The morning air is fresh now, it has a coolness to it that feels so unfamiliar. I grab my fleece from it’s crumpled home at the bottom of my dry-sack, pulling it over my head. The golden light of dawn draws me outside and I pushed open the creaky cabin door, coffee in hand, careful not to let it slam and wake up Ted still sleeping inside. As I sit on the front porch of the cabin, the warmth from my mug making swirling steam rise and spin away into the waking day, I watch the leaves of the Aspen trees shimmer in the breeze. It’s mesmerising. The rustling as they flutter is a gentle soundtrack, the birds adding the high notes with their chirps and the beats from their wings.  Finally, my mind is still.

After 10 months of riding, living away from all that was familiar, away from a life that was expected and accepted, a calmness has crept up on me. I notice it most at times like this. Over the last few weeks I have felt it more and more. It’s a sense of lightness, like the unconscious pressure of my life back home has lifted, floating higher and higher with each day of pedalling, until even it’s shadow just feels like that of a cloud passing overhead. I know Ted feels it too.

Things have become…. dare I say it…easy. A couple of weeks ago, not long after our 4th July celebrations, we decided to leave the Western Wildlands Route behind. Instead we peeled off slightly further East, to join the famous and extremely popular Great Divide Mountain Bike Route (GDMBR, raced on the Tour Divide). On our way to join it we took in a couple of America’s Scenic Byways and some pristine gravel backroads, wiggling past lakes and reservoirs, up mountains and between passes via well known tourist honeypots like Alpine, Jackson-Hole and Grand Teton National Park. It was cruisey.

We even managed to make a friend along the way. We first bumped into Katrin on the Western Wildlands Route, the only other long distance cyclists we’d met since Phoenix. Katrin is from Germany and is inspirationally cycling from Mexico to Canada on her own – True girl power! When we kept bumping in to one another, and then realised we were both planning to join the GDMBR via Jackson, we decided to ride together for a few days. Having Katrin for company has been a real joy. We’ve bonded over our shared love of the outdoors, our joint enjoyment of spending an excessively long time choosing food in a supermarket and a mutual, unending love of ice cream. Not only has Katrin been another person to chat to after ten months of (pretty much) just the two of us, I feel like I’ve truly found one of my tribe in her – she doesn’t think I’m crazy for living in my tent, she understands that shampoo is overrated and she knows how to navigate the mindfield that is the female cyclists’ underwear market! Safe to say, it’s been a pleasure having her along for the ride.

Whether it was all the chatting to Katrin, or whether it was the gentle gradient of the hills, or the pristine smooth gravel here in the USA, we’ve found ourselves unintentionally increasing our daily mileage. The mornings seem to fly by. It means we’ve usually covered 60km by lunchtime, without really trying. And as we find camp for the night it’s not unusual for our Garmins daily mileage to now show three figures, without our legs first telling us this is the case. It’s not that the distances or hills aren’t big here in the USA – everything’s definitely big here in the USA – it’s just that everything has seemed that much easier. The gravel isn’t endless washboard, the tarmac roads are as smooth as they come, nothing is technical riding, the gradients aren’t steep, the weather isn’t a battle to be fought against, the opportunity to resupply with food is plentiful, there are rivers for washing and creeks for drinking. It’s just big and easy carefree days.

As we skirted around Yellowstone National Park and joined the GDMBR, any worries we had about the route quickly disappeared. The further we travelled along the GDMBR, from Wyoming up into Montana, the theme of whizzing along, plain sailing, continued and the rolling reel of incredible views and forests was impressive. Ted’s even become used to doing everything from the saddle, even brushing his teeth! That’s not to say that we haven’t had our frustrations at the number of flies and mosquitoes who love to share our camping spots, or that we haven’t had to learn new skills to hang our food in the trees away from the bears, or that we haven’t had to overcome our nerves at facing a huge shaggy grey wolf as it crossed our path, but we’ve just not let these things get to us the way they once would have done. Maybe we are now more used to dealing with unexpected challenges that are thrown our way. Or maybe the rest of the background noise in our minds from the toil of daily life has finally quietened, so that we have the headspace to better deal with the inevitable ups and downs. Things are calmer, nothing feels like an insurmountable huge problem anymore. Which is pretty good, as just about everything else here in the USA is big.

