50 Shades of the USA: One Woman's 11,000 Mile Cycling Adventure Through Every State of America by Anna McNuff

Author:Anna McNuff [McNuff, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humor, Topic, Travel
ISBN: 1999765818
Google: u47mvQEACAAJ
Amazon: B07GY48LF3
Publisher: Rocket 88
Published: 2018-09-16T12:00:00+00:00

I had just about recovered from my rage induced by Cheveyo the Dream Dumper, as I crossed the threshold into Yellowstone National Park. Then suddenly all rage was gone and excitement reigned supreme. I deliberately didn’t read too much about Yellowstone National Park before the trip, so, aside from seeing some very cool pictures, my knowledge of what lay within it was limited to having watched a lot of Yogi Bear cartoons as a kid. Yogi lives in the fictitious Jellystone National Park, which is a play on Yellowstone. If Yogi was there, there had to be more bears, which explained the mix of nerves and excitement in my tummy. Yellowstone, it turned out, was indeed prime bear territory, and despite my encounters in Alaska with the furry friends, I was a still a little nervous. It didn’t help that as I entered the park someone had taken the care and time to spray paint in red letters on the road ‘Grizzlies eat people’. Lovely.

Right from the off, the Yellowstone scenery lived up to everything I had hoped it would be. Dramatic grey canyons gave way to cascades and wide-open riverbeds scattered with logs and surrounded by rainbow patches of native forest. Alive with yellows and reds of the early autumn, the explosion of colour was breathtaking, and I stopped repeatedly to take it all in. With every bend I turned, a new, different vista came into view – each one like a picture-perfect postcard.

It was a busy day on the roads in the park. After spending so much time alone with little to no passing traffic, it made me nervous to be among vehicles again. Having grown up in London I was comfortable riding in densely packed urban conditions, where the traffic moves slowly and you must weave your way among it. But out here, the trucks and cars moved so much faster, and that scared me. More than that, in Yellowstone, visiting tourists could rent giant camper vans to explore the park, many of them with little experience of ever having driven something that size, and even less experience about what a safe passing distance for a cyclist is, which is at least 1.5 metres. That’s a lot of space to give cyclists when you’re driving on a narrow, winding, single-lane highway in Yellowstone.

It was approaching midday and I was heading up and over the Continental Divide for the third time in two days, when I heard an especially large rumble of tyres behind me. There it was, bright purple and covered in two-tone glitter with a silver wave down the side of it. It was half camper van, half truck – and it was enormous. I yelped and my pulse raced, but I had heard it too late and the van was already upon me. I was engulfed in a whirlwind of glitter and purple as the camper van just missed the edges of my rear pannier racks. The front wheels had passed me now, but I

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