10:30 a.m. update: If you get WCAX TV-3, the CBS affiliate in Burlington, Vt., there will be a piece on Buddy Teevens' ride at about 6:40 p.m. tonight. It will be up on the web tomorrow.
THE ADVENTURE BEGINS
Start
9:30 a.m. Escondido, Calif.
Finish
7 p.m. Brawley, Calif.
Miles
115
By Bruce Wood
www.biggreenalert.com
BRAWLEY, Calif. -- Dartmouth football coach Buddy Teevens was on the phone Monday night recounting Day One of his epic 3,600-mile cross country bicycle trip when his description of a steep grade was interrupted by a sound not unlike the noise a cat would make if it were dropped in a swimming pool.
“Eyow,” echoed a second voice through the hotel room and over the telephone line.
Teevens just laughed.
“That’s Shu getting in the tub,” he said, meaning riding partner David Shula. “We loaded up the bath tub with about 50 pounds of ice trying to get the legs back. He just got in. There's a pool out back. We'll go in that later. It's been quite a day.”
A day that started after breakfast at “the original house of pancakes,” saw the former Dartmouth teammates pedal over 4,000 feet and face headwinds Teevens estimated at 10-15 mph all day.
“We actually went up to 4,300 feet and capped it off in Julian (CA),” the coach said. “It was just a beautiful area. We were going slow enough that we saw everything. People were tremendously friendly.”
Friendly and sometimes amused, something they will find more and more as they move east. “We asked a woman in a grocery store in Santa Ysabel how far Julian was, and asked if it's hilly, and she just burst out laughing,” Teevens said. “She said, ‘You don't know the half of it.’ ”
It was in Julian that Teevens made the first of many planned school visits along this combination adventure, recruiting and alumni-relations trip.
“We stopped at the high school and the coaches don’t work there,” he said. "But the security officer was duly impressed. She offered to bring us water and told us about the Angels of the Desert leaving water out for people traversing the desert. She said she’d check up on us and if we needed to we could stay at her house.”
Instead the intrepid pair kept riding, heading down the east side of the mountains and into a different world.
“Going from 4,300 feet to 1,000 feet or so there was like a 20 degree difference,” Teevens said. “Up top it was cool and beautiful. Down below it was like on Mars. Lush and green up top, and then down the back side and everything was brown.”
Teevens and Shula made another friend at the Desert Ironwoods Resort in Borrego Springs. “A woman named Anna,” Teevens said. “She asked where we were coming from and where we were going and her jaw dropped. She was very helpful. We had a picture taken with her.”
After Borrego Desert State Park it was virtually all desert.
“Oh man,” Teevens said. "Everything was dead but the roads were beautiful and well kept without much traffic. I'd recommend it to anybody. But it was hot and dry.”
In the desert water is critical and the two loaded up in Ocotillo Wells. “We bought a gallon and split it up,” Teevens said. “Shu has a camel backpack. I went the bottle route. My stuff was about boiled by the time I got to it, but it was sufficient.”
The water wasn’t the only thing that was boiling, Teevens added with a laugh. “Hot feet was the theme of the day,” he said. “Shula’s carbon soles heated up pretty good.”
So did the road. The long, straight road.
“There were ‘rollers’ in the desert where the road was as straight as an arrow but you crest one roller and there's another," Teevens explained. "It was good to have company and someone to break the wind for you.”
Hot and tired of the sun, the pair dismounted their bikes at an immigration station at the intersection of Routes 78 and 86. But they didn’t stay long.
“That was the only shade around,” Teevens said, “but we got thrown out. The immigration people looked at us and said, ‘What are you doing?’ We said, ‘We are looking for some shade. We've been riding for a while.’ The man said, ‘You've got to leave. Right now.’ He told us Brawley was another 25 miles or so.”
Although they had hoped originally to make it to Blythe near the Arizona border, the combination of a late night getting their bikes ready (2 a.m.) and a late departure after breakfast with alumni and friends made reaching Blythe dicey. "It was another 60 miles or so of desert and there was nowhere to stop between here and there, so we decided to stop in Brawley," Teevens said.
TODAY An earlier start, more desert and the goal of reaching Wickenburg, AZ, about 175 miles away. Temperatures in the area are expected to be between 93 and 98 degrees.
Today's map (courtesy of a subscriber)
And in regular blog action ;-) ... Free agent Harvard tight end Matt Farbotko had a strong minicamp tryout at Indianapolis and was rewarded with a one-year contract contingent, of course, on making the team. Find a Crimson story here.
Finally, that certain Hanover High freshman had a double, a single and a dramatic running catch in center field (Mom told me that) to help the team win for the second time this year. Her brother had a double and diving grab at third in his 7th-8th game and dear old dad helped coach the Green Machine Little League team to a 9-3 win that raised its record to 3-1. A good day all the way around.
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