July 18-21 - walking on air

[Brock]

It's been a great couple of days and a hard period of the trip to bid farewell to, but I will do my best to summarize.

After leaving Laramie, we were subjected to another punishing ride through barren desert until we arrived at a business which sold nearly nothing but fireworks. Rural Wyoming is a wild place, and the shop we arrived at shortly before Tie Siding did a large business in explosives. We bought energy drinks from their cooler, fortified with electrolytes, and chatted with the proprietor, an old, grizzled man who had made the sale of incendiaries his career about the lay of the land in parts south after using his bathrooms. We declined the 25 cent coffee advertised and continued south towards the border of the Cowboy State.

It's laughably green along the border between Wyoming and Colorado. It's as if someone drew a line where the land becomes green and decided that all the scratch and sage north of this line was to be the wastelands of Wyoming, and all of the life-supporting pine forest south was to be the highly preferable state of Colorado. The one one thing I can praise the Cowboy State for is the quality of their rest stops on highways, air-conditioned oases with full-service bathrooms and cool water from the tap, in contrast to the olfactory dungeons of Colorado's bathrooms with nary a cooling breezer.

A hot day's ride south against brutal headwinds dropped us off the Wyoming plains into the grassland valleys of Fort Collins and the even, pond-ridden flatlands that make up the eastern portion of the state (and, one assumes, the rest of the Union all the way to the mountains of Tennessee) that lie a few thousand feet below the cooling breezes of the higher country we had come from. We rolled into the metropolis of Fort Collins on the 287 highway as we marveled at the trees that provided a cool shade from the oppressive sun.

Our host, Aaron, known by his peers as "The Professor" for some hijinks several years past, left a key under his doormat for us to drop our belonging off before exploring the city, and we luxuriated in the 20 degree difference between the outside air and his basement apartment.

We rode back to the downtown area to meet Zach, a metal fabricator and radio host on the local 88.9 FM radio station for a beer at the local brewery before taking the community radio airwaves by storm with tales of our adventures on the road. Zach had met several other tourists by bike, a few of which called Portland OR their home, and we chatted together about our travels as friends in Portland listened via the webstream.

After the broadcast we rode outr bicycles to a local downtown legend called Surfside 7 to meet up with the bicycle enthusiasts of the city. After an hour of socializing over brews, we departed on an organized and themed ride to one of the dives on the outer edges of the city in a uniform of polor shorts, bolo ties and short denim shorts to continue the merriment.

We were out late that night and reitred to the Professor's apartment after a long night of making new connections.

The next day we rose late and followed the Professor to his workplace of the New Belgium Brewery where he gave us many samples of the wares of the company and led us on a thorough tour of the establishment. We concluded with a few rounds of a Belgian game involving a curved surface of concrete and many rounded wooden gamepieces that rolled lazily back and forth to an end near the goal on the far side of the track.

We rode that night to the Bar SS in LaPorte where we played games involving a ring on a length of wire that optimally would rest on a hook mounted to the fence, followed by a hilarious game of darts with a local who was already several sheets to the wind.

The next day found us in a theater to view the new Batman movie, followed by pints at another small brewery recommended by the Professor.

Leaving this morning was nearly painful after such a relaxed bout with great people in such an amenable city. We loved the connections with new friends and a new town to explore, but duty called and so we rode out with our belongings into the great wide open, relishing our new friendships and leisurely pace of life of the past few days.

The climb to Estes Park from the lowlands was a sweaty mess of persistence up several thousand feet of elevation. All of the campgrounds were full of tourists hankering for a glimpse of the Rocky Mountains, and we made our way to a private enterprise that directed our tent-pitching to the dry camp behind the greatly engorged campground, filled with RV campers and tenters by car. We enjoyed a leisurely dinner of potatoes and beans at a vacant picnic table after setting up camp in the RV storage lot.

We are gratefully indebted to the Professor and his friends for a warm welcome in Fort Collins, and the memory of the place will not soon leave our minds. The transition back into our existence as fiercely independent explorers is not without the sweet sorrow of parting.

Rocky mountains are next.