Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Day 37: Pueblo, CO to Colorado Springs, CO

Since we had to wait for the bike shop to open, we were forced to enjoy the hot breakfast at La Quinta. Not that we minded, really. I ended up walking back to the bike shop while Jillian caught up on blogging and note keeping (knowing that we were going to end up weeks or months behind on blogging, Jillian has been keeping a little black notebook full of notes on everything that happens every day).

I got to Bob's Bicycles not long after they opened, where I chatted with a third employee, who was actually working on the bike. Apparently they'd discovered they didn't have the parts to fix our freehub (turns out bottom bracket wasn't the issue), but the girl who'd been working last night stayed late ripping apart ours to see if there was a problem she could fix. Apparently we'd destroyed a number of the bearings. After removing them, we were down to about five, but she thought it'd be enough to make it to Colorado Springs, where we might have better luck finding parts. They had not been able to fix our brakes, since they'd never seen that model brake before and didn't have the needed equipment. He was in the process of playing with the shifting, but apparently the real problem was that the little arm on the back derailleur had gotten locked into the cassette. After a slight readjustment, we were all fixed.

I also took some time to ask for directions to Colorado Springs. It's only about 30 miles from city line to city line, but there's only one paved road: I-25. While it's legal to ride the interstate many places in Colorado, we had been told we'd be taking our lives into our own hands. The helpful people at the shop helped us work out an alternate route, which they thought would have clean enough dirt that we could ride.

When it was time to pay, they only asked for a little less than $30. $30, to tear apart our freehub, readjust a derailleur, provide advice, and look at our brakes. It felt like a steal. We love Bob's Bicycles.

I rode the bike alone back to La Quinta, where Jillian helped me load up the trailer. We had an awesome ride over to near the University, where we turned north. When Jerry Murphy Road turned to Overton Road, we were apprehensive at the loss of pavement. But the dirt was smooth, there were no cars, and the scenery was fairly gorgeous, if desert.

Just as I was really starting to look forward to getting to Colorado Springs and calling Pickle to play tourist with, the dirt started getting bumpy. In Pennsylvania, where I used to ride on dirt roads regularly, road maintenance consisted of running a bulldozer the length of the road once in a while and smoothing things out. Here, it consisted of sending a truck full of dirt to sprinkle fresh dirt on the road in annoying bumpy paths. Suddenly, instead of smooth dirt it felt like we were riding on continuous speed bumps. And since it was fresh dirt, it we got too close to the edge we'd lose traction and stop moving.

Then the bugs started.

These weren't just gnats or mosquitoes. These were something else entirely. They were larger, and they felt like they liked to bite. Suddenly we had to spend all of our time swatting bugs and trying desperately to navigate the loose soil.

This went on for the next three hours. We abandoned our plan of a picnic lunch by the roadside. We abandoned our desire to ever do this trip again. We were ready to abandon the bike, but there was nothing we could do but ride steady (harder meant the tires slipped more) and hope it would end eventually.

Finally we reached a paved road. We promptly flatted.

We can not tell you how much we wanted to just pull over and quit. Fly home. But there were no options. After thinking about what they bugs would do to us while we changed a tire, we pumped it up and hoped for the best. Since it was on a the trailer, which had fairly thick tire walls, I was hopeful.

For the next four miles, every quarter mile or so we'd need to pull over and pump up the tire enough to get going again. It was a pain, but we needed some forward motion in order to avoid feeling like we were never going to make it.

When we arrived in Fountain, we stopped at the library for much needed bathrooms and air conditioning. I set about changing our pesky trailer tire, although I was never able to find anything in the tire wall. When we set off again, we made it only a half mile before we spotted a little park with signs for a water park. We took the short detour. Although the water park was clearly designed for small children, we saw something even more important: an ice cream truck.

We rode as hard as we could, and eventually were able to chase him down. Jillian got Ice Cream. I got a coke. They were cold. So very fantastically cold.

After ice cream, we tried to get going, only to flat again. This time in the rear tire. At least this time we had shade and no bugs.

The ride along US-85/87 wasn't much fun, with small shoulders, lots of traffic, and road construction. But right before we crossed I-25 we saw signs for the Front Range Trail, which we could have taken from Fountain instead. Although we could have ridden it farther north, we opted to stay on the road in order to get to the hotel as quickly as possible. We weren't sure which to stay at, but Jillian hiked between a few lobbies and discovered that the La Quinta had the best price. We should have known.

When we got to the hotel we gave Pickle a call, who got in the car and drove down to see us. Although it was raining when she arrived, it had cleared up enough that she took us on a tour of The Garden of the Gods, an incredible city park in Colorado Springs.

Apparently the rock is very old, much older than the Rockies, and over time its worn down into incredible shapes.

At one time the land was owned by a family, who charged money to have your picture taken near some of the rocks. They eventually decided to donate the land to the city, on the condition it be kept open to the public.

Remember that you can click on any of the pictures to go to the appropriate Flickr set. You should.

After getting momentarily lost trying to get out of the dark, we traveled west to Manitou Springs, which had a bunch of awesome little stores and restaurants. After looking around for a while we settled on this awesome bar. There were no servers. You ordered food directly from the kitchen. The three of us were actually in line behind an entire Ultimate Frisbee team, which was amazing. Since they all gave frisbee nicknames on their orders, I gave mine as well (Devo). The guy taking the order attempted to come up with a song other than Whip It to sing when he called out my order, but alas, he failed. Still, it was a good time.

Pickle drove us back to our hotel, exhausted as always. As much as I wanted to crash into bed, we had a bit of trouble finding our way to the hotel. Instead we wound up down town, passing a park with a weird crazy fountain. But we eventually got there, and Pickle took the orange duffel bag off our hands. We bid her farewell, promising we'd see her tomorrow night in Aurora, and went quickly to sleep.

| posted at: 01:18 | permanent link and comments

You can view more entries using the archive links to your left or by looking at our index!