Day 43 - June 15 - Fort Collins, CO Rest Day 1 - Two Old Guys Take On A Continent

June 15, 2023

Day 43 - June 15 - Fort Collins, CO Rest Day 1

Touring (Without a Bike) Around

Ed’s Story

Today was our first Fort Collins off day. My night wasn’t the best. I think it was a combination of eating late and too much beer tasting during the day. I woke up several times finally getting up around 6:45. So although I did sleep in it was fitful.

Breakfast was in the hotel…banana, waffles, coffee and orange juice. While I was making my second waffle some kids came in and opened the waffle maker. That ruined it and I had to start again.

A cowboy came in with his jeans and 10-gallon hat. He didn’t look like he wanted to be messed with.

Got my new Wahoo Roam GPS up and running. If you remember I dropped the other one and cracked the face. The GPS synced easily with the Wahoo Element app, however none of my routes loaded. I was frustrated as what good is a GPS without routes.

It was only after I connected my phone to WiFi to update the GPS programming did the routes load. I was happy again….I just need to be more careful.

Dried the tent components outside so we will be ready for our Saturday overnight climbing the Rockies. Repacked several panniers but will most likely rearrange before Saturday. Will move warmer clothes to the top as we progress as it will be cooler at higher elevations.

Stanley, Deneé, and Aiden picked us up about 10:45. Stanley gave both John and me a 5-pack of instant coffee for Father’s Day…thanks Stanley.

We went to REI where I bought more than I should have. A couple longer wool socks; waterproof gloves (needed after riding in the rain the other day); a plastic hammer for tents stakes (I’ve been using my stainless steel water bottle 😬), some more fuel; and a lighter/more compact pan.

I have a plastic hammer at home but for Christmas asked for and received a heavier metal hammer (heavier, silly me). That hammer tended to be too heavy so I shipped it home from Wheeling WV. Up until about a week ago I haven’t had problems getting stakes in.

Since then I’ve been using my bottle to help push but am afraid I’ll destroy the bottle. Hence a new hammer. Since I wear athletic/tennis shoes on the bike they don’t have a hard enough surface to use them.

Lunch was at the Sweetwater Brewery. Had my first veggie burger in at least a month. That and a beer of course.

We dropped Deneé off at their hotel and the four Chimahusky men (or should I say 3 men and a boy) went to Fort Fun. Fort Fun has multiple activities you can play…arcade games, go-karts, mini-golf, bumper boats, escape rooms, etc.

We played a round of miniature golf with the winning lineup as follows: John, Aiden, me, and Stanley. I threw the score card away so no one can prove otherwise. Aiden and I both made a hole-in-one. After that we just walked around the place looking at all the ways you could spend money. Spend money to earn points to get crappy prizes.

We headed back to our respective hotels where Aiden could swim and we could nap. As we pulled into the parking lot I said I wondered if our room has been serviced and probably not.

Ding ding…I win….nothing was touched. I complained to the manager who wondered if we had Do Not Disturb sign up (no we didn’t) and asked if we had asked at the desk for service (I said I didn’t think we needed to).

Luckily there was still someone around who came and took the trash; gave new towels; and wiped down the bathroom. This hotel is just something else.

At least breakfast is still served starting at 6:00 AM on Saturday so we can eat before we go. A lot of hotels start breakfast later on weekends.

The weather is getting cooler with rain in the area, so we took our jackets with us. We saw some cool cloud formations when we went outside.

These clouds are known as virga. In meteorology, virga, also called a dry storm, is an observable streak or shaft of precipitation falling from a cloud that evaporates or sublimates before reaching the ground. Aiden, the future meteorologist, called it vigra.

Picked up around 5 o’clock. We went to Old Town Fort Collins and went to Pinball Jones which has over 30 pinball machines. All had a great time acting like kids again.

Deneé and Stanley outgunning each other.

They’re not hiding that cell phone tower downtown.

After walking for a bit we went to the 415, a great restaurant downtown.

Mediterranean Quinoa bowl with grilled tofu and roasted red pepper bisque. The tofu was huge. I had my first Manhattan with it.

After dinner we had ice cream (vegan cake dough for me) at the Walrus Ice Cream shop. Everyone enjoyed their own ice cream dessert.

It is continuing to rain as we are driven back to the hotel. You can hear the rain hitting the air conditioner outside.

Tomorrow is another rest day here in Fort Collins. We have to go to the bank, grocery shopping, shower, and pick up our bikes.

We will talk to you tomorrow. Until then happy biking!

John’s story

Slept in this morning until almost 7 o’clock. That’s about two hours later than we’ve been getting up for the past month. Felt good.

Ed has expressed his displeasure with the performance of the staff of this motel, but I think he has been too kind in his evaluation. Have you ever read the book A Confederacy of Dunces?

I got a good look at my new haircut this morning. It’s shorter than it’s been in (even not so) recent memory. I don’t think it was this short even when I went to a military barber on the Air Force base in Alaska seven years ago and got the haircut they give all the military guys.

The biggest surprise when I got a good look at myself this morning was how my mustache turned out after getting trimmed by the barber yesterday. It looks a bit like Raul Julia‘s mustache when he played Gomez on the Addams family. Or perhaps a Douglas Fairbanks mustache if he were to play a pirate in a 1935 movie. I feel I should at least be carrying a sword. Needless to say it was trimmed a bit severely over my lip. I would prefer it to be somewhere between what it is today and a Wilford Brimley mustache. In about two weeks it will be somewhat back to normal, and almost no one I see between now and then will ever see me again.

