Colorful Colorado

Hello from Colorado! We did finally leave our beloved Lander and flew through the rest of Wyoming. Waking up to a very tasty continental breakfast at the Holiday Inn was a great way to fuel up for the day. The next town over was Sinclair and the highway went right by the oil refinery. Pretty neat. After that we had to hop on the interstate and ride for a bit, which was interesting since we always think of that being illegal in Tennessee. We are at a point on our route where there is really not much in between our destinations. We had a long but pleasant ride to Saratoga where we stopped for lunch. We made it in to Riverside fairly early that evening and would have liked to continue but we didn't really have any more camping options for another 40 miles. That was a little much after a full day of riding so we decided to stay. We killed some time at their visitor center and met Judy, whose brother own's Ship Shape Marina in Murfreesboro. So if you take your boat in to get fixed tell him we said hey! Thanks to Judy's suggestions we technically camped in Encampment a mile down the road because they have free camping. 

     It was nice to get in early to get ready for a big ride the next day. We were excited to get up because we only had 30 miles to the state line! Colorado is a big milestone for us. We are almost through the mountains for a while and we hope to gain a lot of ground after our last mountain pass. After seeing the state line we still had a long stretch of nothing, but pretty nothing. The first "town" we saw after leaving that morning was Cowdrey. It literally a post office and a liquor store. The basic essentials to life. We finally made to a decent sized town, Walden, where we stopped into a restaurant to take a break. This is where we met Gabi, the most interesting person of our trip. Gabi was an old war vet who appeared to be a frequent visitor of the bar there.  He was a character alright. He was one of those people that a movie couldn't create any more perfectly. He was colorful enough for the whole state of Colorado, his language was anyway. We were very appreciative that he was kind enough to keep offering us beers and shots but had to explain that we shouldn't before getting back on the bike in this heat and altitude. We had to explain this several times over the course of an hour because he kept offering. 

        We had gone 50 miles to Walden and we wanted to make it a few more so we took off to see what we could find. We ended up camping in Routt National Forest. This put us a little closer to the top of our next to last big pass that we have to go over before hitting the flat Midwest. 

      The next morning we got on the road by ten o' clock again! That's pretty good for us. After a couple of miles of climbing we had mostly downhill the rest of the day, but also a headwind : / We ate lunch in Hot Sulphur Springs at The Glory Hole, which was deliciously satisfying. From there we had a beautiful ride. The Colorado scenery has been changing constantly. On our way out of town we had a real treat of riding through Byers Canyon. It is one of our favorite places that we have seen so far. On our way into Kremmling we ran into an interesting character. Steve is walking to New York City..with his goat. Even more interesting is the fact that he started in Seattle last May. We are looking forward to meeting more interesting people through the colorful state of Colorado!

Big mama Nat and Mama Lewis at Sinks Canyon

More Sinclair 

The Sinclair oil refinery in Sinclair, WY

Chainring ouchie!

First time we've ridden on the interstate. Not too bad!

Whoo HOO

Yellowstone didn't have a sign for the border so we snapped a pic for the heck of it.

It's starting to look a little Rocky

There's Ol' Gabbi

National forest camp area. Weird noises all night

Byer's Canyon. It's much prettier in the flesh.

Steve and his goat "Leroy Brown"

