Part 2 Rockies Ride
After spending the night in Gunnison, Mark took us on an incredible route south on 149 through Lake City and Creed, Colorado. We ate some avocado tacos in Creede and kept our rain gear ready. We had to throw it on a few times with downpours here and there.
We camped that night in Durango where there was an amazing lightning show.
The day of riding was really amazing and fast. We had crossed the continental divide a few times and reached some really high altitudes without stopping and really taking it in. That night reflecting on it with a bottle of whiskey we were giddy with all the amazing miles we had already done in just a few days.
In the morning we headed North up 550 towards Silverton along the million dollar highway. The canyons and mountains are dramatic and beautiful. We passed through Ouray an old mining town with steep hills on each side and then towards Montrose. One the way we hit really bad winds with incredible gusts. Mark even got pushed right off the road into the dirt but was able to recover. We stopped off for a bit to see if it was going to let up, but no doing. We decided to head back to Ouray since it is pretty protected in the mountains.
Ouray was charming and beautiful, a stark difference from where we had just come from. We walked to the nearest pub restaurant to grab a bite and walked past a creepy old hotel (in the picture above, on the left where the black car is). We both got a really bad feeling about it, chills in fact. We kept moving. Later that night we looked up the hotel on the inter web and found it was well documented as haunted! Apparently a husband had killed his wife in this hotel and every year the ghost of the wife re-inacts the murder with screams and everything.
That night we looked on our maps and saw a town called Gateway on highway 141 which had no real destination for the highway. That means that there won't be much traffic or cars of any kind. That is exactly what we found. This road was a serious gem, a few hours of winding sweeping roads with hills that looked more like the Grand Canyon than Colorado.
A storm was forming near Gateway so we had to keep moving to outpace the clouds coming our way.
This area is on the west border of Colorado and Utah. We had essentially zig zagged through Colorado and now we headed back over into Utah to a KOA near Arches National Park.
We spent a few days in this area near Arches because there were so many things to explore. We played tourist for a few days and then headed south again on the east side of the Grand Canyon, went through Mexican Hat and Monument Valley.
We got the last campsite in the Grand Canyon Area and crashed out hard that night. After a few days of riding on a trip like this you get into a rhythm and getting up and riding hundreds of miles is totally normal and you actual yearn for it.
On this day we took a side trip to Flagstaff to check out the town and the roads around Flagstaff. From there we headed to Vegas where we were suppose to meet up with the rest of the crew. Nothing better than living out of gas stations and meeting funny people along the way.
After a little over a week and half of amazing riding and roads with Mark it was time to start the cross country tour to New York! The guys back at the shop were working hard to get their bikes ready for the trip. My Sister lives in Vegas so we headed to Vegas to see how long it would take to get these guys up to meet us.