Five weeks of sitting around, sleeping in a warm bed, eating lots of great food, and not biking much has really taken a toll on my physical fitness. I’m sure the high altitude does not help either. The last two days have been exhausting. Granted, there has been plenty of climbing, and even some headwind yesterday. All in all, though, things have gone alright so far on this resurrection of my journey.

The first day found me biking down interstate 25, which wasn’t terribly fun. I had to take a detour from the very beginning due to construction. There was no shoulder and I definitely did not have the self-confidence to try to balance in a one-foot shoulder on the side of the interstate with heavy traffic. Hello no! So I had to take about a six mile detour up some big hills. I came across some more construction later and had to push my bike through dirt through a construction zone littered with nails. That brought me out on to a frontage road, which was a nice alternative for quite a few miles. When I got to Colorado Springs, I got off the interstate and began heading west, up into the mountains to the Garden of the Gods. It’s a nice park with beautiful red rock faces. At the Garden of the Gods, my couchsurfing host, Cheyne, met me, and we rode back to his place in Manitou Springs. Cheyne and I hit it off pretty well, and he made some vegan cupcakes. He’s a bit of an aficionado when it comes to those.

Day one left me terribly exhausted and a bit dehydrated. I woke up sometime in the very early morning with a terribly sharp pain on the left side of my head. I managed to get back to sleep and it was gone when I awoke later, but I’m not really sure what that could have been indicative of. I made sure to eat a kiwi and a banana the next morning. Yesterday also left me faily exhausted. I had a lot of climbing to do. Luckily I was off the interstate, but still on a fairly busy highway with a limited shoulder at times. The wind was at my back for the first half of the day, but around 2:30, a big gust came up from behind me, and suddenly everything changed and the wind was at my face. That slowed me down quite a bit. Still I was determined to keep going and make it up to Royal Gorge, just west of Cañon City.

Unfortunately, as I was passing through Cañon City, I got a flat tire. I thought I would hurry and try to patch the thing quickly and still try to make it up there before dark. I walked my bike with the flat tire about 400 yards to a church across the street. I figured it would provide a safe place to take everything part and do the work quickly. I patched my tube but quickly discovered that, while pushing my bike with the flat, I had peppered the tube with holes, due to the staple that was stuck in my tire. So I figured I might as well just use a new tube. Well, once I got the new tube on and got my bike back together it was already dusk. Darkness would be falling very shortly. I knew I wasn’t going to make it up to Royal Gorge before it got completely dark, and I didn’t want to be riding at night on a busy highway. Plus, I had asked a woman at the church about campgrounds, and she said there were only private ones up there, which are expensive. So I thought that maybe sleeping outside the church might be an option. There was some kind of event going on there, but not something directly church related. At first I thought to just bide my time and wait until everyone left. I biked off and made a few phone calls. Then I realized that I was much better off talking to someone and getting permission to be there. Who knows, maybe they would let me sleep inside. So I went back and asked someone about sleeping outside the church. She put me in contact with another man, but he did not actually work there. He was searching for someone who did. Finally he asked me exactly what I was looking for. I told him I just wanted to sleep outside the church for the night, as there were no cheap campgrounds around. Well, he told me I should go down the street to a shelter, called Loaves and Fish, where I could have a warm place to sleep. He gave me directions and set me on my way.

I didn’t really know what to expect. I’ve never slept at a shelter before. When I got there, there were about 10 pages of paperwork to fill out, asking tons of questions that didn’t really apply to me. I felt bad for being there. I’m not exactly the type of person these things are set up for. But, I am techinically homeless, and the woman there was very welcoming and seemed to be completely fine with me being there. There were seven other guys there and probably four women, one with child. They were all really homeless, from what I could tell. One man had just been divorced and gave his wife everything. He is a truck driver. To get rid of his wife, he sold his six trucks and gave her the 1.2 million dollars. Another man was trying to sober up and get closer to God. I don’t know any of the others’ stories. One man was deaf. I believe he was the father of the child.

I felt a bit uncomfortable being there, and I’ll admit I was a bit fearful of theft. Maybe it wasn’t the case with all of them, but I felt that I had so much more than them. I didn’t belong there. But, I was there, and so I made use of the situation. I was able to take a shower, and the woman gave me some leftover enchiladas from the night before. I went to bed at ten, which was great, and slept fairly well on the top bunk of a prison bunk. The mattress was firm, but not too hard. I think three of the other men were snoring, which kept me up for a bit, but I was tired, and I managed to sleep soundly most of the night.

I awoke around six and got up to get an early start on the day. There was breakfast ready- eggs with ham and peppers. It was really good, but the man working in the morning did not give me much. I didn’t want to ask for seconds. I packed up my stuff and left the shelter before the sun was all the way up, around seven. The ride back east, toward Pueblo, was decent. Again, back on the busy highway. The sun was in my eyes the whole time, making sight-seeing nearly impossible. I had to concentrate fully on the road in front of me, making sure to dodge debris. Now I am in Pueblo, about to head south. Tonight I am hoping to make it to Walsenburg, or just west of there, to Lathrop state park. Hopefully I can camp there for free, or at least for cheap. The weather has been quite warm during the day, in the seventies, but at night it still gets pretty chilly. Hopefully I can make it far enough south before the real cold weather hits. The forecast low for tonight in Walsenburg is forty-one, so that’s not too bad.

Well, the battery is about to die on my laptop, and I want to have some daylight when I stop to camp, so I best be scooting along.