What a beautiful country we live in!
I covered a lot of ground today - one more day traveling by car. I'm amazed at the different types of terrain that I passed through in just one day. Wyoming definitely surprised me with its variety, from the plains of the great basin to red rocks to mountains, and from terrain devoid of much vegetation to forests. There were areas where you could imagine you were on the moon, red rocks that reminded me of Utah, and my first view of the Grand Tetons. I'd seen pictures of them before, but my first view of the mountains in person was awesome.
I had two good food stops today - lunch at the Wildflour Bakery in Lander, and a pie break at the Cowboy Cafe in Dubois. Matt was right, the Cowboy Cafe has great pie. I had a slice of cherry almond crunch pie with vanilla ice cream. Very good. But I'd say that this pie is in second place on this trip - the banana cream pie at the diner in Schroon Lake, NY still takes top place. I'd go back to either place for pie again. And the Cowboy Cafe definitely had more variety. They must have had at least twenty different kinds of pie. It would be a good place to go with a bunch of people so you could sample lots of pies.
There's a consistency to the type of towns I've been passing through. There are the small towns that have a lot of character, like Dubois, and Ordway (back in Colorado), and the towns that are kind of dead, like Jeffrey City (today), and others I've passed through in the last 2 months. I definitely have a preference toward the towns with character, but unfortunately when you're traveling by bicycle you don't always have a choice of where you'll be staying. Here's hoping that most of the towns I stay in on the rest of my trip are those with character...
I passed 8 cyclists today - 3 heading south/east, and 5 heading north/west. So there are still a few of us out here... I keep thinking that there aren't too many Transam riders out here because I've seen so few, but it's probably partially because you never see anyone traveling in your direction, and overall it's a pretty small group of people. Two of the southbound riders were cruising down Togwotee Pass - a well-deserved downhill after a long climb. The one thing that surprised me is that 3 of the cyclists that I passed were not wearing helmets. It always amazes me when I see people riding without helmets, and it surprises me even more when the people are serious cyclists.
I arrived in Jackson this afternoon at about 4:30, not the best time to arrive in a resort town looking for a place to stay. This place is hopping, much more activity than Frisco, but not as high end as Breckenridge was. I stopped at the visitor center and looked at the board showing places to stay that was supposed to show where there were rooms available. Unfortunately, most of the places don't call in, so most of the "yes we have rooms", "no we don't" entries were blank. I started calling motels. The first one I reached only had rooms for $170. I know this is an expensive town, but that's ridiculous. But the woman at that place said she thought the Angler's Inn had one room. I called there and got the last room for tonight, but the place is booked for tomorrow night. After dinner I called around and finally managed to find a room for tomorrow night. I think I want to sit still for another day before I start riding again. I'll return the car tomorrow morning, check out of this place, leave my trailer at the next motel, and find a place to sit and read for the afternoon.
Next cycling destinations - Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Parks. I tried to get to these parks by bicycle back in 2000, but I canceled the trip because that was such a bad fire year. I figured it wasn't a responsible thing to do to deliberately be in a fire area that might need to be evacuated without having any way to get out other than a bicycle. I'm really excited to finally get to these parks!
Thanks to all of you who have written guestbook entries encouraging me to rest and supporting my decision to switch transportation modes to a car for a couple of days. Sometimes I'm just too hard on myself! I'm very happy with the decision I made to essentially skip cycling a state (1/3 of Colorado and 2/3 of Wyoming), and I'm going to take another day off here in Jackson. Then I'll ride some more and maybe rest some more too!
