Day 29 - Flat #4

Day 29 - Monday, July 28

Denver to Fort Morgan —89 mi, 143 km

Today was the ride from Denver to Fort Morgan. This morning we got up at 4:30 and Leon dropped me off at the camp in Denver at 6:30 a.m.

So I started today with Mark Faasse, a retired policeman from Michigan. The first part of the trip was nice, a 27-kilometer bike path along the river Platte. It was a great way to get out of a big city, without being in the middle of busy traffic and having to wait for endless traffic lights. However, I got a flat tire. That was not so nice. I had put a brand-new expensive tire on Friday on my back wheel and today I had a flat. This is flat #4. A tiny piece of metal wire had gone through the tire into the tube. So we changed the tube.

We passed close to the Denver airport through a town called Brighton. This side of the mountains is dry, but there are more towns, which means more possibilities to buy coffee, Gatorade, etc. We are really in the plains now. During the morning, we still saw tops of the Rocky Mountains, but in the afternoon, we saw only plains. Sometimes the plains are just dry with sagebrush, but often there are farms with irrigation, growing mainly grass and corn.

We mainly followed Highway US 76, sometimes on the shoulder of the highway, more often on roads parallel to this highway. It is an older highway, originally made from concrete and later covered with asphalt. So you get the cracks in the asphalt between all the concrete pieces – not very easy to bike on.

Beside the highway was a train track, where trains passed transporting coal.

The wind was officially North and we were going in Northeast direction, so most of time we had a headwind. I got in around 4 p.m. We are camping again on the grass next to a High School, hoping that the sprinklers will not go on tonight.