Landed in Lander

We had a few solid days doing 65+ miles every day from the time we entered Yellowstone until we made it to Lander on Sunday night. We knew Lander was worth spending a least one day in to do some laundry and get everybody back to tip top shape, whether it was healing from sinus infections, hundreds of Mosquitos bites or soreness. Well,  Lander quickly became one of our favorite places. They have an excellent Parks and Rec department that takes care of a wonderful park where you can camp for free. This provides a place for the many through traveling bike tourists from the Transam and rock climbers exploring the climbing in nearby Sinks Canyon. Lander is very community oriented and filled with many generous and friendly people. They are also famous or their HUGE 4th of July Celebration. It started to look like we may be spending a little more time in Lander than we really needed to. On Monday we scoped out the town after doing laundry and finding showers. We visited the NOLS headquarters which was fun since we have all worked in outdoor programs at some point. We cooled off inside Gannet Grill and met Alicia and John, a couple that now lives in Kansas City and would love to host us when we come through that direction. We talked to them for hours and John, who is from Lander, told us about all of the great things the town had to offer. We also met Kevin, a traveler from Colorado who aspires to do the TransAm one day as well. It was evening by the time we finished chatting with Kevin and we received and interesting picture of our tent from Sara & Matt. Our tent that we had left this morning in it's own little space was now surrounded by people in lawn chairs...like LOTS of people. We came back to find a small band concert right in the middle of the park. We continued to meet many friendly locals while in the park who get excited to see cyclists staying in the park. We remembered Judy in particular. She is the perfect example of "giving the shirt off your back." A couple of days prior, one of Natalee's beloved Ironman watches bit the dust when a weak spot in the bad finally broke. Judy was wearing an identical watch so Natalee commented on how great they are and explained the reason for her now exposed, impressive watch tan line. Without hesitation Judy tossed her watch to Natalee and told her to have it. This blog has become an account to show that the majority of the world really is still made up of nice, good-hearted people. We have had very few experiences with negative, unaccepting  people and countless experiences of the opposite. By this point, we had pretty much decided to stay in Lander until the 4th. We all visited Gannet Peak's bike shop the next day, where Judy works. They gave us EXCELLENT care for a very little charge and put the cycle tourists first. Jordan and Natalee took a little ride up to Sinks Canyon which is on the list of "must see's" by the people of Lander. The "sinks" are where the Popo Agie River disappears into the side wall of the canyon. The water reappears 1/4 mile later on the other side of the road at the "rise" but it takes over two hours before reappearing. Geologist have studied, but still are not sure what path the water takes or what causes it to take so long. The rise also has HUGE rainbow trout that get up to 12 ft long. Once into the Shoshone National forest there is a 1  1/2 mile hike that we took to Popo Agie Falls to dip in the cold water. We made it back to our campsite just in time for the play that was being held in the park. We had one more day to bum around Lander before the big 4th of July festivities. That evening we attended a Native American evil spirit dance where Jordan was summoned by an Indian princess to be a part of the pow wow. Afterwards we ran into Nick, a cyclist that we met back in Idaho. Then two more special guests showed up! Natalee's parents made it into Lander a night early after their flight into Denver. The 4th was filled with lots of activities to be celebrated with parents and many new friends that we met over the last few days from camping in the park. We first attended the parade, the bison BBQ next, then the rodeo. This is the world's first paid rodeo and they are very proud of it. The fire department puts on a HUGE firework display at the rodeo grounds to the beautiful sounds of Toby Keith and other very American country songs. A rodeo, fireworks and Toby Keith, could you get any more American than that? What was even more amazing than the city firework show was our view from the bleachers. The entire town was lighting up with cherry bombs constantly for hours! In the end, we were very glad that we stayed around Lander to celebrate. However, because we lost so many days and because of the terrible construction we have been hearing of, we may have cheated just a smidgen. We hitched rides to Rawlins, but we figure that it was a very reasonable trade off. Natalee's parents parted ways in Rawlins and spoiled us once more with a hotel stay before we restart our journey. Hopefully this will help to refresh us because we have some big days ahead of us to make up some miles! Colorado here we come!

The NOLS headquarters

Our tent!

Judy being so generous.

What's going on here?

The Sinks

And not a good picture but this is the rise. The fish are much bigger than they appear.

Pretty

At the start of the evil spirit dance.

Jordan and his princess.

Photo op

We found Nick!

So many new friends!

The world's first paid rodeo!

In the distance you can see the many fireworks popping up in the city.

'Merica!!

A Fine Day for Riding

Apologies on the delay of the last post. It was written a few nights ago but never actually published. Anyway, so we have made it to Lander, Wyoming. It is quite the town of 7,000 people. That is the biggest we have seen since Missoula. We had a rough start yesterday morning. Even though we got to sleep in comfortable beds, tons of itchy mosquito bites made it hard to sleep. Some of us are getting a little under the weather, due to the weather and we put a lot of hard miles in while traveling through Yellowstone. We decided to journey on anyway and make it as far as we could, even though we did not have a lot of options of places to stay. The good news was the the ride was relatively down hill. We had a lot of rolling hills, up and down but we ultimately finished at a lower elevation. It wasn't an extremely exciting day, but a nice day. We had a big variety of very neat scenery. We went through a geologist's haven. I would love to try to vividly describe the type of landscape we saw, however I am not a geologist so I am incapable of doing so. We are also no National Geographic photographers so we were not able to capture the beauty of the area. Our best advice to you is, Google it. We ran into Brent once again when we stopped to eat lunch. About that time, dark clouds started rolling in. It actually worked out kind of nicely because it cooled off tremendously and we had a pretty gnarly sky to look at. The rain held off all the way until Fort Washakie. We had made it that far so we figured we might as well go 15 more miles to Lander. We waited out the storm for a little while at a gas station where we once again ran into Brent. The storm shortly passed and while exhausted and hungry, we used our second wind to get to Lander before it got any later. It was a fast 15 miles with some downhill and a little tailwind from the storm. Lander is very accommodating to cyclists. They allow free camping in the city park, have nice bike lanes, and showers are available for $2 at the city pool. We put in a total of 79 miles yesterday and it is at least 65 miles to anything else. We are also much overdo for a laundry day. We are going to hang out in Lander for the day and check out all the neat things to do while we have the chance to. It definitely looks like we may not have the chance to for a while. We are excited to be meeting up with Natalee's parents after they fly into Denver tomorrow and we are hoping to find a cool place to spend 4th of July. Wish us luck!

