Maybe Mother Nature had enough of my blog and my raves about how amazing this trip has been and so it was time to serve me the proverbial curve ball . I am thinking that was the reason she threw so much at me today.
My eyes opened at the crack of dawn this morning. The air was cold, 30 degrees, crisp and clean. A mist was hovering over the nearby river and I could still see bicyclists, in their crazy costumes now dawned with big puffy ski jackets, still riding around the town in the twenty four hour race.
While it seemed like most of the town was still asleep I took my stuff down and loaded my bike. It as soaking wet either from dew or it had rained, again, in the middle of the night. My Harley strained to start in the freezing weather. But the sun felt good on my skin and I thought it wouldn’t take long to drop in altitude and both me and my bike would warm up.
That wasn’t to be the case. I stayed cold to the bone with jacket, Under Armor and gauntlet gloves all the way to a little mining town that Barry insisted I visit, Creed.
Creed it a charming, once vibrant, mining town turned tourist trap. I took the first chance to talk to one of the locals there to find out the scoop on the town and where to get a cup of coffee to warm up. Although it was still early, well before 10 a.m., a crack of thunder interrupted the directions I was receiving for that coffee. I knew it was more important to keep out of the rain than that warm cup so I was out of there pretty fast.
I guess I wasn’t fast enough because I was poured on from just south of Creed all the way past the turn off to Taos in New Mexico. And if it wasn’t raining it was blowing so hard that my bike and I were at a 45 degree angle to the road. And if that wasn’t enough, going through Wolf Creek Pass I drove through the most intense storm I have ever endured on my bike. There was no place safe to stop. There was nothing I could see through the driving rain and hail. My sun glasses had fogged over so what there was to see I had to look over my glasses into the rain. Now to top it off I was really wet and exceptionally cold. It took a moment to look at my lap to see I had accumulated a large pile of hail stones between my legs. It was like riding up a chair lift during a snow storm and watching snow accumulate in your lap. Did I mention that it was cold?
I survived and got to Pagosa Springs. I went into the Conoco station with a complete change of clothes for the balance of the day. But it was all in vain because I was rained on continuously all the way to Taos. I had to say enough and turned around to make a ‘b-line’ for Santa Fe.
Now the question probably should be; hey Rob, did you think of bringing rain gear? I did in fact and a full face helmet. But I check the weather with as much enthusiasm as I wrote in this blog long before the start of this trip. Sunny, Clear, Strong High Pressure. I was confident that my only concern would be sunburn.
I guess it makes for another story for the trip. For instance when I got settled at the Inn at Crested Butte and couldn’t find one set of keys to my bike. Then it dawned on me where I may have dropped them earlier when I had stopped previously to escape the rain. Sure enough, this morning on my way down the hill, I stopped again in that dirt lot and there they were, my other set of keys….
So I have to wind the trip down and head back to reality. Tomorrow I am heading to Phoenix. I am hoping it will be closer to dark than not, way too hot for an afternoon arrival. I also hope to salvage some of what I missed today and stop through Madrid tomorrow on the way back (that is where some of Wild Hogs was filmed, another suggestion by Barry). I also hope to keep it all on back roads like most of the trip thus far….