The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

My dad always says that bicycle touring amplifies everything. The good days are really good. Every meal you have is the best meal you’ve ever had. Every beer you have is the best beer you’ve ever had. Similarly, the bad days are really bad.

We had a bit of both today. Today started out great. We were on a good road, well-paved, few cars. It was a good temperature out. The scenery was really good. At one point the landscape somehow opened up. It got bigger. More vast. Wider.

And then we turned south. Into a 25 mph headwind, with gusts up to 40 mph. We rode into the headwind for 17 miles. By the time we turned east again, the wind was so strong that the cross-wind was problematic. Not veering into traffic uncontrollably became a struggle.

Eventually we made it to Eureka (our second Eureka of the trip!). This town doesn’t have a Walmart but it does have a Dollar General, a Family Dollar, and a Dollar Tree, all in a row. It took four trips down the frozen food aisle of the Dollar General before we found vegetables. Not a lot of those to be found.

Highlights

• a couple times today while we were stopped for snacks, a passing car would slow down a lot until we looked at them. Then they would smile, wave, and go about their business. One person had the BIGGEST smile for us when he caught our attention to wave. A couple hours later we were stopped for lunch, and a passing truck honked at us. When we looked it was the same man, same massive smile, and another wave. It really made us happy.
• we’ve been following train tracks since we left Pueblo, and today we saw our first train since the day we left Pueblo. Many of the train cars had Amazon or UPS logos on them, but I couldn’t make out the rest.
• we saw an absolutely massive frog in the middle of the road. Mike thought he had a judgmental look about him. Watching the passing cars and cyclists. He also thought he looked ornery and wise beyond his years. I liked the big guy a lot.

Lowlights

• the headwind, when we had one, was brutal. Just soul-crushing.
• the cross-wind was surprisingly terrifying. We had just turned onto a very busy road with no shoulder when we encountered the cross-wind and it was a real struggle to not put ourselves in front of a vehicle. I’ll take mountains over wind any day.
• all through Kansas and the flat part of Colorado, the road has been full of little crickets. They don’t jump very high and they jump away from me when I approach. Today we came across very large crickets. They can jump really high, up to face-level with me. And they jump at me as I approach. At face-level. I luckily wasn’t hit in the face by a big cricket today, but I was hit by many big crickets everywhere else. And the wind really helped them get a lot of speed and so they hit me with a lot of force. And then they’d just hang on to my clothes somehow and I’d have to bat them away.

Julie’s food

• Breakfast: breakfast burrito and Buffalo chick’n nuggies (we bought them for dinner last night and then didn’t eat them)
• First Snack: Clif bar
• Second Snack: no cow bar
• Lunch: peanut butter sandwich and pistachios
• Dinner: grapes, Spanish rice and veggies, sour patch kids

Stats

• Total distance: 73.88 miles
• Elevation gain: 1,579 feet
• Weather: windy, dry, high of 80 degrees Fahrenheit