Sunday, July 19, 2009

Day 35: Garden City, KS to Lamar, CO

Today, unfortunately, was going to be a long day. Unfortuantely, there aren't a whole lot of towns between Garden City and Lamar, so we were stuck. We opted for an early start.

We made our way out of Garden City before the sun was even up, and stopped at a gas station on the edge of town. We waited a few minutes for the sun to rise.

This, being Kansas, didn't really provide us with a lot of interesting scenary. We passed a large chicken factory. Really, disturbingly large.

We did have an opportunity to walk some Sante Fe Trail ruts.

The ruts were a little hard to see.

Today was the first day we really noticed that we were climbing. It wasn't necessarily perceptible, but it felt like we were doing a little bit of climbing all of the time. At least the scenery was beautiful.

Somehow the colorful grasses also meant that we were surrounded by thousands of crickets.

The crickets jumped at us all the time. It wasn't a problem for me, since I sit pretty high up, but they kept leaping right at Jillian.

The terrain felt desert like, as we entered Mountain Time and got another set of tourists to take our photo.

We stopped in Syracuse to get some lunch. Unfortunately, we chose what could arguably be the slowest restaurant in all of Kansas. The food was good, but we were there a lot longer than we'd intended.

Eventually we saw the sign we'd been waiting for forever.

We took the obligatory photo.

We stopped at a little rest stop outside of Holly, where we were promptly attacked by a bunch of mosquitoes.

We stopped at another gas station in Grenada, where I called home for another weather report. Storms were coming, and we could see them on the horizon.Since the weather seemed like it was all going to be north of our road, we rode on.

We made it almost all the way to Lamar before the storm arrived. Huge clouds were visible on the horizon with rain everywhere. Without any cover, and being only a couple of miles from town, we sprinted as hard as we could toward town. We actually rode under the giant cloud you see in this picture.

However, while trying to leave the visitor center we flatted. Once again on a small piece of metal.

Then we started our quest for a hotel. We didn't want to travel far, because of the tires. We passed the Holiday Motel, which had an almost too good to be true rate. However, the owner seemed to be very invested in improving bad businesses in Lamar, and had recently remodeled the motel. He let us take a look at the room first, and we were sold.

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