THE LAST FEW DAYS

Our final days ride for the trip was the descent from Canyonlands back to the Moab Highway, all of it fittingly downhill, easy and enjoyable, all of it alone, all of it with plenty of scenery and time to think and reflect on the last three months. We pedalled our last few strokes riding two-abreast to the highway junction, where we stopped and embraced and generally felt really bloody good about ourselves and what we've accomplished together. All the highs, all the lows, all the places we'd been and the people we'd met. This three month journey was indeed the physical, emotional and mental test everyone knew it would be, and we'd done it with flying colours. We'd done it.

We hitchhiked (again, there was absolutely none of public transport we assumed existed) to Price that afternoon in a tiny, squished sedan with Ryan, a local Pastor. The next day we tried unsuccessfully to hitchhike back to Salt Lake, for a total of four deflating hours, getting so desperate to get back to sort out the flights and the bikes and everything else that we phoned our friend Mark Kennedy, of Saturday Cycles, and asked for a lift, which, of course, he was only too happy to do for us. We spent our last two days in Salt Lake warm showering with Christy (excuse the unfortunate figure of speech. Christy is also from the bike shop), packing up the bikes to be shipped home, going on a mini spending spree of bikey goodies, and going out for a lovely mexican dinner with Mark and Christy. The whirlwind which was our last few days in America had come to an end, and about 30 hours later we were back in Geelong telling our families all about it over pizza and turkish bread.