Live for the Path

119 miles in 10.33 hours – Max Speed 26mph

I woke up early the next day and walked over to the diner attached to the holiday inn for some very mediocre breakfast. The nice thing about the Holiday Inn was that they gave everyone an USA Today (pronounced ooo-sa… the today is silent) which I could read while waiting for my food. It beat reading it on my cell phone, which is what I usually did to stay in touch with the world.

I headed out and got immediately back onto the 80. This was a horrible mistake, as there was a tunnel of despair just a couple miles down the road that I believe I could have avoided. There was no shoulder through this tunnel… and it was pretty long… and the interstate has a lot of traffic on it. And the scariest part about tunnels is always the sound. This was the most frightening moment of the entire trip for me I believe. But I made it.

Just looking at this picture makes me shake a little.

I can see for miles and miles and miles.

After that I did around 30 quick miles to Point of Rocks, a ‘town’ much like many of the ‘towns’ in Nevada. They had two buildings and a bunch of people living out of their RV’s. I sat inside for a while though and talked to the proprietors of the gas station/convenience store/post office. I headed back out onto the highway feeling refreshed and headed towards the next small town of Wamsutter.

Interesting road name... sounds like the name of some anime show or something to me.

Vowels: Only required in 49 states

Actually, believe it or not, there were two continental divides today. There is a basin in Wyoming, so you have to go through the basin to get to the other one. I did not take a picture of it because I was trying to construct my arc to live through the floods at the time, but it said 7000 feet on the nose, you will have to take my word on it.

When I was about 10 miles away though, the interstate on my side became closed, thanks to some construction so it suddenly just became 2 way traffic on the other side. Worse, I was riding in a left shoulder, which is around 18 inches instead of the standard 6 foot right shoulder (I had to to stay traveling with traffic… think about it). Anyway, around 7 or 8 miles after this happened, a police pulled up, and told me to just go ride through the construction on the other side, because he didn’t want me in the small shoulder that I was in. I said alright and got to ride on my very own highway… it was sweet (aside – police in the middle of nowhere: very friendly and treat you as an equal… police in more populated areas: generally not very friendly at all and talk down to you).

My very own highway.

I got to Wamsutter and pulled over to grab some food and wait for some thunderstorms to pass. I figured they would pass in 15 minutes as they had been, but I ended up waiting here for around an hour.

Eventually I ended up leaving, and as soon as I did it began to rain on me. And rain. And rain. I had around 40 miles left to Rawlins, and it rained on me for 35 of those miles. It only skipped the first two miles after I left Wamsutter and the last two miles into Rawlins. I have rain gear, and it had served me pretty well before this, but because of the length of time that it rained and the intensity, I ended up becoming absolutely drenched anyway. It was absolutely miserable riding.

I eventually pulled into town, with nothing on my mind except a hot meal and hot shower. I went to the McDonald’s and then poked around seeing if there were any inexpensive hotels. There was not… everything was exorbitantly expensive, so I went to the KOA in town, which was around a mile back on the highway. I set up there, took my shower, and went to sleep.