my friends for life and I'm fortunate enough to be bringing a few of them with me up to the Tetons.  In all, I'm really happy to have had the experience (and the job hasn't even really started yet!) its funny that the things I was so worried about (bike mechanics, driving the van, etc) turned out to be easy-peasy when all was said and done.  I must have said the phrase "I've never done this before!" about a million times. 

List of firsts:
Re-cabling a bike
Camping
Driving a can with a trailer
Successfully backing that van and trailer between to ominous trees
Pitching a tent
Taking down a tent (while hungover)
I had my longest bike ride ever into 100mph head winds (seriously hard)
Hiking a top ten worldwide hike (Angel's Landing)

And that's just the tip of the iceburg.

Tomorrow I fly to San Francisco.  My first official duty as a BR leader is to pick up a van in SF on Tuesday and drive it back to Salt Lake City.  Then a couple days later I load up the van, hitch it to a trailer, and drive it to Jackson Hole, WY. I'm doing all of this driving completely solo. 

Ai yi yi... I guess its all happening...

pictures to come!

off to the canyons!

Well we've finished our first week of training and tomorrow starts the next part: The Mock Trip.  We're packing all of us into three vans with a couple of trailers and hitting the Canyons.  Apparently "the Canyons" is the oft-used term to describe Bryce, Zion, and the Grand Canyons.  I say apparently because everyone here except me is super down with the camping/canyon lingo.  They throw out words like hoodoo, and the Narrows, and limestone, and all this other craziness and I'm just like "huh? whaa?"  I'm the only person in the group who has never been camping.  When I admitted this there was a collective gasp of horror.  It was like I had said I kill puppies for fun.  So I'm definitely going in to this experience with absolutely no clue of what to expect.

If there is one thing we've learned this week, its that nothing during training is just fun and games, so I expect that there will be a whole lot of hard work while we're out there.  This past week has been rough with an insane amount of ups and downs.  I'm surprisingly better at the driving the van and trailer thing than I thought I would be.  I actually backed up the trailer off to the right into a narrow parking spot on the first try!  It was so cool.  so so so cool.

Anyway this is a pretty boring post but next week will amazing and I can't wait to experience the Canyons... and camping! Finally!

ai yi yi

Welp.  It's day two of Backroads training and I feel like I've been here a week.  It is like a college course where everyone is on speed. go go go go go ALL THE TIME.  A bit intense, but really just a preview of the months to come.

We started out bright and early yesterday morning with a 15 mile bike ride up and down some mountain passes -- and I do mean UP and down.  I was huffing and puffing and straggled up the first big hill in dead last place.  Thankfully I don't think I was the only one hurting.  I'm happy to report that I wasn't last up on every hill after that (shame lit a fire under my bum) but I wasn't very impressive.  In all, though, the ride felt awesome.  Salt Lake is beautiful and even when your lungs feel like they are going to explode you can't help thinking that if you are going to die at least you'll die with a great view. 

The ride ended with a beautiful picnic in a little park and it felt great to lounge on the grass and mange after the long haul.  Then we made our way to our home/classroom for the next week or so: the Backroads warehouse.  It is such an operation at this place; tons of people, tons of stuff happening, and tons tons tons of bikes.  It's a pretty amazing organization.  They gave us the rundown for training and split us into groups, et cetra, et cetra.  Anyway, not to bore you all with the sordid details but they packed a whole lot into one little old day and we all staggered back to the condos feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Its going to be an intense couple of weeks and I know I'm going to struggle with some things and do much better at others.  I mean, I have a lot of catching up to do as far as getting in shape goes (like two of the girls here have done Ironman competitions and they aren't even the most in-shape people here... its a wee bit intimidating) but I did pretty damn well in bike mechanics today (all those crazy flats on those cruisers in Paris really paid off!) and I'm sure I'll do well in public speaking tomorrow.  Friday, on the other hand, may be the challenge of my life: parallel parking a 15-passenger van and then backing up that same van with a massive trailer hitched to it.  Pedestrains beware.

it starts

Since graduating (over two years ago, yikes), I've kind of been all over the place and I haven't done a very good job of keeping people informed of where I am or what I'm doing and how long either of those things are going to last.  I'm about to head out on the next great adventure and I've decided that keeping all my updates in one place would alleviate some of the stress of repeating myself over and over again in e-mails and during phone calls.  So.  It starts.

Actually it starts on Monday.  On Monday I fly off to Salt Lake City to start training for Backroads (http://backroads.com/).  After two weeks of learning to drive a 15 passenger van, working on bikes, and camping in Utah, I'll graduate to become a full-fledged Backroads trip leader and they'll send me off to some crazy place to start the new job.  I won't find out exactly where I'll be based until I'm halfway through training and, truthfully, I'm just glad I don't have choose where I'm going.  Every option seems pretty awesome.  I guess I have my fingers crossed for Hawaii, though... can you blame me?

It doesn't feel like that long ago that I was packing up my stuff to fly to Austin for Fat Tire's training but a lot has really changed since then.  This time its going to be a bit harder to say goodbye since I've been home for so long and have had a chance to really get comfortable here.  Living with Nat and Matt and Josie has been so great and I'm really going to have a hard time saying goodbye to the little bug (and Matt's cooking).  But Backroads really does seem like a dream job and I can't wait to start!

Wish me luck.