May 17th, 2019 / (0km/0mi)
When I wake up this morning it’s raining outside. The dark clouds stick around the mountains one can see from the windows and all in all it looks like weather one doesn’t want to ride a bike. The comforting feeling to have made the right decision starts coming up in me.
We pack our bikes and baggage onto the pickup and continue our drive towards Pueblo. In the next town — we stop to get something for breakfast — Marcel realizes that he has forgotten one of his bike bags at the Angler Inn with all his money and papers in there. We call and they have already found it. So we turn around and drive back for 30 minutes. The bag back in Marcel’s possession, we restart our 5 hours drive towards Pueblo.
The weather is cold, windy, rainy and when we approach two passes with an elevation of more than 3500m/11.000ft, we end up being in heavy snow. Not the weather you’d enjoy on a bike. With sight being extremely restricted, one even risks being hrit by a car. Not talking about the wind or the snow on the street even. And being out there for hours in the cold and wet — nope. No urge to experience that. So we are happy we’ve gone for the option with the car. Still, I regret not to have had a chance to ride thru Colorado by bike: even with bad weather the scenery looks so great and one can only imagine how beautiful it must be when the sun is shining. Bad you can’t always pick what you want.
We reach Pueblo, CO, a not so nice city at the intersection of a few highways, at the late afternoon, decide to check into a Motel 6 and have dinner and restock some food for the coming days in the surrounding area.
That’s it for today. Tomorrow I’ll return the pickup at Enterprise Car Rental station here in Pueblo. Marcel and Chester will leave from here at the hotel in the morning, but we’re pretty sure I’ll catch them somewhere on the road towards Ordway, CO, our next stop. Hopefully the wind, which was still stormny this evening here in Pueblo, will cease a bit.
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime you find
You get what you need
True! 🙂