One Hundred Miles of Solitude (Of Locusts and Other Demons)

Day 38

Pueblo, CO to Eads, CO

Distance: 111 miles

Total miles to date: 2,171 miles

Start time: 6:50 am (earrrrly)

Today was always going to be about the wind.

Battling a headwind across the plains of Eastern Colorado for over a hundred miles would have been a completely different kettle of fish to being pushed along by a stonking tailwind. And so I allowed for the worst while praying to the weather gods for clemency.

And everything went to plan…

Up at the crack, minimal faffing, limited breakfast (i.e. none – still full from last night) and Steed and I were tripping out onto the yawning streets of Pueblo well before 7am.   

Whipping along with almost no wind and an overcast morning, I was out on the freeway and over twenty miles from the city by a little after 8, which was nicely timed to grab a coffee and muffin from a tiny grocery store in a place called Boone run by a nice old guy with a fantastic show moustache!

Back on the “bike train”, I powered through until I spotted an unusual sight by the side of the road. It was Christy and April, who are WALKING across the country from East to West pushing a stroller with their kit in it, because they can! Seems like a good enough reason to me.

While pondering the exercise of these rights and freedoms, I made it through to a small town called Sugar City before giving into the hunger pangs, and was glad I’d waited. The tiny Sugar City Café was cosy, with a small but perfectly formed selection of classic foods. I decided against the daily special of ham, beans and cornbread – a lunch fit for a cowboy – since I feared that the day really might be about the wind – but could see that most of the town seemed to be flooding in for their lunch just as I was leaving. I also got to eat a deliciously succulent and sweet slice of watermelon grown by one of the local guys who had brought it in for the customers to enjoy.

But it was after lunch that it all started to go properly weird. In the time I’d been inside, the clouds had blown away and the sun was beating down. I continued on the same straight road, with flat, sandy, grassy plains for as far as the eye could see, and started to feel strange. Yep, it turns out that being alone for a long period of time in this kind of terrain does send you slightly doo-lall.

Having exhausted all the jokes that I knew and amused myself as much as possible without telling each one to myself more than twice, I decided that I would start singing to myself. And even that was a little bizarre, since my brain seemed to get stuck on a certain verse of a Club Tropicana by Wham that I couldn’t shift, which developed into a form of cruel and unusual punishment.

After starting to suspect that aliens were shining blue laser light at me from a spaceship that had landed in one of the vast fields, and twitching my head around to different angles to test the theory, I decided that it was a reflection from my mirror.

It was just after that I started getting bitten through my shorts by some pesky horse-flies (more flapping and waving of hands).

Next a live snake by the side of the road demanded a sudden swerve of the wheel, and several scarily plump, fleshy locusts flicked up at my legs. Trying also to avoid the fat, bright yellow caterpillars scrunching their way across the road, it seemed like Bear Grylls had been dropping his dinner ingredients along in front of me like a freaky version of a gingerbread trail.

But other than that, to the average bystander, I would have looked like quite a poised and relaxed cyclist… good job there was nobody and nothing around to test the theory.

Eventually rolling into Eads a little after 5pm, I was pretty damn chuffed with my efforts for the day and overjoyed to find that my (rather corporate but VERY comfortable) hotel had a bar in the lobby, so that I could celebrate immediately with a bottle of Coors Light.

Yep, not just completing the 111 miles, but the fact that I am now officially half way through the TransAm Trail – 2,171 miles down, 2,061 miles to go…

Woooohooooo, half way there!

Excellent, a new one for the cycling karaoke. Requests welcome. I’ll be “here” (or rather there on the road) all week.

Me x