Don't leave the path - Day 50: Boone, CO to Eads, CO

There is nothing in eastern Colorado. With the Rockies out of sight, today felt like riding through a glitch where only the basic substrate of a game world had managed to render -- a featureless landscape without any of the elements that developers should have added to make it interesting. This was nearly the entire day. The only sign of progress was a slight increase in humidity and bugs per square meter as I headed east.

Eventually, I made it to Haswell, CO, which had a single gas station as the only food source. It was closed. I stopped and ate from my bag at the picnic table outside, attempting to get through the Nutty Buddy bars provided by the kind Pueblo gas station attendant. Two other eastbound cyclists showed up and helped me with that task. They planned to press on to Eads that night, having started from Pueblo and aiming for >100 miles that day. I woke up with a 20 mile headstart on them, so I couldn't just let them pass me. I rode with them to Eads, CO, and was rewarded with a much nicer camping area.

Before leaving Haswell, I pitched the idea of diverting to RAGBRAI, or the Register's Annual Great Ride Across Iowa. I forgot to mention that Ohio Mike had told me about RAGBRAI way back in Yellowstone, and part of the reason for my delay in Denver was to kill some time in order to hit RAGBRAI at the right time. In short, I've been told that RAGBRAI is a massive ride across Iowa, where something like 30,000 people participate in a 6-day rolling party from one end of Iowa to the other while roads are shut down and the locals come out to join. The party goes west to east, so I figured I couldn't miss it. Deanna and Sonia thought it sounded cool and wanted to join, but also wanted to meet a friend in Hutchinson, KS. It looked like that was doable with a couple rest days, so we tentatively planned to ride together through Kansas and up to Iowa.

Every town out here seems to be defined by its grain elevator. The one in Eads was right next to our camping spot, so I climbed it to check out the view. It was night, which meant I wasn't seen, but that also meant that my phone couldn't pick up the view. Oh well. We went to sleep in a strip of grass next to the grain elevator, with the warning that we had to clear out by 7:30 if we wanted to avoid the sprinklers.

The sights: