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If the morning was any nicer, I would have wet myself. It was a beautiful run, mostly downhill, along the Arkansas River. At one point, we stopped to watch a pair of deer on an island, until Andy scared them off. It really couldn't have been finer. Stopped in Cañon City to go to the post office to get stamps to mail postcards (it's in the mail, honest), and ended up chatting with the visitor information volunteers for about 20 minutes. Past Cañon City, it turned back into desert, and got at least 10 degrees hotter. Michael's parents were waiting for him at the second sag stop, and his dad rode with him into Pueblo. Pueblo West (West Pueblo to normal people) is a sprawling, soul-less expanse of subdivisions and strip-malls, despite the sign proclaiming it a "planned community". So no reason to stop there. Pueblo itself has a large downtown area, but I'm not sure I ever found the center. I biked downtown to a bike shop, but there didn't seem to be a lot of there there, if you know what I mean. Dinner was at the Golden Corral, a buffet restaurant that's actually much better than it has any right to be. It's Carol's birthday today. Her sister-in-law's sister Kathy, who left the ride in Salt Lake City, came back just for the event. Carol has been having a much better time since she realized that she can always go home tomorrow. I suspect that, if she makes it as far as St. Joseph, where her family will be waiting for her, she'll make it all the way. Fast John, Vicki, Bob, and Corey are all leaving us tonight. We (Andy and I) are especially going to miss John, as he's our roommate, so we're going to have to break in a new roommate. John and his brother-in-law are going to bike back west on US-50 to Florence, then up to Colorado Springs and Boulder. John's mom Sally (who just retired) is going to sag for them. The brother-in-law is really fit, but is not a biker, so John plans to ride him into the ground. There's a big street rod convention in town, at the state fairgrounds. A number of the cars are parked here at the Holiday Inn, as well as hotels and motels all over town. We've been seeing these cars pass us since Gunnison, if not before. After the bar closed, we ended up in a long conversation with the owner of a silver 1929 Graham Parker, or some such (oh, I'm going to get in such trouble if I get it wrong). |
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