It goes without saying that the geography is big. We cover many miles between one town and the next, on two lane roads or gravel tracks that feel double the width of those we have in the UK. The mountains and plains feel endless, and the skies even bigger. They remind us of the wide open spaces of Argentina. The trees are taller here. Even the ants are bigger. It feels like everything has been sized up. And that’s definitely the case for food and drink (not that it’s a problem for hungry cyclists like us!). Every truck is also bigger, the top of the car bonnet standing about the same as my head height. The wheels up to my armpits. The RVs and Caravans they tow are larger than our home in terms of floor space. It’s not unusual to see a truck towing an RV, towing a boat, towing a couple of quad bikes or ATVs (All Terrain Vehicles). Most of which would be too large to make it down even the biggest of our motorways in the UK. But here in the USA its all in proportion. It often feels a bit like we’re experiencing a real life version of the classic 1990s children’s film, ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’ with life going on around us at a gigantic scale. It makes us realise just how small the UK is.

It’s easy to see the influences on the American culture that have lead to the consumer concept that ‘more and bigger is better’. Houses have double garages full of every tool and grown-ups toy you could imagine – canoes and kayaks, ATVs and ride-on lawnmowers, e-bikes and motorbikes, overflowing boxes of picnic paraphernalia and garden furniture, SUP boards and surfboards, tennis rackets and volleyball nets, then they have the equivalent winter versions – snow mobiles and skis and ski-doos the list goes on. But with all these toys to use, it seems many people prefer these to simple pastimes like walking and cycling. Unlike the pedestrianised town centres of a lot of the UK, here you can drive to the door of pretty much every shop or eatery. They even have drive through banks. No need to walk. And if not, we’ve seen many people using their golf-buggy or ATV to get exactly where they want to go – The humble legs being totally overlooked! We were, however, encouraged by the number of cyclists using the huge network of cycle paths in Jackson, where the purpose built smooth trails made us feel like we were back in Europe. It was great to see so many people just using their bikes to get around the town, popping to the shop or heading out to meet friends. It just goes to show how much of a positive impact a cycle path network can have on a place, with each one of those bikes reducing the number of cars on the roads and bringing a smile to the cyclists’ face – Joyous!

The general preference to drive everywhere means that there is lots of peace and silence to be found off the roads, as anywhere that is difficult to drive to is very unlikely to have any people around. It’s provided some beautiful and silent camp spots for us, as well as many kilometres of nothing but us and nature – it’s pretty special. Perhaps this is what has helped develop the sense of quiet calm we have noticed over the last few weeks. Or perhaps we’ve learnt to let go of a lot of things that once seemed important at home. There’s less self-induced pressure, less juggling of life admin and riding, less worry about things we can’t influence. Everyday is a lesson in impermanence, in how nothing good or bad lasts forever, so we continue to ride the wave of whatever comes our way and keep pedalling. Truth be told, I’m surprised it’s taken this long, but finally life, for a while at least, just feels…simple.

I lift the mug to my lips, blowing out a couple of breaths across the hot surface, a comforting habit, and take the first sip of smooth, strong coffee. Scrunching my eyes, I turn my face to meet the morning sun. The feeling of the increasingly deepened lines upon my face adding to the sensation. But I let it go, I close my eyes and relax. The next sip of coffee brings me back from where my mind had wondered off to. I repeat. Time is measured only by the golden light moving across the Aspen trees and the slow emptying of my coffee mug. Savouring the final mouthful and then taking a deep breath, I stand and head back inside to wake Ted. Another day of riding begins.