Day 44 to Denver
Tue 23 July 2024
Distance traveled: 356 miles
The least exciting riding day of the trip. Just rolling plains, a subtle change from "Midwest" to "West" and then Denver.
Hanging out with Craig and Joe was great.
Woke up far too early and just felt ready to go, so I did. A super-heavy dew had coated the bike, and it never cooled off much either. I set a 'breakfast' target of a Starbucks down the road in North Platte, 90 miles west.
All that humidity had made lots of ground fog again, which makes for tedious riding--sometimes it was briefly super-dense and I was not thrilled about rear-ending something at 80mph, so I kept the speed down until it burned off outside of North Platte.
And the scenery changed somewhere in that 90 miles from Kearney to North Platte, from lush cropland with oak forests everywhere to more broad and sparse rolling tawny hills with cottonwoods down in the creeks. Suddenly I realized "oh, I'm back West" and felt home can't be too far away.
After Starbucks, it was yet another couple hundred miles into the sprawl of Denver metro down the dull I-76 across sagebrush covered dry hills. The weather was odd--dark purple haze everywhere on the horizon, and a whitish sky--and warm but not toasty. Later I found wildfire smoke had come into the area, which was why my throat was getting scratchy.
I wondered how far the city had grown, and it's pretty much up to the northern Adams County line these days--a not-so-little Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex in the making.
Craig and I had Mexican food that tasted as expected, and then Joe joined us for dinner, and then bed.
My planning for tomorrow has to threat the needle of "how do I avoid the afternoon monsoon in southern Utah, as well as the Vegas heat?" I decided to line up the cities that I could stop in... Richfield, Beaver, Cedar City, St George... and go until either my body said enough or it just got too rainy. Riding on the interstate isn't that interesting, but it's definitely the quickest way back home, and it avoids the two lane Winnebago shuffle through Zion or Bryce or Moab.