Not in Kansas Anymore

Ever since we re-planned the itinerary to skip Eads due to county-fair-induced motel unavailability, I had been dreading this day. 118 miles from Tribune Kansas to Ordway Colorado, in the wind and heat.

Fortunately, the weather gods smiled on us once again and it was not too bad. The strong winds of the past few days died down to manageable levels and the day started out nice and cool. We practiced some Timezone Change Denial and got an earlier-than usual start, and made good time out of Tribune. After 16 easy miles we were at the Colorado state line. How amazing to think we had ridden our bikes from the East Coast to Colorado!

We are officially "out west"

After that it was another 42 miles to Eads. The town seemed deserted; I guess everyone was either at the fair or hungover. We found a little park with shuffleboard courts and horseshoe pits that had a water fountain so we could refill our bottles.

The landscape of eastern Colorado is as barren as it gets. There is a bit more rise and fall than Kansas, so at the top of the rises you could see for dozens of miles.

If you look carefully there is a white dot in the center of this photo.
It's a truck about 6 miles away.

We passed through a few more small towns (by "small" I mean populations less than fifty) that were even more deserted than Eads. The desolation in this area is incredible. We had planned to eat lunch in Haswell (population 67, also apparently deserted) where there is a convenience store, but it was closed on Sunday. Fortunately they had a Coke machine out front and a water faucet so we could at least hydrate. (By now it had warmed to 85 degrees or so.) We had somewhat anticipated not being able to find food today, so we were carrying quite a bit, which was a good thing. The only thing we bought en route in the 119 miles today was that Coke.

The road surfaces varied considerably today. We were on KS/CO 96 all day, but in some spots the road was silky smooth and in others it was uncomfortably rough. The last 10 miles in particular were horrible, with big dips across the entire road every 30 feet or so. Ba-dum, Ba-dum, Ba-dum. Not what our sore bottoms needed!

The other big milestone today was that we reached the official unofficial halfway point of our trip. With some our on-the-fly revisions, we don't know exactly what the total mileage is, but we know that we passed the halfway mark at some point today. To mark the occasion we declared this tree the official point and posed for a self-timed photo.

The official halfway tree

The official halfway photo

I keep disbelieving that we are already in Colorado but still only halfway. Last night I pulled up our (now somewhat inaccurate) map of the overall route. It seems that we have a lot of winding around in western Colorado and Utah, which is contributing to some extra western miles.

Lots of slack in that string

By the time we finished in Ordway the temperature had to climbed over 90, so we were hot and tired. We are staying at the historic Hotel Ordway, which is 109 years old and has been beautifully restored by the family owners.

Today's ride was a long 119 miles. Overall I felt pretty good, just hot and tired toward the end. We have been steadily gaining altitude and are now at 4311 feet. Tomorrow it's into Pueblo and beyond to Florence. The climbing starts in earnest on Tuesday.

I also wanted to send hopeful best wishes to my family and friends that have winter homes in Fort Myers, Florida. On the heels of Harvey, now we have Irma. Quite a train of calamities during this trip. I hope you are as lucky as we were and that your houses make out OK.