All Tales From The Road since the beginning of times:
2021:
Lessons Learned
Points of Interest
After visiting a few major points of interest (Yellowstone National Park, Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park) and after riding a few major mountain bike trails, we will go ahead and say that we rather much ride our bikes! Don’t get us wrong; these places were AMAZING, but it felt somewhat like going to the mall on a weekend (even if we were visiting off-season!): you get there, drive your car to consume viewpoints after viewpoints, wait in line for your turn to shot the same pictures as everyone else, and keep doing this until you checked all the flyer’s points of interest or until your body can’t take it anymore (for some reason going to the mall is the worst for my body).
Just like your favorite beer taste MUCH better after a bike ride, seeing nature gets much, much better during our bike rides. We climb, sweat, improve, descend steep lines, drop, jump, almost fall but save it, get emotional, it’s fun, so much fun. And while doing this, we get to ride AMAZING landscape & terrain, very similar to the neighboring national parks. We feel closer to nature, we feel we’re lucky to be there, to have it for us at this very moment. It’s hard to describe, but life’s good when you live it. You know what we mean if, you too, you are having fun out there; paragliding, kayaking, backcountry skiing, climbing, basejumping, … it doesn’t matter how you live your passion, but living your passion out there make you feel like it’s the best day of your life. There were many days like that in the last month…
Travelling Pace
More a milestone than a lesson learned, we’ve finally managed to slow down our travelling pace. During our first month, we had to travel across the country to reach the west side, then ensued a race against the cold weather: our plan to “slowly” drive south had to be fast-forwarded, because winter arrive early in north Montana! After reaching Moab (Utah) by mid-October, we got “stuck” there with no good reasons to get out of there…
This is Sunset campsite near Moab. It overlooks the Colorado River and Dead Horse State Park. It’s free, quiet (compare to other Moab dispersed campgrounds), scenic and we might stay here forever.
Living in a Van
Days are getting shorter and driving south won’t really help in that department… the sunset in the desert is unbelievable, but it’s also the signal that we will have to move inside the van soon.
That makes long hours spent inside. What about firecamp? Well, there isn’t much wood in the desert and, at 5$ a bundle of wood, a firecamp is kept as a special threat! That being said, we’re surprise to see that we don’t mind too much being inside; we’re out all day, so getting inside is not a punishment. The van is our home after all; it’s comfortable and warm 🙂
Actual Cost
We’re still tracking all our travel expenses, here they are:
Van Report
We performed a few upgrades this month.
1- Webasto Air Heater
For the past month, Antoine daily routine includes to crawl under the van and drain the fuel line of the Webasto heater.
Since our heater had carbon buildup, it’s the only way it would start. For some reasons. We finally took some time of in Salt Lake City and installed a new burner insert in that thing and adjusted it for high-altitude so it burns leaner. Finger crossed, it solved the issue!
2- On Board Mountain Bike Tire Inflator
While half the Faroutride’s crew thinks it is a useless upgrade, the other half thinks it’s a GREAT upgrade! Only one of us is right, choose your side!
3- Not exactly an upgrade, but we finally completed our Build Journal!! Yay!!
Here are the added articles:
Cleaning the Solar Panels
Days are getting shorter. It also means less solar input. We still have plenty of solar power, but we definitely noticed a small decrease in input; it takes a bit more time to get the battery full. And since we’re out here in the desert, it doesn’t hurt to clean the panels… It’s the first time in two month we do it and we haven’t feel the need to do it more often than that.
Electrical System Design: Electrical System Design
Solar Panels Installation: Solar Panels Installation
12.5ft Telescoping Ladder: Buy on Amazon
Others
We’re still hoping to upgrade our grey water system; it’s irritating having to empty the 4 gallons grey water aquatainer every day… and we forgot once to empty it 🙁
The composting toilet was emptied after three weeks this month. We’re using it more often (countdown of nights spent in Walmart during second month: NONE 🙂 ) and it got a bit colder in Montana, reducing the composting action.
The LED strips we installed in the Garage got partly trimmed away when getting stuff in/out, we’ll have to fix that. We should have protected them somehow; the garage is an hostile environment…
The remaining systems are performing as stated in our First Month on the Road article, nothing more to say!
Tales from the Road
Second month traveled road:
Yellowstone National Park
Carbella Recreation Site is a free campsite at the north entrance of the park, we started from here. We planned on having a beer around the campfire, but a mini hail storm put an halt to that.
The next morning, we woke up to more winter goodness:
We headed to Mammoth Hot Springs, it felt like we arrived on another planet…
Then we went for a swim at the Boiling River; it’s located near Mammoth Hot Springs on the way to the north entrance:
This is Upper Falls near Canyon Village:
And here is a hole with hot water in it. These holes are EVERYWHERE. First inhabitant added barley, ferment and added HUMONGOUS quantity of SIMCOE hops into them:
This is how IPA was created. Then, large tunnels were dig under the surface of the earth to bring the fresh and delicious beer to the nearest village. Beer was served under pressure:
Because the inhabitants drank too much IPA, they also had to invent the first giant composting toilet. It’s still being used today, but mostly by tourists:
There you have it, the real story of Yellowstone.
CrepesCity, CrepesState
There are two ways to identify what day it is. 1- If there are weekend warriors everywhere, it’s the weekend. 2- If there are crepes, it’s crepes day!
And everyday is bacon day.
Salt Lake City, Utah
Bike, friends & beers! We’ll be back in a few months when the Wasatch are covered in delicious white powder.
Moab, Utah
Moab was SO GOOD to us. This is where we finally slowed down, had constant warm and nice weather, biked almost every day, watched incredible sunsets, watched incredible landscapes… this is where we really got what we were dreaming of before leaving for this trip.
Wait.
In fact, there is just too much to say about Moab.
It deserves its own article. Voilà:
And here are some other places we liked passing by:
And finally, this month, we worked hard on our auto-portait, in Goodenough Creek Campground:
It’s the cover for this Mightygoods interview:
Check it out! https://mightygoods.com/faroutride-isabelle-and-antoine/
What’s Next?
Photos of snowstorms and foot-deep powder has started to appear on our Instagram/Facebook feed; we’re not insensitive to that, it’s tempting since we’re a few hours drive from the Teton, but we will wait for the snowpack to accumulate before heading there. We really enjoyed the warmth, the sun and riding our bikes the past few weeks, so we keep going south…
TO BE CONTINUED…
All Tales From The Road since the beginning of times:
2021:
OUR CAMERA GEAR
All the photos above were capture using our favorite photo/video gear! Aerial/Underwater/Long Exposure/POV/Gimbal, all of this in a portable package, check it out:
