Originally Posted by
indyfabz
Totally forgot about my Backroads experience at Moran Jct. I was sitting outside some store eating lunch when they started to come down from the direction of Togwotee Pass. I tried to get some info about the climb up. Someone told me they had been shuttled up some “big hill” and rode down. It was clear they didn’t want to have anything to do with me.
A while later a leader came with a van and started loading their bikes on the roof. I had come from Jenny Lake so I didn’t smell that bad yet.
I would say it’s more of a group dynamic issue than anything wrong with you. I’ve experienced the same thing in Scotland 40+ years ago. My wife and I kept being asked if we were with “the Alaskans” at every place we stopped. We were a day or two behind them and, as we were Yanks wearing helmets (something rare at the time in Great Britain), everyone assumed we were lost sheep. We eventually diverged off their path. In Oban, we ran into the Alaskans at a pastry shop and introduced ourselves with “Hey, you’re the Alaskans! We’ve been chasing you for 2 weeks!” The response I got was “well, you caught us.” I was able to pry out of one of them that they were 50 miles into a 100 mile day but that was all. They were in their own insular world and running across a random Yank wasn’t all that interesting. Frankly, they were a bit rude with the shop clerk so running across a random Scot was probably not all that interesting.
A few days later we ran across a solo tourist from Oregon who was more than happy to talk with some random Yanks in Scotland.
This, by the way, is something I’ve run across with just regular riders as well. I’ve done thousands of miles of solo touring and have gone days at a time without interacting with a single person. Even people riding my direction are completely uninterested in striking up conversations. A common theme in campgrounds is for me to spend an afternoon, an evening, and a morning in camp with no one at all approaching me. But let me break camp, get loaded, swing my leg over my bike, and start to push the pedal and it’s like I have a line at a New York deli asking me questions.