7.26.2008

Day 28, Welcome to Colorful Colorado, please enjoy the rodeo

Here is a slight disclaimer: I already love Colorado. I have loved it since I was a boy. I love the Rockies. I love the people and their athletic friendliness. I love the air. I love the Broncos. I love the milk. I love everything you can do here. I love that I have already met someone who has made the long flight to my hometown. I even loved John Denver when he guested on The Muppet Show.

I love it and I've looked forward to it and I got into it at about 8 this morning.

Our last night in Kansas was quite eventful. I had two bean burritos and mushrooms at a restaurant that also sold videos and bric-a-brac. Get Disney's First Kid starring Sinbad and a Hommel figurine for 5 bucks with a free side of curly fries. We ate with efficient joy, set up tent, and brushed teeth so that we could pass out by 8. We did this because we planned on waking up at 3 and making the long trip to Ordway without wind or sun.

Five minutes into sleep and a blinding light shines right into my face. I'm convinced it's either a group of people come to kill me or the sheriff come to write me a ticket for failing to yield fully at the 4-way. It is neither. It is the lights to the tennis court and, while I closed my eyes as tightly as I could, I did manage to make out that it was a very important match between two teenage girls who were both terrified of the ball. I have never heard such screaming.

I woke up again to my tent slowly suffocating me. The wind had picked up so fiercely that the side wall had wrapped itself around my face and blown up my nostrils. This was followed by a loud crash. Connor's bike had been blown into the air and onto the ground. He rushed to right it while I held his tent down.

My alarm went off just as I got to sleep. I had stayed up praying we wouldn't be struck by lightning. The storm worsened. The heat lightning had gone, but the wind picked up and was blowing against us. Connor's tent was completely smushed in on him. If we were to head out, we'd have to bike as hard as we could just to be blown backwards into Missouri. We made a tough executive decision: we went back to sleep.

We were back up at 530 and got ready to go. The wind might be up, but the storm had put hundreds of wonderful clouds in the air. I was even a little bit cold. We pushed on.

Then the best thing happened. We couldn't feel the wind. It was behind us and it stayed behind us as it pushed us across the rest of Kansas and 100 miles into Colorado. As I said in the first paragraph, I just love Colorado.

We ate lunch in Eads and were joined by a couple of Dubliners. These two got together over a couple of beers and drew up a map of places they wanted to see in the states using Google maps. Then they bought a road atlas and set about biking -- up to Yellowstone from San Francisco, back down to Vegas, over to the Rockies via Arizona, the desert at its hottest, and an Indian reservation.

They rode until they were tired and then they slept on the shoulder. They ate with real hunger at lunch. They survived the desert and coming upon town after town that existed on the maps but had either burned down or been abandoned. They had managed to see most of what they'd wanted to and they were only halfways.

I was very impressed. They weren't even sunburnt.

We arrived in Ordway at 6, had a decent meal, I lost a challenge to see if I could eat 3 pieces of bread in a minute (impossible), and we had a strange conversation with a curved-over man in camouflage about rattlesnakes. We went to Gillian's house and then the county rodeo.

Gillian is a woman from New Zealand who is kind enough to let cyclists into her home despite her being at work all day in the penitentiary. She has a hurt baby goose in her bathtub. She also has Alicia, who is working around the place in the mornings so she can live in sleepy, lovely Ordway. I have yet to meet Gillian, but I have spoken to her on the telephone.

The rodeo was tremendous. We walked from the dirt field in back of Gillian's to the floodlights and the music. We got there in time for the pairs cow lasso thingy, which was giving every rider trouble, and we stayed as the sun and lightning disappeared and the bull riding began.

One bull (KO) was not having it. He kicked and kicked in the stocks. Oddly, he was riden the longest. Heat -- what you could describe as a stretch-bull -- seemed friendly enough until he bucked his rider into the ground and stood on the boy's ribs. The boy, who had prayed to Jesus just moments before, was not that phased by being trampled. He was much more upset at going out so early. He had a nice pink shirt, sequined chaps, a new haircut (his neck tan gave him away), and he walked with all the unearned confidence young men often pretend to. He kept himself twice as busy after his loss, which helped keep his eyes down and away from the crowd.

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