So the badlands were awesome. We stopped at Wall Drug, since there were about a thousand signs along the way, and were so not impressed. Sorry Wall Drug. We stopped at a chain Mexican restaurant in Rapid City, which seemed great at the time… The needles highway, which we had planned on driving along, was already closed for the season, which meant we got quite a bit more drive-time in yesterday than we expected. When we started looking for motels around six, we realized that we were close enough to just drive straight through to Denver by ten. The problems: 1) we were not expected until today, and would need to contact our friends France & Jen to see if we could camp out on their floor. 2) by this time, we were well into Wyoming and had no cell phone reception, so we couldn’t call France & Jen. 3) the town we stopped in to call France & Jen (or possibly stay in, if we could not get ahold of them) smelled so sensationally awful that there was no way on earth we could stay there, and we were in such a hurry to leave that 4) we did not even stop for gas… And we couldn’t find a gas station for about sixty miles because the “towns” on the map were actually just houses. This did not end up a disasterously as I thought it would — we were able to coast into a gas station in Cheyenne. Along the way, we were planning our strategy for if we ran out of gas, mostly involving Nat installing a rack on his bike on the darkest road in America, and then riding it along the highway until he found a gas station. There was much praying involved on my part.
We made it, though, and fell into the open arms (and air-mattress beds) of our friends. Today has been all about biking around, trying to get a sense of Denver’s layout, and also eating the most buttery-delcious pastry and free! coffee! at a place called buffalo doughboy. Just about everything out here is named buffalo something… but we still haven’t seen any buffalo.
So far, the plans for tonight include dinner at some point and then meeting our lovely host for the next six weeks. The plans for the rest of our time here are still pretty malleable, but definitely include biking, climbing, sewing, hopefully some odd jobs, and efforts at becoming friends with France & Jen’s sassy (and amazingly dark black) cat, Ocita.
One Comment
I love the pictures. I already have this website booked to read everytime i come into work. Don’t run out of gas, just always keep plenty in there. Go to: Buffalo Gas Station.