The good news is that in a couple weeks my mustache will reach back down to my lip and it won’t feel naked anymore.

One of the things I was worried about in making this tour was who was going to mow the lawn while I was gone. I hired a lawn service last summer so I could develop a relationship with them, and they came back this spring. Carol is in Alaska for three or four weeks cavorting with her sisters and the polar bears, so no one is there to make sure the lawn gets cut. I was happy to see on my Ring doorbell camera this morning the lawn guys at work.

I looked at a few statistics this morning of our ride so far to compare expectations with actuals. The Wahoo says we’ve climbed about 58,000’ of hills. Ride With GPS says we’ve climbed over 66,000’ of hills. As I’ve complained before, the Wahoo doesn’t recognize elevation gain on low-grade hills as climbing, so this result is not unexpected. My climbing expectations are based on the routes I built in Ride With GPS, so that’s the better number to compare to anyway. There’s only a one percent difference between expectation and actual when it comes to climbing. At this point in the ride we should be at 46% of the total claiming we will experience.

We have ridden 2155.24 miles to get to Fort Collins. That compares to 1960 miles in the plan. Those little side trips to restaurants and breweries and coffee shops add up after several weeks of riding. According to the plan we have ridden 52% of the way. That means we have more than half of the climbing left in less than half of the miles to be ridden. I keep telling folks that after having ridden the hills in southern Ohio and in Missouri I am not concerned about riding through the Rocky Mountains. Time will tell.

To date we have averaged 10.7 mph on the road, and have spent 201 hours in the saddle.

I’d like to shout out to my daughter Rebecca and thank her for the suggestion of putting baking soda in my biking shoes every so often to control the odor. It works like a charm. I have a Ziploc of baking soda in one of my panniers, and it gets used regularly.

I always carry a tiny sewing kit when I go on a bike ride, and it finally came in handy. Two of the yellow ditty bags that I keep toiletries and such in have started to disassemble. I spent some time this morning sewing up the holes.

So at the halfway point of the tour what are some of the things I might just as well have left home? My paperback copy of James Michener’s Hawaii. The bike lock. The Gore-Tex wind briefs. The helmet cover. The paracord and clothesline pins to string a line for drying wet clothes. The collapsible water bucket. Some of the tissues. The “P”bottle. Perhaps two or three pounds of gear in all.

There are plenty of items I brought along that I have not used and hope I won’t have to use, but would not have left behind. Water purification tablets and a black plastic trash bag to cover the water with while the tablets did their work. Materials to patch the tent if necessary. Zip ties. Numerous small tools and spare parts. Folding spare tire. Some of the spare tubes. All in all not a bad outcome. I would like to know how someone could do this tour with 20 fewer pounds of gear.

After Stanley picked us up this morning, we went to REI. I bought a couple of freeze dried meals to eat on our first couple days in the mountains, since there are no grocery stores once we leave Fort Collins and I don’t want to weigh myself down unnecessarily. We also bought a couple of fuel canisters for the stove, isobutane this time instead of the butane-propane mix we’ve been finding at Walmart.

At lunch at the Sweetwater Brewery I discovered the Rachel sandwich, very similar to a Reuben sandwich but with cole slaw substituted for the sauerkraut and turkey for the corned beef. We will start making this at home!

Deneé was feeling much better today, but after lunch we dropped her off at the hotel for a nap while we went to a small amusement park very similar to a Dave & Buster’s. After a round of putt putt golf Stanley dropped Ed and me off at our motel. I managed to nap for about an hour. It was glorious. Stanley picked us back up shortly after 5:00 PM to go out for the evening.

I had discovered a pinball arcade in the basement of a building downtown. We spent an hour or two there. I love playing pinball! We also got in some Skee-Ball, Pac-Man and air hockey.

I wish there was a place like this in Oklahoma City. Stanley and I always talked about going to a pinball confab in Frisco Texas when he lived in the Dallas area but we never made it happen. This was my first time playing pinball in years.

My basement (if I had one) should look like this.

I spent most of my time on this machine, celebrating my new Raul Julia mustache.

Just erase Raul Julia‘s face, except for the mustache, and substitute mine, then turn the mustache gray, and you have the new me.

After we left the pinball arcade we passed a street concert just getting started. We would really have loved to stay but we were hungry and looking for food.

Shortly after I took this picture a rainbow appeared. It was an omen of things to come later in the evening.

I expected to see the Wicked Witch of the West sitting on his bicycle wind vane.

Shortly after we left the restaurant the skies opened up. Lucky for us I had checked the weather just before Stanley picked us up several hours earlier and noted the chance for rain later in the evening. We were all prepared with rain jackets and enjoyed our walk back to the car.

We found an ice cream shop on our way back to the car. There was a line out into the street so we figured it had to be good. Even Ed found some vegan ice cream.

Ed and I were dropped off at our motel. Here I am at almost midnight finishing up the journal for the day. I look forward to sleeping in again tomorrow morning!

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Rebecca ChimahuskyGlad the baking soda trick is working for you!
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10 months ago

Jane ChimahuskyI am mailing the rent hammer back to you- you wanted the heavier, more expensive one, you better lug it across the States! Lol! I knew I should have grabbed the comparable but lighter one I saw at Walmart- blame David and mom for telling me not to go cheap 😂😂
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10 months ago

Jane ChimahuskyTo Jane Chimahusky*tent hammer
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10 months ago

Ed ChimahuskyTo Jane ChimahuskyMea Culpa….🤣
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10 months ago