Navigation, Hospitality and Yogi Bear

I'm writing this in a laundry room, of all places, in the Tetons National Park, in between Jackson and Yellowstone. This room seems like a weird Internet cafe with lots of washing machines, a very strange place.

We've had a shorter day cycling today after a few very big days since Salt Lake City, we did nearly 300 miles in 4 days with a lot of climbing involved, that we were generally unaware of before, which is one of the reasons for this post. Andy's iPhone had been our main method of navegation, until his water bottle killed it last Thursday, and since then our already ad-hoc navigational techniques have become even more basic. American road maps are quite frankly crap for cycle touring, generally in a far too bigger scale with no detail of any relief or amenities whatsoever, which to be honest makes them useless for every usage, not like OS maps back home with every single pub marked on. For us this means we basically have to guess our distances, look at the shape of the road and the boldness of the text used to sort of plan our way through rural America and it is here where we tend to come unstuck!
We've now had a few days where we look at the map at 4pm, think that must be about 20 miles max, and then cycle round the corner to find a road distance sign with our planned destination and generally a distance next to it of roughly double what we thought. "Oh fuck," normally comes to mind straight away, followed by thinking do we have enough water, and then a massive hill upto around 8,000 ft. We do it, finish in the town and if that was in Utah and on a Sunday, everything apart from Fast food chains is shut! We did meet an American tourer who had all these specialist cycle maps with topographic views, services in each town etc, but we both think that that will put more mental challenges in front of us, and also, where's the fun and adventure in that?!

Where we are now is big bear country, so all the campsites have special bear bins and advice everwhere, which generally runs along the lines of don't feed the bears, makes you think what some people must do. All very beautiful though and we'll have some rest days in Yellowstone to visit the various hot springs, waterfalls and expensive and showerless campsites on offer. A big place though, one guy told me today it was a "milion square miles, or acre, I ain't sure.". Fairly sure it was the latter as we weren't talking about the Pacific Ocean.

The fine American hospitality has continued. We stayed in the guest house of a New York family's ranch on Friday, and they even let us ride their quad bikes up the hill behind the place the next morning, in the middle of a thunderstorm however. Jim, a lovely guy from San Francisco has just taken us out for dinner too after striking up a conversation outside the laundrette, so many lovely people everywhere. In a way, the people we meet make our trip much more enjoyable than the places we visit, all very entertaining characters and genuinely friendly people. As goes the phrase, God bless America!