On yer bike

Hi TPT it's Hank reporting alive and well from a lovely part of Central Florida where the farm life has usurped the drunken life 5 years off it August going strong 😉

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Svën's body guard Kermit, 16 coastal haybale cargo pull 5 miles, Joy the feral sow orphaned by hunter who gifted her to me at 3 days old bottle fed for 5 weeks she's a monster now going on 1 y/o she has boyfriend named Dieter a castrated boar.

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So glad to see Sven is alive and well, he’s even more of a pimp than ever. Ha also really cool to see an update from you Hank. 5 years sober is above edible milestone. I’m in France just outside Paris next to Versailles. There’s some great bike riding here. Let me know if you ever make it this way.

Thanks Da_Nit I appreciate the offer I've heard Comrade Hidalgo has created a cycling mecca there in Paris. It's hard for me to get more than one county over with much regularity but who knows maybe I'll find a good farm sitter down the road which will allow me more flexibility to tramp.

To conclude the great bike tour of 2019 me and Sven continued on from Austin west to Silver City NM where the Tour Divide a long distance unpaved MTB trail intersects with the Adventure Cycling Southern tier route which I was following. Here my plan was to ride north towards Canada, it was about 40 miles of very mountainous terrain on paved roads from Silver City to the unpaved start of Tour Divide which we did no problem. The picture below is from where that dirt road starts, around 1/4 to 1/2 mile further my fancy pinion gear bicycle stopped propelling me forward despite furious cycling of the cranks. Somehow the front sprocket had worked its way loose and annihilated the output splines on gearbox rendering it utterly useless!

Lucky for me I was able to get transportation back to Silver City somewhat quickly where the kind owner operator of Silver City Bike works put me up for over a week while the gearbox company pinion sent me a refurbished unit. After installing the new box I decided to ride towards Los Angeles where I'd call it a ride.

Some of the highlights along the way were being blown for almost an hour west at what must have been near 25mph towards Lordsburg NM by a dust storm, it was like a video game cheat code had been applied and despite all the kit we made more distance in an hour than I ever thought possible!

Some other highlights were spending a week in Slab City during the height of summer at Dr. Spencer's (RIP) Temple of Enlightenment. Travelling around the Salton Sea and dropping into Bombay Beach for a seltzer at the Ski Inn.

When I reached San Bernadino CA I chose to ride their light rail into Downtown LA where things got very interesting for close to two weeks. Spent a lot of time in Bell Gardens at the Motel 6 making pilgrimages to the Commerce and Bicycle casinos. It's quite amusing to me that the Bicycle Casino does not allow customers to park or lock up a real life bicycle anywhere on their compound and that includes the vast parking lot across the street.

Somehow I managed to win the biggest pot of my life by a country mile playing less than a full orbit at 100-200 NL in a near total blackout. There were some well known killers at the table so I made no qualms about performing the hit and run, also they big timed me by denying entry at first saying the min buyin was 50k but later lowering it to allow me entry, perhaps one of the floor people relayed to them of my alcohol intake and antics at lower steaks....

Went to skid row a few times hung out, according to my fixer there buying alcohol is done via informal sales persons because the corner stores don't sell it?

Played bike polo once and hurt myself worse than I've ever experienced by crashing a bicycle the resulting hematoma on my lower back was grotesque.

It was a good trip all in all and the weeks long bender helped motivate me towards a radical hail mary life change which is working out better than I could have ever conceived of.

I'll post some more pictures from the journey west soon, Hank

Wow Hank another amazing update. I’m googling everything as I wasn’t familiar with Slab City but do know of the Salton Sea and Bombay Beach. How on heck did you end up in a $100-$200 NL game?

Have you thought about posting this someplace else? 2+2 is kind of dead ans thinking you might get more interaction at a place like Reddit, one of the subs for bike riding.

Well 100 200 seemed like a good idea after several days of round the clock drinking and I did have a little over 100bb to buy in with so I took the plunge and the poker gods smiled upon me
Ak-Chin tribal lands feed lot south of Phoenix

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Casa Grande AZ

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Kurt & Olga

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