We rolled into Midway, Utah just after the sun went down after another day of traveling. Uncle Sven and Barney (the dog, not the purple dinosaur) greeted us at their place in Midway, which came complete with heat, running water and showers. After eight days living in the van, we were duly impressed. Sven was gracious enough to not make a face at how bad we smelled. Judging by how much Barney liked us, it must have been bad. After a quick stop there, we headed on down to see Nate’s brother Chris, who is a freshman at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His dorm room is a single in a brand new building that was built for the 2002 Winter Olympics. My freshman year was spent in a cramped double that used to be a single in a building that had to be 20 years old. Not fair! After trying to eat a Super Giant pizza for dinner, we scrounged up some longboard skateboards and cruised around campus. Nate had never been on one before, so we were all a bit nervous he would bite it on his hand. After a few practice runs in the parking garage, we were off down towards the rest of campus. About halfway through he ate it, but it was on some grass and the finger was okay.
Nate flew home the next morning to have his pins taken out. One more step on the road to recovery, pretty soon he’ll be hucking himself off cliffs again. I headed back up to Midway and spent some quality time doing a lot of nothing. Sleeping, eating, internet browsing and general laziness were the order of business. Sven and I did try a new Mexican food restaurant in town; after they assured us the margaritas were real and not “Utah” margaritas we happily ordered up a few.
The laziness didn’t last forever, though. My legs start twitching if I watch too much TV, so on Friday I headed back on down to Salt Lake to ride with Chris. He had heard about a place called I Street on the outskirts of town that was supposed to be fun. It was awesome. Someone (or many people) had spent a long time building up jumps, drops, ramps and all sorts of fun stunts just right for mountain bikes. Soon after we showed up three other guys (Chris, Dave and Ben), who were all semi-pro or pro mountain bikers, rolled up and showed us how the place was supposed to be ridden. We all took turns on a line that started with three jumps in a row, followed by a berm to a 5’ drop into a gully that had an 8’ step-up on the far side. For those not versed in BMX-speak, a step-up is a jump where the landing is higher than the takeoff, so you have to “step-up” to get over the jump. This one required you to rail the berm as fast as possible, fly off the drop and scream back up the other side just to make it. I had about a 40% success rate. The great thing about a step-up, though, is that the landing is usually at the peak of the jump, so at that point you’re barely moving. When you come up short, you just plop down and stop, instead of a normal jump where bad things can happen. We ended up riding until the sun was going down. By that time Chris had taco’ed his rear wheel and I was getting tired and squirrelly. Chris left to get ready for the ballet and I headed back to Midway. I had a flight the next day to go back for Thanksgiving break. After the break, we’ll reconvene in Salt Lake for the drive down to Texas and some unexplored country.