Viva La Vagabond: 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!