Very happy to hear that you didn't have much traffic on 50! Definitely a much better experience than I had. And yes, the restaurant is inside the store.

Thank you for the prompt. I went back and added some commentary. Yep - blue skies today. Google has nothing new on the Lopez fire. IDK if that's good or bad.

Looks like the fire must not have been a problem.

Woo, hoo!

That’s really scary. I’m glad he didn’t end up losing a core sample.

Try riding a recumbent bike! Talk about a sub niche!

One other tidbit for tomorrow's ride; turning off at Cotopaxi, scan the high cliffs to the right as you climb up those hills; you may spot some mountain goats.

Kelly - I remember the ride from Salida to Cotopaxi very well from my 2017 Western Express trip. Unfortunately, as you have already surmised, it is not fun - not at all. There was no shoulder at all most of the time, and the traffic on 50 is fast and aggressive. We left very early in the morning and ran hard, and it just wasn't fun at all. There was no easy way to do it, you just had to grin and bear it and try to get through it as rapidly as possible. I'd go so far as to say it was the worse stretch of highway along the entire 1,600 miles of the Western Express. I was very happy to turn off at Cotopaxi. What we didn't know was that the store at Cotopaxi served a decent breakfast in the cafe - else we wouldn't have ate big in Salida and would have gone for 2nd brekfast there. You may want to call ahead and see if they still serve breakfast. And maybe the highway has been improved with wider shoulders since 2017.

Looks like some kind of Penstemon. There are over 20 species in that area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penstemon

Hey Kelly, I should have been more clear: In 2019 we stayed there when Joy drove me to the start of my Oregon-to-Kentucky trip (https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/noflats/).

So that time we didn't ride to Salida on bikes.

I hadn't thought about the difficulty getting your long recumbent to the second story. We do remember the upstairs rooms as being nice and roomy (we might have paid more for a larger room each time), but maybe he didn't have any of those left.

Thanks for your offer on Colorado routing. I might take you up on it; I feel like I haven't given Colorado a fair chance, because it seems like I always spend too much time on bad roads there. Or maybe the roads are ok, but I'm in a bad mood, haha.

Can you send me a link to the 2019 trip? I can’t find it.

I had called the Woodland. The man said the rooms were small, we would have to stay upstairs, and the size of my bike would be a problem. So. Here we are on the vanilla strip.

I don’t think you will ever revisit Colorado, but if you decide to give it a try, I think I could come up with a low traffic route.

Is the Woodland Motel in downtown Salida no longer open? If not, that's a shame, since it was/is a memorably nice older mom-and-pop place. Joy and I stayed there two nights on our Great Divide trip (https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/weakestlink/joy-maintains-a-steady-smirk/), and then again in 2019. It was great being able to walk a few blocks to stuff in Salida from the motel.

Salida is our favorite Colorado town.

"It seems e bikes are the wave of the future."

Although I agree they are probably now a permanent feature of the cycling landscape, trends and fads are too. Fifty years ago it was banana seats and ten speeds. Then it was mountain bikes in the 80s and hybrids in the 90s. I dunno about the next 20 years because I was not in the market for a bike. Then it was high end road bikes, triathlon bikes, and time trial bikes. Solid disc wheels. Bladed spokes. Carbon fiber wheels. Titanium and carbon fiber have supplanted aluminum, which displaced Reynolds 531 and 535 steel tubing and lugged frames.. Elliptical chain rings have come and gone and come again.

Now its 29ers, "gravel bikes" (whatever that means), and ebikes.

Through it all, a bike designed for loaded touring has been a sub sub sub niche and choices have been few in the mainstream market. I think that's still true.

Their fix held to Salida. Jacinto is at the bike shop as we speak. No body parts were injured during this adventure!

I’m a 10 mph rider. This really is a big day for me. ~6 hours a day is my happy zone. More than that and I’m too tired the next day. This was our longest mile day. Hopefully, our longest saddle time also.