… Or maybe not as you’ll see later.

We were up before 6 am ready to load our bikes. We thought the breakfast at the hotel started at 6, but 6:30 was the starting time, so we had a breakfast bar and banana and got on the road.

Our destination today was Grand Junction, CO. Our route took us on 2-lane roads (except for short sprints on I-80 and I-70) through Wyoming and Colorado. Neither of us had been through these states in a North/South direction; all our previous trips had been East/West. Our route kept us east of the mountain ranges as we traversed the central basins. This is rolling grassland interspersed with outcroppings of rocks or mesas. This was open range country. We saw a number of cattle and quite a few antelope.

The most spectacular part of the trip was through Wind River Canyon. The road is on the east side of the canyon and the railroad on the west. While most of the time the road is level, the slope of the rocks makes it appear that the road is descending and that the river is flowing up hill. In one stretch it looked as if we were descending rather steeply, but, in fact, we were rising.

The road goes through a tunnel on the left,

…and the raiilroad on the right.

On Rte. 13 in Colorado I had my “Lucky” experience. Three birds flew up from the side of the road as I passed by at 65 mph. One of them hit me smack in the face shield. There were blood and guts on my helmet and jacket. If I hadn’t been wearing a full-face helmet it would have hurt pretty bad and would have had guts all over my face and down my neck. After cleaning up my helmet I realized I should have taken a picture, but then I guess I saved you the gory details.

We were delayed for a short time due to construction. The flagman held us for a few minutes, then we rode patches of old pavement and hard-packed gravel. After this experience, Beth might go out and buy a dirt bike!

We are staying tonight in Grand Junction. We traveled 11 hours and covered 530 miles.