Striped hills

Calamine lotion to save the day.

Dubois wy

Somewhere east of Dubois,WY

The boys waiting out the storm in Fort Washakie

HUGE pancake special at Maverick's in Lander, WY

Laundry day outfits 

Laundry outfit #2

To Yellowstone and Beyond.

2 national parks later and another state down! Last Dwayne's day morning we said our final goodbyes to our new family from San Diego as we all departed from the cabin. We biked 20 miles back to West Yellowstone, got some groceries then made our way to the park entrance. It felt like we were about to go into Disney World! It was still early so we were able to take our time on a leisurely ride through the park. We stopped to see all of the geysers and mud pots but we were disappointed that we didn't see any animals. We made it to Norris campground fairly early. We followed the path to the biker/hiker area and as we came around the corner we couldn't believe what we saw. A bison sitting right in be middle of the campsites! He stayed there all night. We almost had an extra guest for dinner but he just continued on his way, making his rounds until he laid right back down in his little spot. We had the entire next day to explore the park. We stopped by the Canyon Village Visitor's Center and learned all about the history of the park. We saw more geysers and had lunch right on the shore of Yellowstone Lake. Yellowstone has a lot to offer for cyclists..except for shoulders on the roads! It was a little scary at times but we had an amazing time regardless. We camped at Grant Village where we ran into Matt & Sara, our other friends from San Diego who we have not seen since Baker City, and Brent from Bruce's Warm Shower house in Missoula. It has been nice running into familiar faces so frequently. We were excited to camp with fellow road friends and to top it off, we got delicious leftovers from an outdoor company called Backroads that is based out of Salt Lake City. I don't know that we have ever enjoyed food so much in our lives. The next day the vagabonds had to split up for the first time. Natalee continued on the trail and out of the park with Matt and Sara in order to pick up an interesting package from mom while the boys visited Old Faithful. The vagabonds eventually met back up at Colter Village. Luckily we ran into Backroads again and got more leftovers! But even cooler than that, we met their staff member, Olivia,  who just graduated from UT and worked for their outdoor program with some friends of ours. It's a small world after all. Today consisted of one big, long climb over Togwotee Pass, but we met some interesting people along the way. Jeff and Matt are from D.C. going to the west coast. Mark and Erica were traveling with their whole family!(just wait for the picture) We made it into Dubois exhausted and ran into Sara, Matt and Brent again at the Cowboy Cafe. Yep, small world. After the three of them left we were stuck at the table trying to figure out where to stay. Does this story sound familiar? Have we ever heard of planning ahead? We were trying to figure out a way other than paying $40 to sleep in a tent at the only campsite in town so we asked the waitresses if they had any ideas. Long story short, we are staying in Meredith and Brent's  workshop with beds AND a shower. A lady with her family sitting next to us heard this happen and told us she got chills listening. She biked across the country years ago and had the same experiences. We can't quite figure out what it is but people have been nothing but supportive of our trip. It is an amazing feeling and reassures us that we are supposed to be on this adventure. But as for now, we have a busy night of counting each other's mosquito bites. Any guesses for Jordan? Natalee? Israel? 

 With our friend Jess at the Cabin

Our new San Diego Family

Gibbon Falls

The Artist's Paint Pots

Weird

There here is

Let's see how many times we can cross

the Continental Divide in one week

Now those are jorts

Goodies from mom!

Lori, a fellow swiftwick wearer from California!

Mmmm...tastes like home.

See if you can spot the whole family. On just two bikes they are carrying three kids and a dog.

There it is again

Despite the horse flies and the clouds of mosquitos, we made it.

A la mode

Thanks Brent and Meredith!