It was a great morning waking with Bill, Greg, and the other guy Rob who’s going the other way. We all meandered around packing our own stuff on our own timelines but pretty much were ready to leave at the same time. I walked down the street to get a veggie bagel sandwich and a coffee for V and me. The bagel sandwich was so good: jalapeño bagel, pesto cream cheese, scrambled egg, tomato, and greens. Wow, yum! The coffee was great but when I looked at my bill, I noticed they charged $.50 for cream. Who has ever charged you for the cream in your coffee?! Odd. Anyway, we left the Saint Barnabas Episcopal Church hostel after a great night. It was super comfortable and well appointed, very clean, had soap/q-tips, had snacks for us, and the beds and mattresses were comfortable. Thank you again, churches!! We had a really nice ride out of Saratoga straight north with a massive tailwind for 20 miles, all the way up to where the road out of Saratoga meets interstate 80. I was FLYING!!! It was one of the most fun rides of the trip, gorgeous terrain, little traffic, and BIG TAILWIND. And that’s when things turned shitty. We had to ride on I-80 and we knew it would be shitty riding on the interstate. I had done the same 14-mile stretch on the interstate here back in 2010 and it was pretty bad. It has a big shoulder, but it has constant, deep rumble strips and there’s tons of truck tire debris everywhere so it’s a big flat tire hazard for cyclists with all the seem and unseen metal bits from the shredded truck tires. And you pretty much have to ride over there on the shoulder because there’s so much traffic on the interstate that you certainly don’t wanna be out near the traffic. So you just cross your fingers and hope you don’t get a tiny, invisible metal that punctures your tire and you try to avoid all the large debris that you can see. Things were going well for the first 4 or 5 miles but we could see a big storm brewing in the distance. The wind that was present from the time we got on the interstate started getting stronger and stronger, a head/crosswind of about 25 miles an hour with gusts much higher than that. Initially it was just annoying because it was challenging to make any progress, but at one point it started to get dangerous. We had to lean into the wind, which was blowing from our left, but then as soon as a semi-truck would go by the wind would disappear because of the truck and the sudden absence of wind would cause our bikes to lurch to the left toward traffic. It was not fun and it was starting to become more dangerous. And then we saw that the clouds were getting blacker and blacker and sheets of rain were falling in the distance; the wind was bringing a big storm directly our way. We stopped to put on our raingear which was a very sketchy proposition, trying to get our limbs through the rain gear without putting a hole in it or accidentally letting go of it and having it blow away into the vast scrubbrush field to be lost forever. So I held my bike and Vanesa‘s bike while she put her legs through her Gore-Tex pants and then she repeated the favor for me. But when we finished donning the rain gear and attempted to get back on our bikes, the wind had gotten so strong that neither of us could actually get on the bike and pedal. We were just being blown off the road. Literally. So, we were about 7 or 8 miles from the interstate exit we were supposed to take, we couldn’t ride, and it was about to rain (and hopefully not drop hail or lightning). So we started walking our bikes. That was extremely difficult as well and it was hard to even walk and push the bike straight given all the wind out there. We walked probably about 3 miles on the shoulder. I’m actually quite surprised that no one stopped to offer us help given all the pick up trucks that were passing by. Honestly, if a pickup truck would’ve stopped and offered us assistance, we would’ve had no problem throwing the bikes into the back of the pick up truck and being driven the 7 or 8 miles up to the freeway exit in Sinclair. But after we had walked about 3 miles or so the wind seemed to let up a little bit when it started to rain. The storm has arrived. It rained really hard but only for about 2-3 minutes and I think that we must’ve fortunately caught just the very edge of the storm. We made slow progress and eventually got to the exit for Sinclair and were able to go get some shelter and nourishment in the truck stop there and re-energize for about 30 minutes before we rode the last 7 miles to the city of Rawlins. The road from Sinclair to Rawlins was nice and had very little traffic that all gave us a wide berth (thank you, Wyoming drivers, for not being Colorado drivers). We entered Rawlins and saw the great big Walmart sign in the air as it is one of the first places you pass when you come into town. Vanesa had to go to Walmart because she had called in a prescription of allergy medicine from her doctor in Oregon and we needed to pick it up. Though we had a hotel room booked at the Econo Lodge already which is about another 3/4 of a mile up the road, we decided we didn’t want to go check into the hotel and then come back to Walmart for the medicine, both because of not wanting to do more miles on the bike as well as because another afternoon storm was rapidly approaching. So we stopped at Walmart and of course they couldn’t find her prescription so it took quite a while for her to get things sorted out and then eventually get the prescription. When she came out, we headed straight to the Econo Lodge but as it turns out they had given away our reserved ground floor room to the other cyclists that we were riding with, Bill and Greg! At reception, the gal told us that if we wanted a room with two beds, which we do during this trip because we sleep and rejuvenate better for the next day’s ride, that we would have to take an upstairs room or we would have to wait an hour and a half for a downstairs room to be cleaned. We decided to take the upstairs room. She checked us in and gave us directions to get there. We followed the (awful) directions and by the time we found the room and got our bikes and all our gear up the stairs to the room it was about 20 minutes later!! And then it turned out to be the grossest smoking room ever, in the grossest smoking WING of the hotel ever, clearly not a non-smoking room like we had booked. So Vanesa went back down to the front desk and very kindly and very firmly demanded that they correct the situation and put us into a non-smoking room…and suddenly, wouldn’t you know it, they had a ground floor room with two beds non-smoking that opened within two minutes!! Not another hour. (Good job, Vanesa!) Anyway we were relieved when we got into the room and it was only about 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Rather than take a nap, I sat down at the awful hotel computer, which kept freezing up on me, and worked on four days of ride summaries which took me maybe an hour and a half to two hours. Vanesa came to the room and watched a movie. I think after that I took a nearly 45-minute shower - I’ve never showered for so long in my life but I felt like I needed to wash not only the dirt, sunscreen, and DEET off me, but also the stress of the difficult ride and the stress of getting into our hotel room. Afterward I felt great and when Greg texted and invited us down to the hotel bar to have a drink, Vanesa and I both accepted. We sat there with Greg and told stories for an hour over a drink and then Bill came down and joined us for a bit before we all walked 1/4 mile over to the grocery store to get dinner. Now having eaten, as soon as I finish this ride summary I am going to crash for the evening because tomorrow we leave at 6 am for a 66-ish-mile ride which looks to be like a long day into a head/crosswind to get to a crappy ghost-like town that has nothing in it except a mediocre restaurant with limited hours, and apparently a newer church hostel we can sleep in. In 2010 it was the worst town I went through on the Trans Am but now with a church hostel that is said to be nice, that makes it possibly much better than it was then. Can’t wait. Let’s hope we don’t see any rattlesnakes tomorrow, at least up close. I do want to see one and get a photo though! We’re totally in snake country now, and I saw a big rattler here laying only 5 feet from where I stopped to pee by the side of the road on this same stretch of highway back in 2010. (PS-ignore the elevation gain data from todays route because there was an error at the beginning of the ride capture. The other data is valid though.)