Woke up in a comfy bed hugging a comfy pillow and didn't really want to get out of bed after the short night of sleep, but there were goodbyes to be said to the Adventure Cycling group at breakfast and miles to be ridden.

I packed up quickly and said goodbye to Gillian, regretting that our time together wasn't longer but needing to get over to tell the groupies goodbye.

Now, until I met up with them, I was loving my solo tour. But as we hopscotched across most of Kansas together off and on, I'd gotten kind of attached to them. When I pulled up to their hotel, Toni saw me first and ran over to give me a big hug and told me how brave and strong I was for undertaking this trip. She even named me a HAC: Honorary Adventure Cyclist, which was really touching. 'Course then she wants pictures of my bleary, teary, sleep deprived self at 6 a.m. I'm sure I look a little worse for the wear in those pictures.

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Told people goodbye and headed out on the road alone, knowing Alvin would catch up so I could tell him goodbye and figuring Tim and Jacques would eventually catch up, too. Not too far from town, though, I finally ran into Gracie, a recent Duke grad unicycling across the US for lukemia/lymphoma research. UNICYCLING: as in one wheel, no coasting, one speed travel. After saying goodbye to everyone else, the company was nice. Her boyfriend was in the group of 7 guys I'd met up with a few times in Virginia and Kentucky, and she said she was going to tell them off for making fun of me for carrying too much stuff since they way they talked I had some giant load or something, but I'm not carrying as much stuff as many people are. Those guys just happened to be travelling lighter than most. So there.

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Alvin eventually caught up with both of us and got pictures of Gracie while I pulled ahead, but we ended up riding fast together a while (well, it was fast for me anyway, but that made it fun) and talking about how much we'd enjoyed each other's company over the past week. We'd had so many good, meaningful conversations about school and life and such in such a short amount of time. And those conversations were making it harder to go our own ways--sometimes you just run into someone who gets you, who understands your sense of humor and your sense of the world, someone you don't really have to explain yourself to. That's the kind of week we'd had, but he had to take care of things for his group and I had to go meet my mom, so we parted with a big hug, a little sadness, a couple of tears on my part, and a final round of talking trash.

I rode on into the Pueblo area alone and a little slower, picked up the rental car, and tried to remember how to drive. But the car was almost exactly like mine at home, so that wasn't really a problem, and it was a good day to have air conditioning. As I was running errands around town a couple of hours later(and going so fast in my little car!), Alvin called to see if I was still around town. The campground the group was staying that night was quite a few miles out of town, but they'd arranged for one group member's wife who was coming to visit to take them to town to get groceries for the group. Except that she was stuck in Baltimore or something on a delayed flight. So me and my little blue car went trucking out to the campground to pick up the cooks and take them almost 10 miles back to WalMart for food. I've been helped by so many people on this trip that it was no problem helping them out.

After that was all done, I finally headed northward, not really knowing where I'd stay since I didn't know how much driving I'd have to do. I'd put in contacts for the first time in a month, and the dry climate and sleep deprivation made them uncomfortable, but I went ahead and drove all the way up to Denver, found the airport, tried to find a cheap hotel, and ended up sleeping in the car in a campground fairly close to the airport between an interstate and a railroad track, still amazed at how many miles a car can do in a day compared to me 'n my bike...