Total: 895 miles (easy math this time....)
There is not a whole lot to report today. I woke up at 5:15 AM, had everything ready, and was rolling out of the garage at 5:30 AM. I entered the address for the motel in Colorado into my GPS and it estimated my arrival at 5:39 PM (there's a time change involved.) I got to the motel at 6:15 PM. Now I'm confused but it looks like the day worked out just about how I thought it would.
What is there to report about riding across Texas on the same roads I have ridden many times before. Hiway 6 has less road construction than it used to. The loop around Waco is a must. Fort Worth doesn't look any richer from the freeway than Dallas does but I guess it is anyway. And then there's US 287.
I think of US 287 as a very utilitarian road. Its function is to get you from here to there and it does a great job of that. It is the closest thing to a shortcut to Colorado that Texas can offer. But man... Most of the time it basically looks like this:
Except for the towns you have to remember to slow for instead of picking up a ticket and ruining your vacation. And the trucks you have to dodge. But mostly the trucks aren't a problem. I actually like trucks and truck drivers very much.
Nothing went wrong. I didn't stop except for gas and all that entails. The weather was great. Tail wind most of the way.
It is true that nothing actually went wrong...but I did pull my usual "Kerry and the gas" stunt. Sometimes I just get so lost in my thoughts and enjoying the experience that I forget to pay attention to how far I've ridden since the last gas stop. It isn't like the odometer is hard to see. But I just don't notice it. Over 100 miles slipped away unnoticed until I glanced down and saw that I had ridden 183 miles since my last gas stop and I had no idea how far it was to Raton, NM. Fortunately I had my GPS to reassure me. And I must have gotten great gas mileage with the tail wind because I filled up at 197 miles and only put 5.1 gals in my 6 gallon tank.
But then, for the next 16 minutes, I got to enjoy what I had ridden 800 miles to do. Riding over a mountain pass. This was my first video attempt and it worked. I clicked the right buttons and everything. Unfortunately, it seems the resulting file is too large to upload so that will have to wait until I edit this post sometime in the future.
No alarm tomorrow morning. I get to ride over Wolf Creek Pass way up on the great divide, biking on down the other side right into Pagosa Springs. Believe it or not, this has been a bucket list thing for me ever since the song first came out.
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