From Salida, Colorado

As you can see from the photo, I am in the mountains now! Lovely scenery everywhere - clear mountain air, high meadows, five mule deer, twenty wild turkeys, and a herd of pronghorn antelope. Lovely place to ride a bike.

That is not to say that I am without adventures.

This morning I tackled the TAT again in spite of my fears. There is always something to worry about, you know. I worried about the quarter inch rain yesterday afternoon, and what that would do to the "off roads." But it turned out that Colorado off roads handle that much rain very well. The roads were wet, but not really muddy. Not the kind that bogs you down and sticks to your tires. It was pleasant riding. I just had to avoid an occasional pool of water on the road.

But as often happens before the day is out, I found a rough section going over one particularly tall mountain, West Spanish Peak at 11,000 feet. It took me about an hour to go five miles. The road had outcroppings everywhere with four inch boulders sticking up, making for a really, really rough ride. Nothing really dangerous or difficult, just really rough. It was so rough that things started bouncing out of my milk crate. I thought I had everything tied down with bungee cords. My tool bag came upzipped and dumped all my tools into the milk crate. Miracle of miracles, I don't think I lost anything but a six millimeter Alan wrench. It was not until I got to the motel and prepared to cover the bike that I realized my bike cover had bounced out. I think those are the only two things I lost this time.

Yeah, this time. It happened once in Oklahoma too when I hit some spots on a gravel road that were like one foot high speed bumps. That time my tool bag bounced out and hit me in the back. I thought I had recovered everything, but I lost a 32 oz bottle of Gatorade that time.

Yeah, I know. Gotta tie things down better. But who would have thought that things would bounce out of the milk crate? I did have the bungee cords over them, and thought I had them all tied down well enough. Oh well...

So I just went to Wal-Mart to buy another bike cover, but they didn't have a motorcycle section like most Wal-Marts do. That's the bad news because I like covering the bike at night just to keep people from snooping around in my milk crate. The good news is that I pulled up beside this truck at Wal-Mart:

See that? That guys got a Yamaha TW200 loaded in the back. You don't see many of those.

Here are a few other miscellaneous pictures from the day to give you a feel for the scenery:

No pictures of the rough stuff. Too rough to stop and take pictures.

After about sixty miles of off road, I took the easy pavement on to Salida. And I have finally made a decision to give up on the TAT. I have done hundreds of miles of it, enough to decide I just don't like it. The easy gravel like in those photos is fine, but I invariably wind up somewhere I don't really want to be. And then, the minute I hit pavement, I start having fun again.  It takes me a while to make such a obvious decision, as you can tell. I've been complaining all the way across the TAT. But I've finally made it. I'm a pavement guy. It's pavement for me the rest of the way.

It's still 1500 miles to Oregon, and then it will be 2600 miles back to Lexington, so I still have plenty of adventure ahead of me. And I still have the goal of taking the TW200 from coast to coast and back home again.

Thanks for sharing the journey with me.