Day 11: Vernal, UT to Rangely, CO

52 Miles Just a quick zip between towns, out of Wyoming and into Colorado. Lazy breakfast, lazy loading of the vans and bikes around 9:00am-ish, the exact opposite of yesterday's early morning start and focus. It didn't even matter that Tom and Don stayed in their room until 9:30 watching the end of the Tour de France stage (Col de Galibier mountaintop finish), hovering over Don's iPhone. After that we stopped next door to check out the fossil and jewelry shop. Know what, fossils of dinosaur bones feel a lot like stone (they are stone...) and if polished they look like petrified wood and people make jewelry out of them. Learn something new every day. Personally a whole dinosaur femur might be interesting, but at 225lbs depending on animal it might be a tad heavy to care on the bike.
I'm stalling of course, you can probably tell that, but jeez what to write about? I mean 52 miles, the worst thing is your brain thinks it should be over as soon as you start so the ride feels longer than it is. And the scenery... well, as we headed west into Colorado we found a part of the west that wasn't verdent, lush, or leafy, it looked like Arizona at its best moments. Whoever named the Badlands hadn't been here, they'd be the Worselands, the rock outcroppings near the Dinosaur National Monument were neat, just don't look anywhere else... Sage growing through bare rock, brown grass with prarie dogs, a thin crust of brown dirt without a grazing animal to be seen.


And the roads, yuck, a lot of big trucks, several times they went past us with a car coming the other direction at the same time. The result was the car got forced onto their shoulder to make way for the truck and just a lot of noise and wind in a small space. The issue is the shoulder was full of rumble strips, those parallel gouges that make noise when you drive on them, which you can't ride a bike on so we had to stay close to the white line. More cheerful thoughts, the Green and the White Rivers are both hot-chocolate brown, and after the long shallow climb up to the ridge of the overlooking Rangely what you see is... Rangely. Free bumber stickers on request that say "I Love Drilling." Natural gas and mining, a tough, very real, Western town. Hot and dry and 360 degrees of brown. Lunch at 1pm on arrival, and that was after two (!) rest stops on the way, so lots of time for laundry, a new rear tire (mine, a 2nd flat today) and lounging about. As Tom said, when we left this morning (10am), we'd done more miles yesterday (70+) by that hour of the day than we were riding all of today. Back to the real stuff tomorrow...