Eads to Limon, CO

I'm posting this from the comfort of my friend Dale's house in Littleton, a suburb of Denver. It's still easy to imagine the work that was involved in this day though. I wrote most of it right then, and I'm only now adding the photos.

The day started off beautifully, but ended as a fight with the wind.

The night before I talked with Dale, and it sounded like it would work out better if I arrived there earlier, and there is a more direct route from Eads to Denver than going to Pueblo first, as I had planned previously. So I said goodbye to Maggie and Dave and headed North. I was sad to leave them, they've been great travel partners, but the lure of arriving a day and a half early proved too great.

For the first few hours I had no wind, but as the day wore on it got stronger and stronger. For the first few hours of wind it was a crosswind, annoying me but not slowing me down. Then just 10 miles from Limon it turned straight against me and slowed me to about 5 or 6mph, making that last little bit take about 2 hours I guess. It definitely felt like a fight, but I just geared down and spun and stayed basically sane. I think I only shook my fist at the sky once.

Saw some cool stuff today - cactus, pronghorn antelope, cow skull, jackrabbits. I didn't take too many photos early on, but got into it later with some landscape and cloud pictures.

I had a nice experience in the morning in the tiny town of Wild Horse. It shows up as a dot on the map, but apparently only 9 people live there. The next town west of there was Hugo, over 30 miles away, and I wanted to refill my water bottles. After being rebuffed by some people working outside the "STUF SHOP" (a painted sign said "OPEN"), I tried at the US Post Office. It was a tiny little metal building, but inside was a very nice woman who told me all about the town, the post office business, etc. She gave me some of her own emergency drinking water after telling me that people in Wild Horse don't drink the tap water there because it seems to make people sick. So that was very nice of her. I then bought some stamps :) and went on my way.

I am super-psyched to be almost in Denver. Tomorrow night I'll prolly stay in Castle Rock, which is only about 20 miles from Dale's place. I might be able to keep going straight on to his house, but I don't know, that would bring the mileage from 67 up to 87 for tomorrow. Try it and see, I suppose.

Besides now being in cactus and sagebrush country, I have arrived in Green Chili country. Unfortunately for me, it is green-chili-with-pork country. In New Mexico people make green chili vegetarian by default, but in Colorado they put pork in it. So, I'll have to wait another day or two until I can go to the New Mexican restaurant in Denver. Hot green chile action awaits!

OK, pictures. This lovely tower was made of car or farm implement parts welded together. I think it was in the town of Hugo.

This repair shop was also in Hugo I think. The sign says "We Fix Everything, from daybreak to heartbreak". Doesn't look very open though. Glad I didn't need anything fixed.

I saw this broken bike safety flag on the side of the road while I was fighting the wind. Seemed like a creepy omen: someone else may have been fighting wind hard enough to break off their flag! If you look closely you can see that the non-flag end is splintered. Yikes.

This next cloud/landscape photo I took just to show a sample of what I was seeing most of the day. At least the clouds kept it from being too hot out. There were almost no crops to be seen today - the land was largely used for grazing.

Finally, I realized that my political views have been causing me to filter some very typical things out of my blog. This shows an old US flag flapping in the wind that someone fastened to a street sign way out in the middle of nowhere. Actually there were US flags all over the place all along my trip. I personally am not very proud of my country because of what our government is doing these days, so I tend to ignore such things.

Similarly, there were "support the troops" ribbon stickers on many many of the cars that I saw, and I sort of filtered them out as well. I suppose I didn't want to acknowledge them or something, so I never took pictures.

Finally all across Kansas there were anti-abortion signs. "Stop abortion - Save the baby humans", some would say. I think one said "Some gifts only God can give" and it had a picture of a little baby. Every time I saw one of these I fantasized for the next half hour about retort signs to put up next to them. "Stop war - save the adult humans". Or "...Though a rapist can give a pretty similar gift." Pretty harsh I suppose, but it just goes to show how different my viewpoint is about the issue.

Anyway, I'm happy to be back in the big city for now.