Hot. The sweat resistant sunscreen flows to white islets on our arms. The skin feels like sandpaper. Salt crystals pattern T-shirt and face. The gummy bears are melted to a compact colorful mass. And the water bottles are all empty again. But the steep dirt road winds, unimpressed by our whining further upwards. Did we not read somewhere that every hundred altitude meters make a diffrence of up to one degree Celsius in temperature? So further up, it can only get better.

After Indiana pass, we encounter the first racers. One hundred and eighty of them started less than ten days before in Banff and try to cover the distance of over 4000km in record times of less than two weeks. Some are too stressed to stop for us, others seem to be happy about an excuse to climb for a moment off the bike. Short chitchat, where from, where to, do you like it and always: "how far are you going today?" Then we merely shrug the shoulders. If it gets dark, we will pitch the tent somewhere in the woods or beside a small stream, annoyed by the mosquitoes we will cook, eat, sleep. We do not care where that will be and we are not making any daily stage plans since a long time. Once again we realize how far we have distanced ourselves from the society that thinks in minutes and hours, which is hoarding time like the gray men in the children's book "Momo" and makes a competition to come as far as possible in as little time.

Exactly this shrug helps us a few days later to a beautiful place for the night. For ten days we are now cycling without a break. Sleeping in tent somewhere in the wilderness, bathing in icy streams, washing clothes in lakes. We long for a bed, for a hot shower, a washing machine, just a bit of civilization luxury. And then we meet Anita and Jack on the hard shoulder toward Steamboat Springs. They are cycling their morning round with their racing bikes, stop and ask questions about our equipment, then about our trip. "And how long do you intend to be on the road?" A shrug, a laugh: "No idea, we make no plans, you know." And so we have a few kilometers later exactly what we wanted. A bed, a hot shower, a laundry plus a bunch of interesting conversations.

Anita's parents emigrated in the fifties to America, their head full of dreams, the hearts filled of desire for a better life, a life that the Europe of the postwar times could not offer them. With both hands they have taken the oppurtunity America has offered them. Anita tells us how they drove the expensive Cadillac of Rod Serling, a famous director, from New York to Hollywood, of course, without having a clue, to whom they were doing a service. For them it was simply a unique and cheap opportunity to cross the country, while the "fine Mister" was taking an aircraft. How they had asked to be allowed to extend the trip by one day to make a honeymoon stop at the Grand Canyon. How they handed over the car so spotless after the trip that the owner, impressed by the young couple, payed them the money for gasoline, though that was not part of the deal. It is one of this "America, the land of opportunity" stories and it touches us in a special way. Because not all immigrant stories have been so successful. The differences between rich and poor are huge, especially for such a modern state, a state which is a model for many developing countries. No social security, no unemployment benefit, no proper pension, no health insurance, no payed higher education, a minimum salary of $15 per hour, which is still far from being respected everywhere. For us all things a matter of course. Many Americans are still believing that you are the architect of your own fortune. If you did not make it from rags to riches, is your own fault. An attitude that seems selfish to us.

Yet we sit here now on a loaded table, enjoy the salmon, while we talk about the greasy sheep meat we ate in Mongolia; the bivouac at minus forty degrees, when the lashes are freezing together; how traveling, that had started eighteen years ago with short holidays in Europe, has become more and more our life. The encounter with Anita and Jack was one of those special moments in travel life and it has triggered something in us. We are surprised and grateful for the hospitality in a western country like America. A chat here, a conversation there, even with unknown people. We wish us a similar openness and curiosity to foreigners or travelers in Europe. We wonder if and how we will make the leap back again into the everyday world and the consumer society when there will come the time for it. The departure from home has needed courage. It was not easy for us to leave a great job, our home, family and friends three years ago. But sometimes we think that a return and reintegration into the old life will need almost more courage.

In Wyoming is the Great Basin. Almost every cyclist is complaining about. Heat, drought, wind. Will there finally be a bit of adventure? After all, there are cyclists who warn us, and the judgment of a cyclist is mostly true. But everything only half as bad! Gentle, rolling hills, silvery sage bushes between lilac blooming lupines, finally yellow prairie grass til the horizon. A nice change from the never ending forest. We start in the darkness, after all we have learned from the wind in the Puna. The sky discolors in a gentle pink, a few antelopes flee when we start cycling. But unlike the Puna wind the Basin wind awakens with the first sunbeams. And we have it frontally. Pedaling, riding in the windshade of the other, cursing - and in between dreaming of Mongolia.

After the Great Basin the trail crosses the Teton National Park. Finally real mountains. We know that cyclists coming from north can ride through for free, but coming from south it looks differently. The try to cycle naughty by the ticket booth, fails. We are called back. Also our argument that we will not visit the park, but merely ride thirty kilometers through on the main road, does not help. Behind us a traffic jam. "You have to pay, it's final," says the annoyed Park ranger. Then we load on a car, we reply with a shrug, because as cyclists we would have to buy both a single ticket, double what is charged a motorist with four passengers. "Hitchhiking through a National Park is forbidden," so the ranger. But now we are annoyed as well, because thirty dollars means almost a daily travel budget, or a bit of luxury like a bargained motel night, or four times eating in McDonald, or eight pints of ice cream. Without any further word we turn back and eat frustrated a Snickers at the crossroads. And then there are coming two cyclists from the north, which have a ticket that is valid for three more days and additionally includes the Yellowstone National Park. "There is always a solution", something we have learned during our travel years. Sometimes you just have to wait a little bit longer for it.

In Yellowstone, we feel like we were in China, Korea, India, France and America at the same time. Thousands of people visit the park on the weekend of 4 of July, the American national day. They step on each other's toes on the catwalks in front of the geysers and fight for the airspace above their heads with their selfie sticks. And most of them are traveling in an over-sized motorhome - with a trailer for the ATV and when it comes up even with one for the boat. The roads are just as congested as on Easter at the Gotthard tunel. In the evening when we were in tent, we feel like in Sicily when we had once camped on a traffic island in the middle of a main road. Again, we have the constantly hum of traffic as a lullaby in the ear. It's funny that entire regions are destroyed by fracking to produce the gasoline, so that those diesel monsters can then visit protected nature elsewhere, we ponder. It's funny that those who want to see unspoiled nature have to pay for the park, and not those who destroy the environment.

Back on the trail we enjoy the solitude and silence all the more. Meanwhile, we are close to the Canadian border. And then? We still do not know how to proceed. But we still have all the time we want. A shrug, a laugh. "No idea, we make no plans, you know." Perhaps as well this time an unexpected door opens for us.