Monday, June 29th, 2015
Start/End: Wray/Ft. Morgan, Co
Mileage: 87+
Weather: Very warm, more clouds than yesterday
Today we woke up at the the WRAC in Wray, CO to some great pump-up music to start out our day. We had some great space that we could use for the night and morning. The staff were so friendly to our group and we had the opportunity to shower as well as have our laundry done for us. We woke up to our laundry all being very neatly folded and arranged so that we could easily find out clothes, even our socks were paired! It was great. Sometimes the little things really make a big difference :) We are also so thankful that the rec center not only let us stay at their facility, but also gave each of us an energy bar in the morning.
Today’s ride was dedicated to a woman, Jean, who is from Washington, IL. This community, including Jean, was impacted by a tornado a few years ago which destroyed many houses. Now after getting back to “normal”, she finds herself fighting a new battle against Hodgkins Lymphoma. So today we ride for her and her fight with cancer.
The ride started out a little bit windier than we expected, but as we rode out of Wray, we got to see some really cool rock, plateau formations that shaped the horizon. We also saw that to the south of us, there were some pretty dark clouds, that were thankfully moving away from us. We even got to see a rainbow! This was all helpful when it came to distracting us from the wind, encouraging us to move on.
As the day went on, though, the wind calmed and the clouds stayed pretty consistent for a while, providing a good amount of shade for the ride. This helped the temperature stay down throughout the day. Colorado was a lot flatter and arid on this side of the state than expected. There were some occasional hills and an unnoticeable incline most of the day, but I am not even sure we have seen the Rockies in the distance. That will surely change tomorrow as we ride into Denver!
It was another enjoyable day with nothing too exciting which happened. We did notice that there were some gecko/lizard things along the road which scurried off rather quickly as soon as we came along on our bikes. There were also some cacti growing in the cracks on the road….so we were sure to avoid those as to not get flat tires. Some groups were not as fortunate, though, as some groups learned about picking the thorns out of tires after getting flats on multiple bikes at the same tire.
We are very excited for dinner, which has generously been donated by Arby’s and Pizza Hut. We will be having roast beef sandwiches and pizza, which are some of my favorites, so I am sure the team will not go hungry.
Tomorrow we have another long day into Denver so we will be waking up an hour early, but we are very excited because our last rest day was 10 days ago…..can you believe it? After tomorrow, we will have biked for 11 days with no time off. Wow.
Also, again I thank you so much for your patience with blog posting being a little bit behind this week. It has been a long week.
-LAH
