Comprising a Life

In 1969 after having lost my college deferment due to the new lottery system, I made a bicycle trip to Estes Park Colorado as a final fling before reporting for the draft. It turned out to be quite a trip lasting 40 days and 40 nights.  I would have made it in less time except that I took occasional jobs at newspaper offices during the latter half of the trip.  The contacts for these jobs came about from the fact that small newspapers started to write about my trip somewhere in Oklahoma think.  http://www.vlbanting.com/clippingsfromtrip.htm

At the end of the trip I took a job with a restaurant for the remaining months of the summer and since unlike the other student employees I was not going to be heading back to college at its end, I decided to stay in Colorado until first snow.  When the snows came I sold my bicycle to a fellow student and flew home.

Because there was no one there to document my trip other than the newspaper clippings, I took to photographing my bicycle at each state line and so you might say this is a story about a bicycle that peddled 1500 miles to work in a restaurant.

For photographs of my time in Colorado that summer click to that subject in my index bar. http://www.vlbanting.com/colorado.htm

After giving my story to the Rocky Mountain News in Denver early one morning, I began the final and most difficult day of the trip.  The long slow ride up into the Rocky Mountains to find Estes Park hidden in the middle of them in a beautiful valley.  Before that climb I had come across for other bicyclers (they were coming from New Jersey and New York and planned to ride their bicycles coast-to-coast.  When we reached the crest of that final mountain the ride down into the valley was wonderful.  That night we pitched our tents on the lawn of a Methodist church.  In the morning the pastor took us down to the basement and fed us a great big breakfast.  Then my friends departed and I began looking into finding a summer job.  It turned out it was no problem at all of a lot of newspapers had covered my story and several of the shop owners wanted to hire me.  So I was able to select the job that most fitted my needs and those were to have the time off to mountain climb.

I chose a job with a restaurant that only served the evening meal so I didn't have to go to work until four clock in the afternoon.  So everyday I would get up early and try to do a small climb before having to report to work at the restaurant at four.  The employees were all students from various universities like myself except after the summer they were headed back to their colleges and I was headed to Vietnam..

For more connected to this story, click on these two links http://www.vlbanting.com/clippingsfromtrip.htm   http://www.vlbanting.com/colorado.htm or click their topics in the index bar.