July 11, 2014
Day 43 - Walden to Hot Sulphur Springs: The Last Pass.......there's a Sag Wagon Coming!!
More to come check back in a little while! Working on yesterday.
I'm back...thanks for waiting. We had an exciting time while you were away. We are in a little old motel....the last room in town and it was raining and lightning when we rolled in later than normal (major head winds)....I digress. Well let's just say the walls are thin and our neighbors were very frisky.
Ok..back to the ride. We had a 22 mile warm up to the PASS of the day Willow Creek at 9,683 ft. Thankfully the warm up ride wasn't as difficult as yesterday's first half. We had headwind but not to bad so by the time we reached the climb for the pass we were not worn out. This pass was very mild as passes go.
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The wind was nearly non existent on the pass so we hoped that when we were on the other side we would catch a tailwind on the downside.......no didn't happen. In fact we were coming down the hill at a pretty good speed and all of a sudden at about 6 mi down a gusting side/head wind kicked in so hard and fast it almost brought me to a standstill. And so it was the rest of the afternoon. The wind was coming from all the storms around us. We could see black clouds and lightning all around. In fact going up the pass we had a rain gear drill. It started raining so we stopped, put on our gear and then went about a mile (without rain) and had to take it off.
The first motel we saw said vacancy on the sign but the door had a hand written sign "No Vacancy". So, with thunder, lightning and rain we pulled into the next one up the road Canyon Motel. They had an apartment and a small room left. We took the small room because it was supposed to have the best WiFi (not terrible).
Well this is the Last Pass as tomorrow our brother-in-law David is going to drive until he runs into us and drive us to Buena Vista. That means we will not be doing the 11,000+ ft pass. We are good with that as we would like to spend at least two days visiting with them. They live in Louisiana so we don't see them very often and we haven't had a full day off since Driftwaters- Montana. Also, they don't have WiFi so you may not hear from us for a day or so.....but keep checking I might find a coffee shop or a bar with good service. We will rejoin the route in Pueblo.....maybe before. Haven't figured it out yet.
Until then...... Good Night.
I forgot to mention that we walked to dinner at the only place open a drive-in burger place. While waiting on our order, only seating outside, we looked at the flags out front and Yes...the wind was now blasting with a tailwind coming into town. The storms had cleared. We could have gone another ten miles with that. Well in our dreams. They did have one of the better burgers of the trip but they also had the worst nachos ever. Melted Velveeta........now that was scary.
Today's ride: 62 miles (100 km)
Total: 1,659 miles (2,670 km)
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