July 14, 2018
Pueblo – Eads
183 km (114 miles)
580 m (1902 feet) elevation
7:20 moving time
3587 km (2229 miles)

No more mountains for a while just flat and we guess it will be hot.

We started early after a great sleep (again) at Ellen’s house and said goodbye to her and the guys who were going to keep on going west. The morning was beautiful, it had rained a little during the night so the air was a bit cooler than it has been. Our way out of Pueblo didn’t give us many choices for breakfast so we ended up having a sandwich at a gas station.

As soon as we where out of the city we could see how flat the landscape had become. The colors were mostly brown and yellow and everything seems to be lacking water.

We hadn’t quite decided how far we were going but were thinking about Eads if we would have a good day.

We had some good rolling even though we had some headwinds (where did the tailwind that everyone have been saying we would get go?). We went through some towns that had no service and some of them looked like they had been abandoned. Sometimes you can see a nice car outside a run-down house so it is likely that someone lives there, but it is hard to tell.

We came to Ordway around noon and had dinner there at the only diner in town.

Guessing religion will be more and more visible as we go further east as we saw a family at the diner saying praier before starting they’re lunch today.

We decided to keep on going knowing that it would be very little service those 90 km to Eads and likely we would have headwind the whole time. The heat was still fine and the wind helped cooling us down. Before leaving we filled all our bottles and bought some extra huge bottles of Gatorade.

Our map told us that we could get service in Sugar city and Haswell but both towns are today gost towns 😕. Between the towns we found a shadow under a tree in the park of Arlington, a town with four houses 🙂 and drank our Gatorade. At that time the heat was getting closer to 40 degrees and the headwind a lot stronger but nothing to do except keep on cycling.

We started to worry a little about our water supplies but not so much. When we got into Haswell we were both feeling tired and too hot. As we had no shelter and difficult to see if someone lived in that town and no service available we sneaked into the post office. Almost every town in America (also the ghost towns) has a post office that is open 24/7 and has air conditioning. Today it was our saving. We crawled in and laid on the cold floor for at least an hour cooling down. When we had been there for some minutes an elderly lady came in to check her mail box. It looked as it was quite normal for her to see exhausted cyclist on the floor 🙄. She told us that we could find cold water in the ‘park’. Sæmi went and got some so we could wet our clothes to cool down a bit quicker. After snoozing for an hour it had started cooling down and we rode the last 30 km to Eads where we had dinner and then found this pearl of a hotel, Cobblestone Inn and Suites, that gives TransAm bikers a special deal. The hotel somehow stands out in a town that looks like faiting away being modern, clean and pretty.

Checking in a couple of truckers struck up a conversation. They were very friendly and when we asked them about their views of cyclists they said that the roads are for everybody to use. They offered us drinks which Saemi accepted while Monika went to wash up. Had some interesting conversations on guns and Trump. In short we don’t share the same worldviews but the discussion was civil and friendly. Always good to listen to the opinions of others.